tmcb

Plagiarism is something very different from skepticism towards the concept of intellectual property.

Plagiarism is the act of avoiding attribution or citation for personal gain. You can be a staunch anti-IP advocate and still believe plagiarism is ethically wrong.

LLMs are objectively bad at attribution and citation, therefore incur in plagiarism. Even if this is due to a technical limitation, it is still plagiarism.

People with a 132TB media collection don’t usually act as if they wrote and directed The Godfather.

AI steals by lacking the ability to properly do either attribution and citation, whether this is accidental or by design.

Downloading an existing PhD thesis without permission is very much different from submitting an existing PhD thesis as yours.

> these types of compliance efforts can mean completely redoing multiple core systems to handle privacy, wipeout, audit, reporting, per-location policies, etc etc.

Maybe the phrasing is unfortunate, but if compliance to the law requires a “redoing”, launching in that market was never a priority in the first place. That’s a completely legitimate choice, but usually companies whining about regulations are making a financial decision rather than an ethical one.

Of course not. To me, HN’s content is pretty similar what pop tech websites had 20-30 years ago.

One valid question, though, is whether or not you should add more pop tech content to your information diet. That, of course, is up to you. What makes HN such a good information source are experts actively looking for knowledge and being kind enough to share their findings here. That is something else you should consider—not the sharing part, but actively looking for it. You will consume objectively less “data”, but it will be much more meaningful.

Well, cargo cult programming is definitely a thing, and has been for a long time. It may “deliver value”, but it is not guaranteed. I believe entrepreneurs have an easier time having AI do the work for them because their value assessment framework is decoupled from code generation proper.

This is industrial-grade FOMO. They will take the jobs of the first handful of people. The moment it is obvious that LLMs are a productivity booster, people will learn how to use it, just like it happened with any other technology before.

I did read the article. I concede that I might not have understood it. Again, I never said it is wrong, but rather that it has a blind spot. I am familiar with Joe Armstrong’s work because I worked on a proprietary (and rather worse tbf) native distributed systems middleware in the past.

Actually, now I thought about it, I know exactly what irked me about the approach. I hope the author takes it as constructive feedback:

Saying "let it crash is a tagline that actually means something else because the BEAM is supposed to be used in this particular way" sounds slightly "cargo-cultish", to the point where we have to challenge the meaning of the actual word to make sense of it.

Joe Armstrong's e-mail, on the other hand, says (and I paraphrase): "the BEAM was designed from the ground up to help developers avoid the creation of ad-hoc protocols for process communication, and the OTP takes that into consideration already. Make sure your system, not your process, is resilient, and literally let processes crash." Boom. There is no gotcha there. Also, there is the added benefit that developers for other platforms now understand that the rationale is justified by the way BEAM/OTP were designed and may not be applicable to their own platforms.

I actually skimmed the article before posting. I have some exposure to Erlang, but not to Elixir. As I’ve already mentioned, I think the author’s covering of application behavior is OK, but there is more to the tagline than meets the eye.

Maybe I didn’t make myself clear. “Let it crash” is not something that should be thought of at the component level, it should be thought of at the system level. The fact that the application crashes “gracefully” or not is not what is really important. You should design the system in a crash-friendly way, and not to write the application and think: “oh, I believe it is OK to let it crash here”.