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Cake day: October 14th, 2025

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  • My wife is a materials science researcher, and works for a university here in Germany. She uses AI to drastically increase the speed that she programs calculations and simulations. Yes, it regularly spits out nonsense, and she’s constantly having to refine and tweak it, which she can effectively do because she has a PhD in the field. She has repeatedly told me that the actual programming was always the least favourite part of her job. But now that she can get an LLM to write the actual code, all she has to do is go back to refine it, and spend more time thinking, and less time reading stack exchange.

    Another group used Evo 1 and Evo 2 to create novel genomes for bacteriophages in the fight against antibiotic resistance. There is a nuanced debate on whether those models are technically LLMs, since their language is actual sequencing rather than written descriptions. But they are structurally nearly identical.

    My personal project is iterally just for funsies, to see if I can mimick human learning and dreaming by combining an LLM with a more abstract NN. So the weights are never frozen, and it actively hallucinates and dreams scenarios between weight adjustments and re-initialization.

    I don’t know how to make it not lie, and I’m not sure if that’s possible. But I see that akin to asking “But how can we make X-rays safe to be used in shoe stores again?” Maybe we can’t, but that doesn’t mean we should ban them entirely.

    You and I seem to agree whole heartedly with the harms. Over use, abuse, misunderstanding, etc. are terrible and causing real harms.

    But I see people pointing their ire at every instance of the word indiscriminately, actively antagonizing those who are actively trying to make the changes they supposedly support.


  • Fawkes@lemmy.ziptoProgrammer Humor@programming.devDo not use ai
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    4 days ago

    Cool, then go after the corporations shoving tech in places we don’t want it.

    Go after the data centers that are displacing families and wasting resources.

    Go after the media for misrepresenting reality and distorting truths.

    Those are all real harms with real actors. Getting angry at the camera because someone took blackmail photos of you is nonsense.


  • Fawkes@lemmy.ziptoProgrammer Humor@programming.devDo not use ai
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    4 days ago

    Yeah, except that’s a complete shift from “This technology is bad,” to “I don’t like the way this technology is being used.”

    You could write a 5,000,000 word thesis on all the ways ANY technology could be abused, and it STILL would not be a refutation from its beneficial uses.

    Explain to me why open source LLMs, trained on public data, so both the training data and the resulting model are both 100% free and open source, are bad. For something to be universally bad, it CANNOT have any positive uses. Otherwise the real assessment is that it shouldn’t be abused, not that it shouldn’t exist at all, which I 100% agree with.

    Because that’s the claim that needs to be defended. I am not defending OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc. at all, so suggesting I am would be dishonest. I am not saying it should replace teachers, or scientists, or programmers, or anything like that, so suggesting I am would be dishonest.

    I am not defending the corporate practice of explosive expansion, which causes these major issues. As that is a product of psychopathic capitalism abusing a technology, not an inherent property of the technology itself.

    If you want to justify how an emotionless, mindless, will-less technology is inherently bad, you need to address its BEST, most ethical uses. Not its worst. You’re making a universal claim. I reject the universal claim. I don’t need to explain the abuses, because I am not justifying or defending them. The responsibility is yours to explain how the ethical uses are somehow bad.



  • Fawkes@lemmy.ziptoProgrammer Humor@programming.devDo not use ai
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    4 days ago

    Being a sarcastic ass does nothing to refute my point. I don’t have to be an oracle to look back at history and see 100% of technologies finding an eventual use. I don’t know how the problems will be solved, and I don’t need to know what their uses will be in order for the trend that has continued for 1,500 years of recorded history to most likely be true.

    You, on the other hand, have to somehow show that THIS technology is so wildly unique that none of the examples from the last 1,500 years are informative.

    Edit: sorry, got some things mixed up in my brain. Just because you can’t identify a use for a technology doesn’t mean a technology is bad. Unless you are personally familiar with every single technology, profession, and process on the entire planet, and those that will be invented in the future, and can act as the ultimate arbiter of what is and isn’t useful. Alcohol is very harmful. But also good at sterilisation. X-rays are very harmful, but also good at medical imaging. Gunpowder is very harmful, but also makes pretty fireworks.



  • Fawkes@lemmy.ziptoProgrammer Humor@programming.devDo not use ai
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    4 days ago

    That’s a gross overreach and obviously wrong. Selection bias at its finest. The people who act as you have described are loud and easy to spot. The people that treat it like a tool don’t go around telling everyone about it. You’re conflating improper use and corporate abuse with ANY use. By that logic we should outlaw X-rays entirely, since when they were first discovered they were used fuckin’ EVERYWHERE, and quite a lot of people got sick because of it.

    Humans are bad at moderation. When a shiny new toy is presented, we obsess to our own detriment. Over time, a balance is found. This has happened over, and over, and over, and over.