Downvoters have absolutely fucking nothing to say, but sure are mad about something they can’t defend.

Fuck copyright.

Not sure whether you’re being sarcastic here

Jesus.

“Name a publicly traded company that generated significant profit as a result of buying llm services from a provider.”

This at least is just a problem of relevance. Utility is not measured in money - especially for open-source non-profits like Zig - and people selling shovels and promises are obviously not the best place to look for success stories in mineral rights.

But I’ve seen several Youtube channels hand-wave complicated software for devices they’ve just built from scratch.

And several copyleft projects are caught in philosophical arguments against permissive rewrites with completely different code, structure, and/or programming language.

And a few ultra-niche projects simply typed “rewrite this in Rust” for an order-of-magnitude speed boost.

The kneejerk insistence that LLMs are never useful is wishful thinking. It’s less defensible than equally glib promises of institutional value, because even some of the people loudly distancing themselves do so because it worked. ‘I didn’t recognize my own codebase!’ Yeah, because you didn’t write it. The chatbot did. It’s not Inception-ing the experience of making it yourself; it’s inventing exactly the Github dead-end you’d like to find.

The linked Asimov story is only dimly related. You’d expect a culture relying on other minds, kept simple, somewhere between Brave New World and HG Wells’s Eloi. But it’s about the method of learning, not capacity or demonstrated ability. Like Bowie: “the fingerprints will prove that you couldn’t pass the test.” Your typical mid-century sci-fi civilization where The Committee has dictated how everything works, and obvious criticisms could be resolved by doing things very slightly differently.

The twist is even less relevant, because it treats originality as some vanishingly rare thing that must be tricked out of people. Hard left turn into YA protagonist syndrome. Even though the main character just got done describing the simplicity of learning incremental improvements.

Meanwhile the reality of LLM programming is, here’s an idiot robot that will do its best for literally anything you ask… and you are expected to spot where it has fucked up. The only way it’s better than letting project leaders run it themselves is if you are putting in the effort to babysit and second-guess the chatbot.

Thinkin’ about LLMs? That’s a paddlin’.

Same reason as before this policy: they care about the project itself.

If you don’t view these tools as the devil, of course you might roll your eyes and say, that’s nice, anyway, here’s an improvement.

A nice low bar, set fairly and in good faith.

They took world-class branding and made it look like Alibaba conversion kits for your Toyota.

Straight up supernormal stimulus.

Eargesplitten loudenboomer, seen here with ergonomic grip.

dbzer0 at least takes an instance-wide fists-on-hips stance. Like, you can be against this… that can’t seriously be why.

Copyright - which the vast majority of people on Lemmy must care deeply about, outside of this topic.

The main problems aren’t with the technology

Half your bullet points are pragmatically impossible if the software exists. Which it does, and will.

A series of heart attacks among right-wing politicians.

He is playing a tech-bro billionaire.

The absence of this joke is how I knew the Kill James Bond episode about Cars 2 predated the acronym.

the math of the simulation includes the math which defines the different substrate

2+2 on an emulated calculator gets a different answer than 2+2 on a real one, because there’s different math. Math being physics in this case but not when it undercuts your whole point. Conscious experience must only be possible in this substrate, despite zero evidence to the contrary… and faking the entire substrate with physics math doesn’t count because numbers work differently in rocks than in meat.

k.

If telling you to shut up is redundant then good riddance.

You can tell the difference between a simulation and the thing it’s simulating.

The premise is - you fucking can’t. It acts ex-act-ly like the real thing, and for all the same reasons. Given that unreasonably high standard, you still insist, nuh uh. Would never be conscious. We’re beyond ‘but what if.’ You’re explicitly arguing that machine consciousness would not count. That any difference from exactly how humans work cannot be a mind. Fuck off. That’s just novel bigotry. Dog-torturing prejudice.

If you can have a long-ass argument with someone and go away figuring they’re a person like you - that’s consciousness. That’s the only way you can judge the inner life of any person you have ever met. And you want to pretend that someone meeting that standard, while you observe their brain at a subatomic level, is disqualified? Come back and fuck off again.

You cannot laud the perfect exactitude of… squishy biology and quantum foam… and still say nuh-uh when a whole-ass person arises from those exact processes. If you mean anything when you say it’s all just physics, then whatever physics are required for consciousness, can be faked. The resulting person really does think, as surely as an emulated calculator does real math. It’s not simulating math. It’s doing math. The device is simulated, but the answers are real. Get it?

Simulating physics from first principles is not “mimicking human behavior.” Don’t dismissively phrase it like a chatbot. If you insist the exact molecular exchanges in human neurons are a mandatory component, you could observe every subatomic event, not just the fact they talk to you like any other meatbag on the street.

I never insisted that it’s “only simulating consciousness.”

You just did! Again! You think an entire simulated human being, that acts exactly like a living person for the same underlying reasons, must be different - somehow. Your consciousness only arises from the laws of physics and the shape of matter, but if we simulated both of those exactly, and got indistinguishable results, then nuh-uh.

This is dualism. This is Descartes torturing dogs and insisting they only act like they feel pain, unlike us real humans, because we’re different and special. It’s straight-up Chinese Room horseshit, where no demonstrable evidence of conscious thought is enough, unless it fits your preconceived notions of what minds look like.

‘If it happens, it counts’ is not a tautology when you insist happening and counting are different things. To the guy in the simulation, any experience is real. His consciousness entails all the processes you insist must be accounted for. It works the exact same way as it does in real life with real meat.

If you would insist ‘well that’s only simulating consciousness’ - that counts.

Do you know what if means?

You want to make this a matter of philosophy, and then you suck at philosophy. Hey buddy, do you have facts about other real people’s experiences, or do you just have beliefs? Could you even demonstrate your own conscious experience to me?

And all of this is such tired Philosophy 101 crap, just so you can cling to ‘aha but what if,’ even though I have a concrete answer for what-if. Are we ruling out magic? Great, then physics can be simulated and a computer can host a mind that way. Its experiences would be identical to any free-range meatbag. If it wrote a book, you could read it. That would be real art. So in what fucking manner is its consciousness not real experience?