184
Probably want to stop using Booklore... (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
79 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Just a PSA.

See this thread

Sorry to link to Reddit, but not only is the dev sloppily using using Claude to do something like 20k line PRs, but they are completely crashing out, banning people from the Discord (actually I think they wiped everything from Discord now), and accusing people forking their code of theft.

It’s a bummer because the app was pretty good… thankfully Calibre-web and Kavita still exist.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 6 points 7 months ago (10 children)

I'll argue that it is a tool, and object to automatic zealous hostility towards anyone using it, but that doesn't mean criticisms of how that tool is being used aren't valid. It seems like that is what people are focusing on here, and they definitely aren't Luddites for doing so.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 10 child comments
    •
  • [–] 6 points 7 months ago (9 children)

    I think I can provide you a great equivalent. Firearms, they have utility, but there are people who make them a lifestyle choice, and there are people who make them their whole personality. There are also a lot of people just desperate for an excuse to use one. I grew up with a couple of farmers in the extended family, I would never argue guns should be entirely banned, but I am so glad I live somewhere with sane laws around gun ownership. It would be so nice if we had similar consideration around regulating LLMs.

    The danger to open source as I see it is that LLMs degrade the quality and ability of developers while increasing their throughput, and I have never once heard someone complain that open source lacks quantity, but I hear a lot of people complaining about the quality.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 9 child comments
    •
  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (6 children)

    I will complain about quantity, many areas where open source projects are competing with closed source commercial products they have not achieved feature parity or a comparable level of polish, quantity matters. So does, as someone else touched on, quality of life improvements to the process of writing code like ease of acquiring and synthesizing information. That doesn't mean it's necessarily a worthwhile tradeoff, but how much is really being sacrificed depends on what exactly is being done with a LLM. To me one part of what's described here that's clearly going too far is using it to automate communication with other people contributing to the project, there's no way that is worth it.

    As for the gun thing, I will support entirely banning LLM powered weapons intended to kill people, that's an easy choice.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 6 child comments
    •
  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (5 children)

    I still don't think quantity is lacking, and when quality is there it's amazing how often Open Source becomes a defacto standard. How many video tools are just a shim over FFMPEG for example?

    Yet again the problem I see is that LLMs are a seductive form of software cancer, it starts as a little help and before you know it we have booklore like projects. If open source can't be better it will be subsumed in slop.

    Not disagreeing about LLMs as a weapon. In a functional society the person who pulls the trigger on any weapon is responsible for the consequences of that action. I wonder how eager the CEOs of these "AI" companies would be to weaponise their creations if they were held personally accountable for every injury caused by their product. By a jury. Preferably with explicit laws stating they could not indemnify or gain immunity.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 5 child comments
    •
  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago* (4 children)

    One example of a place where quantity is lacking is web browsers. Another might be mobile operating systems. I am glad projects like Firefox and GrapheneOS exist, but it's obvious that the volume of work needed to achieve broad compatibility and competitiveness for these types of software is a limiting factor. As for the idea that any LLM use is a slippery slope, the way to avoid the slippery slope fallacy would be to have compelling evidence or rationale that any use really does lead naturally to problematic use; without that the argument could apply to basically any programming thing that gets to be associated with things done badly (ie. Java), but I think it isn't usually the case that a popular tool has genuinely no good or safe ways to use it and I don't think that's true for AI.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago* (3 children)

    How many browsers would you like me to list, yes a lot of them are spins on some of the big incumbents, but there is a much wider variety than you might credit. Rendering engines on the other hand, yeah there's not much variety there.

    Mobile operating systems are something of a special case I'm afraid, the Telcos and incumbents have got way too heavy a thumb on the scale, and if any new comer looks like breaking the duopoly it will be treated as an existential threat. It will be associated with paedophilic terrorists faster than you can blink.

    Both incidentally categories where I will never be happy with slopcode. But hey if anyone wants to use a slop-coded browser I just heavily suggest you never enter any passwords or personal information while using it.

    We are actively building a history of cases where LLM usage correlates heavily with that slope you mentioned, but hey that's OK, we aren't allowed to call things out before they happen, judgement may only be passed once the damage is done right?

    Out of curiosity, we know that LLM usage increases cognitive deficit and in some cases leads to psychosis. How many fatalities would you say is an acceptable number before governments act? How degraded do we let our societies get before we reign it in?

