DonaldPShimoda

> It's an approximation in the sense that, when you buy something for 20 bucks, it's not that the something is actually worth 20 bucks, but that you value 20 bucks (and, by extension, the other things you could buy with them) than the something.

I regret to inform you that this is actually a description of abstraction, not approximation. :) The twenty "dollars" abstract over the notion of "a quantity that is owed" such that you can exchange the otherwise meaningless scraps of paper (or just bytes these days!) for other goods/services. If you were not going to use that money for something else, it actually has no value, curiously enough.

Decades ago, money had a concrete value in that you could request the issuing government to take your dollars and give you gold at an established exchange rate. When we abandoned the gold standard (and all forms of fiscal concretization), money became inherently abstract.

> Turns out money is just a more verifiable and simplified form of favors.

I should like to refer you to the book "Debt: The First 5,000 Years" for an alternative look at monetary systems, credit and debt, favors, and more. I found it a fascinating read (I mean that genuinely), and very educational with regard to this claim in particular.

Setting aside the law itself entirely (it is, after all, not an arbiter of morality), I think "if I can copy your work, I am entitled to do so" is a problematic worldview that harms individuals and communities, and I want no part of it.

Thank you for sharing — yes, this is exactly the feeling I have. The end product is not what got me excited about all the projects I used to see here; the inspiring part was the human element itself, and AI effectively removes all but the most superficial traces of that.

> What do you think money is? It's a rough proxy approximation for value.

Money is an abstraction, not an approximation. There is not of necessity any real basis for any price that has ever been attached to any product or service, ever. Money is an artificial mechanism by which we exchange debt owed by the issuing state that itself also has no real basis.

> If you don't care about creating value, you don't care about people.

On this we agree, but, of course, my point was that when I say "value" I don't mean monetary value. A person's value is intangible, and the value of their works (whatever those may be) is derived entirely from the relationship formed between the artist and their context and the connection from this relationship to whoever wishes to partake of the art.

> As, ultimately, it costs money to care for people, and if you don't have it - all you have are prayers and best wishes, and you functionally can't help anyone.

What a woefully capitalistic perspective. I wish the best of luck to you and your shareholders.

On the one hand, I agree with you about, e.g., Disney. I think the way they have deliberately manipulated the formation of modern copyright law for their purposes is also problematic.

But I do care about, for example, a recently published author, or someone who posts their paintings on social media. Regardless of where the law stands in each particular case, I think it's repugnant that statistical models were trained on these inputs with the intent of offering the ability to produce similar outputs without any payment or even attribution to the original artist.

> Information wants to be free!

If someone chooses to make their information free, then so it may be, but the issue at hand is very obviously not about the use of, e.g., copyleft materials. The AI companies knowingly chose to take material that they knew they should not have and used it to make their copycat machines, building those machines in such a way that those responsible can cower behind the letter of the law to defile its spirit.

Maybe "any" was too strong, but I would still say most uses of LLMs are anti-people.

I think about how disappointing it is when a new project makes it to the front page of HN and I click through and it's just... vibe-coded slop. Looks pretty at first, but it's clear that there isn't really much human underneath. Lots of obvious interface problems or just a distinct lack of a personal touch. It's empty, and it makes me sad.

Or even not in software, I think of all the people who have been so quick to offload their thought processes to a statistical model. What do you mean you don't know what you want to eat at this restaurant so you asked Claude and got recommended something that isn't even on the menu?

And that's just individual stuff. I am genuinely fearful of the integration of AI into, say, the legal and judicial processes, or governance, or whatever else. People give the models wayyyy too much credibility considering they (the models) cannot give an accurate confidence interval for their results, and I think it's going to make things much worse for disadvantaged communities to a degree that the communities will not be able to overcome by using the technologies themselves.

I said "resist", not "absolutely refuse". There are limits where one's livelihood is concerned. I am fortunate to be in a place where I can still decide for myself.

But, of course, this is also part of the immorality of the AI industry.

Yeah, I think it's infeasible to remain in software development while maintaining a 100% "I refuse to touch anything that has a nonzero level of LLM input" for that reason.

For the time being, I'm content to simply not use it myself. I don't think it's reasonable for me to foist my morals onto those around me, in the same way that my very close vegan friend still talks to me when I order a whole milk latte. I don't think there's a way to exist in modern society without incurring some degree of (likely indirect) immorality, so it's all about setting boundaries for myself where I can and accepting where I end up.

Two things are important to me:

1. All modern LLMs are (in my eyes) inherently morally problematic. They were trained on stolen information, and where they didn't break the law they corrupted social contracts. Their manner of operation is also problematic: disadvantaged communities are being exploited at a rapidly increasing disproportionate rate in the name of "more compute".

2. I am fundamentally disinterested in the productivity mindset that LLMs lean into. I don't care to "produce more"; the value of my work does not lie in the amount of money that can be gotten in exchange for it. This is an easier position to hold as someone who does not hold a typical corporate job, but even if I did I would still resist because an increase in my output would not correlate to an increase in my salary.

At the root of it all is people. I care about people (their existence, their happiness, my connections to them, their connections to each other), and any use of LLMs is (in my mind) anti-people, so I want no part of it.

I steadfastly refuse to believe that you administer a thorough examination of a person's knowledge of the mechanical workings of an internal combustion engine, or the chemical properties of a catalytic convertor, or the physical properties by which tire tread increases traction prior to letting them drive you down the block to the supermarket.

Your argument grows more ludicrous with each byte you submit.

To your point anyway, knowing these things does not make someone a better driver, nor does not knowing these things make someone a worse driver. They're separate skills, just as understanding how to program has little bearing on a person's ability to operate a computer.

I don't think anything you've said is necessarily wrong, but "using a computer" does not really fall under the purview of a degree in computer science. People don't go to university for CS degrees so they can better understand the fancy veggie-watering timer they bought off Amazon, after all.

> If "AI is gonna take over the world" wouldn't you want to be able to use such a tool yourself ?

AI is being marketed as a tool that does not require expertise to wield, so it's unclear to me why you'd think the hype would get more people to go to college.

Anyway, the problem is likely more to do with job prospects. Most CS undergrads I talk to these days are perpetually concerned with the job market; things have not been good for a while now. And this on top of the over-enrollment problem: many schools have been accepting far more undergrads in CS than they could handle for the better part of a decade now, resulting in ultimately poorer outcomes for everyone involved except the upper administration.

Barring significant improvements to either of those issues, reducing enrollment is necessary. But society is not exactly going out of its way to help high schoolers find many viable alternatives, which is really where our efforts ought to focus, in my opinion.

AI companies weren't buying up tons of unsold mass-market materials, and I think it's disingenuous to even make the comparison.

What was going on recently was AI companies were specifically seeking out rare — or sometimes irreplaceable — books to supplement their data sets (and hopefully getting a leg up on their competitors). The destruction of the books wasn't the point, it was just a consequence of the business-oriented realization that they could scan the contents of more books faster if they just chopped off the bindings rather than investing the time to care for the books and keep them intact (plus supposedly playing along with copyright law by "only having one copy of the copyrighted material").

Ooh, I like this way of thinking of it. Thanks for that!