"I would never suggest that LLMs can be used to generate documentation beyond carefully delimited scenarios, such as API docs or code snippets, that is, cases where documentation is produced from clear and concise sources, in almost programmatic ways. Echoing the thoughts in Get the hell out of the LLM as soon as possible, you should limit LLM output to tasks where they truly excel.
On the other hand, when you let LLMs generate entire documentation sets, problems arise. “Oh, you can’t do serious programming, but you can still use LLMs for docs” is a naïve, reckless statement that not only overlooks what goes into crafting excellent documentation but also shows disregard for user experience (because docs are a product, too)."
"Leftists don’t believe in “personal responsibility” for society-wide problems like homelessness. We do not believe that “job creators” bring “innovation” and “entrepreneurship” to the “free market,” and thus ought to have billions while everyone else has pennies. We do not believe, as Joe Biden did, in some nebulous and ineffable thing called the “soul of the nation” which can be redeemed through “decency.” Instead, leftists understand that politics is primarily a struggle for control over wealth and resources. It consists of labor, money, land, power, and violence, not abstract ideals, slogans, and mythologies. The technical term is historical materialism, but it really just means facing material reality without a lot of ideological junk in the way. And if you don’t have that, you wind up running down all kinds of blind alleys."
"At this point, a conservative reader might say: aha, but what about the cases where conservatives have been right, like when they said the Soviet Union was full of horrible gulags? Weren’t leftists reluctant to admit the truth then? Well, not exactly. Some of the more hardcore Marxist-Leninists stuck by Stalin long after it was sensible to do so, it’s true. But in this case it’s the anarchist left that was incredibly prescient. All the way back in the 1870s, Bakunin was writing that a revolutionary government ran the risk of becoming oppressive, as “the so-called people’s state will be nothing else than the very despotic guidance of the mass of the people by a new and numerically very small aristocracy of the genuine or supposedly educated… a fine liberation!” Chomsky calls it “one of the few predictions in the social sciences that actually came true.” Later, it would be Trotskyists like Victor Serge who wrote the most incisive critiques of Stalin and Stalinism. Meanwhile, conservatives have never had any trouble supporting dictatorships of their own (Pinochet in Chile, Suharto in Indonesia, the Shah in Iran, et cetera ad infinitum), so long as they were anti-communist."
@makeshiftreaper@lemmy.world: I suspecting that by now you're trolling me. Millions of software developers use these tools everyday. Some of them are forced to use them; some of them not and in fact quite enjoy using and LEARNING new things with them. But you can't ignore that more and more people are using AI tools. That's just a fact. You may prefer horse carriers instead of motor vehicles because they're safer. But you can't ignore the fact that people love to use cars to move themselves.
@makeshiftreaper@lemmy.world: Like in all situations and with all new technologies, using AI for intellectual tasks should always imply a calculation of the effort expended in relation to potential gains. To say that AI tools are always unhelpful is for me a blatant lie. People should research how to best leverage new technologies such as LLMs. To simply deny that there are advantages is for me too simplistic.
@makeshiftreaper@lemmy.world: That's a good approach when you're still a student or you're on a sabbatical. But when it comes to for-profit companies, that is totally unrealistic because projects have strict deadlines, managers impose certain productivity goals, etc., etc. That's not a valid approach when you're earning your life as a software developer.
"AI companies are not pitching a future of AI-enabled centaurs. They're colluding with bosses to build a world of AI-shackled reverse centaurs. Some people are using AI tools (often standalone tools derived from open models, running on their own computers) to do some fun and exciting centaur stuff. But for the AI companies, these centaurs are a bug, not a feature – and they're the kind of bug that's far easier to spot and crush than the bugs that AI code-bots churn out in volumes no human can catalog, let alone understand."
"In a few years, almost everyone will claim they opposed this genocide. But it is now that people of good conscience need to take a stand. As economists we stand, today, with Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur under attack by the US and Israeli governments because her recent report throws indescribably important light on the political economy of Israel’s occupation and genocide."
Privacy's Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance
by Cindy Cohn
"A personal chronicle of three key legal privacy battles that have defined the digital age and shaped the internet as we know it.
From the very beginning, Cindy Cohn was driven by a fundamental question: can we still have private conversations if we live our lives online? Privacy’s Defender chronicles her thirty-year battle to protect our right to digital privacy and shows just how central this right is to all our other rights, including our ability to organize and make change in the world.
Shattering the hypermasculine myth that our digital reality was solely the work of a handful of charismatic tech founders, the author weaves her own personal story with the history of Crypto Wars, FBI gag orders, and the post-9/11 surveillance state. She describes how she became a seasoned leader in the early digital rights movement, as well as how this work serendipitously helped her discover her birth parents and find her life partner. Along the way, she also details the development of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which she grew from a ragtag group of lawyers and hackers into one of the most powerful digital rights organizations in the world.
Part memoir and part legal history for the general reader, the book is a compelling testament to just how hard-won the privacy rights we now enjoy as tech users are, but also how crucial these rights are in our efforts to combat authoritarianism, grow democracy, and strengthen human rights."
"On its face, that might sound not altogether different from Google Photos, which similarly might suggest AI tweaks to your images after you opt into Google Gemini. But unlike Google, which explicitly states that it does not train generative AI models with personal data gleaned from Google Photos, Meta’s current AI usage terms, which have been in place since June 23, 2024, do not provide any clarity as to whether unpublished photos accessed through “cloud processing” are exempt from being used as training data — and Meta would not clear that up for us going forward.
And while Daniels and Cubeta tell The Verge that opting in only gives Meta permission to retrieve 30 days worth of your unpublished camera roll at a time, it appears that Meta is retaining some data longer than that. “Camera roll suggestions based on themes, such as pets, weddings and graduations, may include media that is older than 30 days,” Meta writes.
Thankfully, Facebook users do have an option to turn off camera roll cloud processing in their settings, which, once activated, will also start removing unpublished photos from the cloud after 30 days.
The feature suggests a new incursion into our previously private data, one that bypasses the point of friction known as conscientiously deciding to post a photo for public consumption. And according to Reddit posts found by TechCrunch, Meta’s already offering AI restyling suggestions on previously-uploaded photos, even if users hadn’t been aware of the feature: one user reported that Facebook had Studio Ghiblified her wedding photos without her knowledge."
@burnitdown@beige.party Exactly!
"I would never suggest that LLMs can be used to generate documentation beyond carefully delimited scenarios, such as API docs or code snippets, that is, cases where documentation is produced from clear and concise sources, in almost programmatic ways. Echoing the thoughts in Get the hell out of the LLM as soon as possible, you should limit LLM output to tasks where they truly excel.
On the other hand, when you let LLMs generate entire documentation sets, problems arise. “Oh, you can’t do serious programming, but you can still use LLMs for docs” is a naïve, reckless statement that not only overlooks what goes into crafting excellent documentation but also shows disregard for user experience (because docs are a product, too)."
https://passo.uno/whats-wrong-ai-generated-docs/
IDEOLOGY = BULLSHIT:
"Leftists don’t believe in “personal responsibility” for society-wide problems like homelessness. We do not believe that “job creators” bring “innovation” and “entrepreneurship” to the “free market,” and thus ought to have billions while everyone else has pennies. We do not believe, as Joe Biden did, in some nebulous and ineffable thing called the “soul of the nation” which can be redeemed through “decency.” Instead, leftists understand that politics is primarily a struggle for control over wealth and resources. It consists of labor, money, land, power, and violence, not abstract ideals, slogans, and mythologies. The technical term is historical materialism, but it really just means facing material reality without a lot of ideological junk in the way. And if you don’t have that, you wind up running down all kinds of blind alleys."
"At this point, a conservative reader might say: aha, but what about the cases where conservatives have been right, like when they said the Soviet Union was full of horrible gulags? Weren’t leftists reluctant to admit the truth then? Well, not exactly. Some of the more hardcore Marxist-Leninists stuck by Stalin long after it was sensible to do so, it’s true. But in this case it’s the anarchist left that was incredibly prescient. All the way back in the 1870s, Bakunin was writing that a revolutionary government ran the risk of becoming oppressive, as “the so-called people’s state will be nothing else than the very despotic guidance of the mass of the people by a new and numerically very small aristocracy of the genuine or supposedly educated… a fine liberation!” Chomsky calls it “one of the few predictions in the social sciences that actually came true.” Later, it would be Trotskyists like Victor Serge who wrote the most incisive critiques of Stalin and Stalinism. Meanwhile, conservatives have never had any trouble supporting dictatorships of their own (Pinochet in Chile, Suharto in Indonesia, the Shah in Iran, et cetera ad infinitum), so long as they were anti-communist."
@TheLeadenSea@sh.itjust.works Are you waiting for reading the article?
@makeshiftreaper@lemmy.world: I suspecting that by now you're trolling me. Millions of software developers use these tools everyday. Some of them are forced to use them; some of them not and in fact quite enjoy using and LEARNING new things with them. But you can't ignore that more and more people are using AI tools. That's just a fact. You may prefer horse carriers instead of motor vehicles because they're safer. But you can't ignore the fact that people love to use cars to move themselves.
@makeshiftreaper@lemmy.world: Like in all situations and with all new technologies, using AI for intellectual tasks should always imply a calculation of the effort expended in relation to potential gains. To say that AI tools are always unhelpful is for me a blatant lie. People should research how to best leverage new technologies such as LLMs. To simply deny that there are advantages is for me too simplistic.
@makeshiftreaper@lemmy.world: Why are large companies forcing software developers to use AI tools in their jobs?
@MichaelM@sciences.social Countries shouldn't act as nanny states. Education is something to be left to the parents and to the school.
@SGforce@lemmy.ca That's why companies need Technical Writers AKA Content Curators! :)
@makeshiftreaper@lemmy.world: That's a good approach when you're still a student or you're on a sabbatical. But when it comes to for-profit companies, that is totally unrealistic because projects have strict deadlines, managers impose certain productivity goals, etc., etc. That's not a valid approach when you're earning your life as a software developer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6kK7rIbyB0
"AI companies are not pitching a future of AI-enabled centaurs. They're colluding with bosses to build a world of AI-shackled reverse centaurs. Some people are using AI tools (often standalone tools derived from open models, running on their own computers) to do some fun and exciting centaur stuff. But for the AI companies, these centaurs are a bug, not a feature – and they're the kind of bug that's far easier to spot and crush than the bugs that AI code-bots churn out in volumes no human can catalog, let alone understand."
@WhatGodIsMadeOf@feddit.org I beg do disagree. That's, as a matter of fact, a very self-fulfilling prophecy.
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/breaking-news-ai-coding-may-not-be
@NebulaTide@bsd.cafe Yes, but that's in the U.S., only - at least as of now.
@bearsong@ravenation.club Thanks! I like to share links to articles that I personally find interesting :)
"In a few years, almost everyone will claim they opposed this genocide. But it is now that people of good conscience need to take a stand. As economists we stand, today, with Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur under attack by the US and Israeli governments because her recent report throws indescribably important light on the political economy of Israel’s occupation and genocide."
Privacy's Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance
by Cindy Cohn
"A personal chronicle of three key legal privacy battles that have defined the digital age and shaped the internet as we know it.
From the very beginning, Cindy Cohn was driven by a fundamental question: can we still have private conversations if we live our lives online? Privacy’s Defender chronicles her thirty-year battle to protect our right to digital privacy and shows just how central this right is to all our other rights, including our ability to organize and make change in the world.
Shattering the hypermasculine myth that our digital reality was solely the work of a handful of charismatic tech founders, the author weaves her own personal story with the history of Crypto Wars, FBI gag orders, and the post-9/11 surveillance state. She describes how she became a seasoned leader in the early digital rights movement, as well as how this work serendipitously helped her discover her birth parents and find her life partner. Along the way, she also details the development of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which she grew from a ragtag group of lawyers and hackers into one of the most powerful digital rights organizations in the world.
Part memoir and part legal history for the general reader, the book is a compelling testament to just how hard-won the privacy rights we now enjoy as tech users are, but also how crucial these rights are in our efforts to combat authoritarianism, grow democracy, and strengthen human rights."
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262051248/privacys-defender/
"On its face, that might sound not altogether different from Google Photos, which similarly might suggest AI tweaks to your images after you opt into Google Gemini. But unlike Google, which explicitly states that it does not train generative AI models with personal data gleaned from Google Photos, Meta’s current AI usage terms, which have been in place since June 23, 2024, do not provide any clarity as to whether unpublished photos accessed through “cloud processing” are exempt from being used as training data — and Meta would not clear that up for us going forward.
And while Daniels and Cubeta tell The Verge that opting in only gives Meta permission to retrieve 30 days worth of your unpublished camera roll at a time, it appears that Meta is retaining some data longer than that. “Camera roll suggestions based on themes, such as pets, weddings and graduations, may include media that is older than 30 days,” Meta writes.
Thankfully, Facebook users do have an option to turn off camera roll cloud processing in their settings, which, once activated, will also start removing unpublished photos from the cloud after 30 days.
The feature suggests a new incursion into our previously private data, one that bypasses the point of friction known as conscientiously deciding to post a photo for public consumption. And according to Reddit posts found by TechCrunch, Meta’s already offering AI restyling suggestions on previously-uploaded photos, even if users hadn’t been aware of the feature: one user reported that Facebook had Studio Ghiblified her wedding photos without her knowledge."
https://www.theverge.com/meta/694685/meta-ai-camera-roll