    At some point the bubble is going to burst and we will see a number of countries bankrupted in the name of "AI" I'm really curious to see if we learn our lessons at that point. Should be interesting.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
    •
  • [–] 0 points 7 months ago* (2 children)

    Both incidentally categories where I will never be happy with slopcode.

    The point here isn't necessarily that any particular use of LLMs is a good tradeoff (I can accept that many will not be especially when security and correct operation is very important), just that quantity clearly matters, to refute the point you were making earlier that it doesn't.

    We are actively building a history of cases where LLM usage correlates heavily with that slope you mentioned, but hey that’s OK, we aren’t allowed to call things out before they happen, judgement may only be passed once the damage is done right?

    Out of curiosity, we know that LLM usage increases cognitive deficit and in some cases leads to psychosis. How many fatalities would you say is an acceptable number before governments act? How degraded do we let our societies get before we reign it in?

    I think it's a mistake to consider all LLM usage as one thing, and that thing as some kind of sin to be denounced as a whole rather than in part, and not considered beyond thinking of ways to get rid of it (which is effectively impossible). There were people who had this attitude towards for example electricity, which is actually very dangerous when misused and caused lots of fires and electrocutions, but the way those problems eventually got mitigated was by working out more sensible ways to use it rather than returning to an off-grid world.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (1 child)

    Your looking at this in a fundamentally different way, you seem to think it's like electricity or indoor plumbing, where it's primarily a benefit and enabler of further growth in society.

    I see it like asbestos, or to borrow another posters example radium. A technology that has super narrow ETHICAL applications, but since we have elected to make it the only economic force that is driving large swathes of the world's markets, we are in the jam it into everything and see how it works out phase. Humanity keeps on making this one fundamental mistake and because we haven't completely collapsed society and killed ourselves en masse yet we keep on doing it thinking "this time it will turn out differently".

    I am trying to convey that this is a poison whose LD50 is microscopic, why do we as a society all have to experiment with dosing ourselves to find out how much we can take before it corrodes us to death?

    It's already taking a bite out of the computing landscape, it's damaging the environment, its increasing the wealth disparity, its causing actual fatalities and its destroying the ability of people at large to think and retain information. Software development is probably one of the strongest cases for LLM usage, so please tell me how many untrustworthy browsers do we need to offset the above mentioned costs?

    If we had focussed a similar level of effort, and money, into transitioning away from fossile fuel based energy grids as we have on this nonsense the world would be in a better place, but it doesn't allow for the malignant growth of wealth to the 0.01% percent so it could never happen. Please make me understand why this is a good thing?

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    I think you're in a way conflating two problems. One is policy and private investment in AI and the other is personal LLM use.

    The first is stupid irrespective of the underlying economic system. They're literally using environmental resources that are scarce and our taxes to fund these unnecessary data centers.

    The second is something different. I think of it as being able to hire someone to do something for you. You could hire someone to do your homework for you which would be really stupid because it's essential you do that. Most people didn't do it not because they had restraint but because it cost too much. With LLMs you just reduced the cost.

    I honestly think if the public subsidization of LLMs stopped and policy made them actually pay taxes and environmental regulation fines or for mitigation measures, we would see the actual cost and most frivolous use will stop.

    It'll probably be limited to institutional use and helping doctors summarize notes etc.

    The other aspect is probably correct safe guard for the tool. You don't need to ban calculators for ever. You just need to ban them at stages of education where the students need to practice the underlying operations to learn, i.e. probably up to the end of high school.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    I think that the problem, in both cases, is culture.

    It's not that either of those are bad, or bad for people; it's bad for people of this culture or people of this society. It's how the two intersect that is the problem.

    It could be a tool that lifts up the worker or creative, but instead it's a tool to devalue the creative and extract power and wealth.
    It highlights that people with power get a different set of rules and laws than the rest of us, and they're using that to further entrench and enrich themselves.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago

    And it's so noisy. We are already losing bug bounties, it's swamping open source projects in poor quality or even counter productive "work" on github to get recognition, its drowning out the work of creatives, its invading so many aspects of life (education, communication, research, public policy) and its fundamentally a bad tool for so many of those areas.

    I recently applied for a job and got some advice from a friend who works HR in a different industry. His advice, see if you can find out which LLM they use and run your application through it. A lot of positions are getting huge numbers of applicants so they are using LLMs to generate the short list for interview, you could have the absolute perfect application but because the LLM doesn't like the way you wrote it you are thrown out of the pool without a human being ever seeing you. It's so insidious, by being "helpful" it reinforces its necessity.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent