I'm interested in why you feel like this. Do you take this action because you can't trust traditional channels (blogs, established tradpub authors, Goodreads et al) to self-curate LLM writing out of the pool of available literature you would normally be aware of?
Yeah I think it boils down to trust issues. I can't know how the text was created. Anything created before 2023 I know that at least a human had to invest a significant amount of time to produce the story.
Maybe I'm a bit too reactionary though. Thinking about it some more I would absolutely read something if it was recommended by a trusted source (which in my case is almost always a human I know in the physical world).
I get the sentiment completely. I am actually doing what you're thinking: if it didn't come from my List Of People Who Know Of What They Speak I want nothing to do with it.
We really have gone full circle! It's quite upsetting.
It's often quite easy, because most people who author articles with LLMs do not bother doing any kind of post editing. Meaning you can see/build a mental map of common tropes[^1] for what to look for. Once you read perhaps two or three articles authored with LLMs you will not be able to unsee it.
Yes but it's still like wading through shit to find the occasional gem. It's not hard to pick out when you work with LLM's a lot. But it's still a bad experience. Social media was already hard at work at killing the internet (or at least what the internet used to be). LLM's made it worse.
For fun, I pasted a few Matt Levine's newsletters into the AI Vetter on the above page. Since it can't fetch the Bloomberg's paged directly, I had to copy the content into Github gists.
4 out of 5 were marked as suspicious, mostly citing short punching sentences, negative parallelism, and content duplication.
Sure, but there is a marked difference between a therapist and an LLM Chatbot: you can't talk to your therapist for +4h a day, at any time convenient to yourself. It's also not a guarantee you're going to hit upon a therapist that is like that, versus a product that is very literally intended to maximise your usage of it.
a therapist should, if they follow their training, not be a sycophant whatsoever. CBT, for eg, is a multi-step process including Socratic self-dialogue, reframing practices, etc to guide the person towards the development of insight and healthier coping mechanisms
Any good therapist should train you in the methods of coping with and eventually overcoming your problem. This boils down to private grad+postgrad psychology/psychiatry course, because to cope+overcome you have to understand what's going on and there is no one who can do shit but you yourself.
But that is only ~half of job. The other half consists of gently reminding one that not all is lost yet.
There is no LLM that can do this and I think there never will be.
The article is exactly what you think it's going to be: "China is moving ahead, but at what cost?" and the usual breathless Sinophobia that comes with it. At the very least when this happened in the early 80s with Japan's "oh shit they're going to outdo us technologically!!!" we got really cool fiction out of it for the next two decades.
The mass media loves to talk about ANYTHING besides the ongoing decay of the west, largely facilitated by it's own ineptitude at the game it designed. We're losing because we outsourced everything for short term gains and have let supercorps run completely without oversight, buying each other left and right, until every "American" product left is owned by one of four conglomorates, and none of them know what they actually do anymore and the only way they can keep "growing" is by cutting costs to the bone.
*with the implied framing being that China has somehow done this and is responsible, letting those actually responsible, largely the same people who own corpo rags like the New Yorker, off the hook entirely.
No, it's clear that you haven't actually read the article. You appear to be laboring under a sort of delusion, which I advise you to do your best to remedy.
We had this exact drama about 3 weeks ago in the SFF community, when a bunch of editors admitted to accepting and paying for submissions from very clearly AI author[^1], which led to some more interesting revelations: there are many Editors in this space that care _more for the premise of the idea shown to them_ than the actual quality of writing.
I have a suspicion this is what happened here too. Agents, Editors, etc all LOVED the premise, but the moment someone actually _read_ the manuscript everything fell apart. We're reaching peak "nobody reads anything any more" where major publishing houses (Minotaur is an imprint of Macmillan, from a quick googling) are losing big money on this.
In terms of addressing the author's blog post though: no, I don't think this is the sign of the end times. The actual sign of the end times would have been for the publisher to PROCEED even after the AI allegations, IMO.
You don't need to look to AI slop for the end times. It's much closer than that: 20 years ago barely 1% of couples needed medical assistance to have a child. Now, that number is ~17%? Sperm counts falling to an average of zero by 2045?
I am skeptical of those numbers. Like, decades ago 1% needed IVF? I assume that's what you are referring to. Is that not partly a result of it being fairly new technology, quite expensive and not readily available to most people? And the 17% number, while it does seem to be about right, how much of that is just that the average age of parenthood keeps going up and up? It does not seem surprising that the older you get the more problems you have with fertility.
I would be interested to know what the actual rate of sperm count decline is, controlling for age and such.
Rates are down quite a bit in the last 50 years, about half. But extrapolating to zero in 50 more years is a stretch. Average is something like 40-50 million/mL, which is above the 15 million threshold considered normal, but does mean an increasing number of people are falling below that threshold. So yes there is going to be an impact, extinction seems highly unlikely however.
It's wild we're seeing people rediscover the same solution to the same problems we've had forever: being precious about your darlings.
Code generators reduced the friction for implementing every shitty idea someone has ever had, but because developers seem to have never experienced throwing shitty ideas away (because if it was written in code it _has_ to be important right?) they treat everything coming out of the Codegen as a precious idea that eventually builds up to clutter one's brain leading to Implementation Fatigue the author experienced. The solution? Go through that same process but focus on one idea at a time and make it good.
It does make me wonder if the people experiencing this had hobbies outside of software engineering (let's say, anything creative) they'd be able to spot the signs earlier.
Funny. In writing, the advice is to "kill your darlings". Don't let a particular paragraph that you love a lot stop the whole story because it doesnt fit.
I think that's still the same idea. In his example the darling would be the entire project, in your example it's the paragraph.
Advocating for killing a single paragraph for the sake of the book is like abandoning a single feature for the sake of the project, which is his central point.
The only difference is if you're referring to the darling as the whole or as one paragraph/feature
> I do not like to build on a foundation that could be ripped away from under my feet at any moment for arbitrary reasons.
Do you only build and publish software in a vacuum running on hardware you own? There is no online community in the western hemisphere that isn't subject to any kind of arbitrariness, be it internal (community, like here) or external (legal or infrastructurally, like on github).
So who are you actually angry at? There was a vote, by people, in a democratic process, and Codeberg are adhering to it. Why is it Codeberg's problem that they don't defy the will of their members? Are you angry at them because the members put a motion against your particular special interests? If so, go make a new motion to reinstate them.
It is of course in the right of voting members to do this. However, it undermines Codeberg as a stable repo hosting platform. If you are hosting a repo there for an open source project, it may suddenly be in violation after a whim of the voting members.
The signal is now that Codeberg is an activist platform. That is fine, but that makes it unfit for many projects that want a largely neutral hoster.
Just as they are free to do this, I am free to move my repositories elsewhere and stop donating.
(And I'm nothing near a vibe oder, but the way the terms are now formulated, even doing LLM-assisted programming could be a violation.)
> Just as they are free to do this, I am free to move
It doesn't seem like you're amicably moving your projects away. It seems like you're going around tech forums arguing with the democratic decision and fear-mongering about how legitimate projects will be removed next.
It doesn't seem like you're amicably moving your projects away.
I am moving my projects away because I will be in violation of the new rule:
You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools
While my projects are currently not 'mostly code generated by "generative AI"-tools', most new code for some of my projects is, so at some point in the not-too-far future I will cross the threshold where this becomes true.
around tech forums arguing with the democratic decision
Don't be so dramatic. What tech forums am I going around aside from a comment here? Also, I acknowledged that this is a democratic decision. That does not mean that I have to agree with it and if I don't agree with it, I can move my repositories somewhere else. I am just flagging that this can be a problem for existing open source projects.
fear-mongering about how legitimate projects will be removed next.
My projects are legitimate and have been used for years by many people and some will be in violation of this rule once enough LLM-assisted code has been added.
> It seems like you're going around tech forums arguing with the democratic decision and fear-mongering about how legitimate projects will be removed next.
If we're going to argue that a platform is free to make decisions, aren't its [ex-]users also free to make decisions, too?
Yes obviously, and they've already said that. What they're pointing out is that people are being petulant whiners about it. If we can all agree that Codeberg is free to make its decisions, and a decision has been made that you don't like, then just choose another provider. Going around slandering Codeberg is being a petulant whiner.
I think one of the issues is that people who already have repositories there have to migrate them, migrate the issues, existing pull requests, community, etc. For larger projects this can be quite a large time sink.
I think it would have been more palatable to people if the terms said something like "Additionally, for repositories after July 24, the following additional requirements apply:".
Where will this slope slide next? It doesn't seem all that slippery to me. First they came for the LLMs, Lord knows plenty of people are speaking up, but who will they come for next in the dead of night after a majority of voting members publicly decide to boot them?
Well, for starters, banning content that is already present on the platform is a very aggressive measure. You are, in practice, kicking people out, and it's perfectly reasonable for those people to be upset at either Codeberg or its community.
For seconds, this proves that Codeberg may in the future ban any project. The platform is, flat out, without a doubt, not reliable long term, and I reckon about anyone should be pretty upset at that.
Third, this reeks of children playing politics. If you are going to put measures as strong as these on the table, you better have very defined lines on which to act upon, and you better have a good rationale for them. This doesn't seem to be the case in one account or the other, which paints the administration as not only incompetent, but delusional on their competency. This may not warrant anger, but it sure does warrant frustration and disappointment.
It is perfectly fine to take politics seriously. I reckon more people should do it. There is a huge problem though in which people mix that up with taking political action, without actually putting the work on what to do, why, how and what are the consequences. That is the actually hard part, and this looks more like "we are anti-bad stuff" than that.
> For seconds, this proves that Codeberg may in the future ban any project.
Thats the cost of hosting your code on a platform you dont control. Its nothing new either ideologically or practically, large forges have been banning repos for years.
>Third, this reeks of children playing politics.
This is the age old liberal way of whining about political action they dont like, they rarely critique the actual decision but target "how" it was done. You can view it as "childish" if you want, but for those of us that see these tools as inherently bad an outright ban is the correct and decisive move. Folks seem to think that if a political action isnt technocratic enough it is childish, but really its the type of action we need more of. There isnt nuance to these tools in many folks' minds, they are a scourge and should be banned as swiftly as possible.
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