> It's the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up
Learning isn’t stealing. They didn’t take our culture away from us and nobody is “buying our culture back” from them. We never lost it; it never went anywhere.
If StackOverflow dies because nobody uses it anymore, the entirety of its knowledge is now only available through LLMs that trained on it.
If a blog dies out because the author gave up writing, the entirety of its knowledge is now only available through LLMs that trained on it.
If people stop writing books because they cant outcompete generated content, that knowledge is also lost to LLMs.
If people stop making art because they can't outcompete generated art, that is also lost to LLMs.
So yeah, they haven't directly taken anything away, but the consequences of what they are doing may still have that outcomes - and it does look like that's the version of reality we're about to get.
> If $X dies because ..., the entirety of its knowledge is now only availabe through LLMs that trained on it.
And archive.org. And scraped copies people have around for various reasons. And libraries. And even in the first-party source, should they just leave it be instead of shutting down and destroying copies in pure spite.
The knowledge did not disappear, and it shows no sign of disappearing faster than it loses value - which is the usual case, as all the examples you gave always come with an expiry date. For StackOverflow, that's measured in low years; for blogs, high years to a decade. Past that point, we enter the realm of curating and preserving knowledge past its commercial utility expiry date, which is a separate endeavor, and one that LLMs not only don't threaten, but actively aid.
Isn't that the same point piracy advocates have been making for a while? If I watch a pirated film, I didn't really consume a physical resource. Nothing physical is lost. Therefore it's not theft?
>Learning isn’t stealing.
This is cheesy. There is an exposure to (and a gain from) a resource that is traditionally associated with a cost. That cost wasn't paid. It's a public good to have information available, but it's not really acceptable to circumvent established ways of compensating the creator of the work you're benefiting from.
> Isn't that the same point piracy advocates have been making for a while?
No. Plenty of people – not just “piracy advocates”, whoever they are – have pointed out that copyright infringement is not theft over the years. Learning, copyright infringement, and theft are three distinct things.
Learning isn’t copyright infringement.
Learning isn’t theft.
Copyright infringement isn’t theft.
These are all different statements, and all are true.
> There is an exposure to (and a gain from) a resource that is traditionally associated with a cost.
“Gaining exposure to” isn’t theft either.
Copyright isn’t some form of “super-ownership” that gives you absolute say over what happens to all copies of the work. It is very specifically a monopoly on the production of new copies, and even that is limited in many important ways and is not absolute.
There is a form of control over information that matches what you want copyright to be though - trade secrets. If you want legal protection that allows you to control knowledge, then it needs to be a trade secret.
Imagine someone asks you how to do something at work, you tell them. Then they create a huge packet filled with bullshit about how it got done and now they are your boss.
It's a shitty move, but ultimately, in between the bullshit narrative, they also did the thing - not you - so the promotion rightfully belongs to them.
Execution trumps ideas, impact trumps raw effort, and such. Isn't this the entrepreneurial narrative?
Of course you tell them, because you're nice person, and not jealous of someone else succeeding in a thing you aren't even pursuing? You wouldn't want to act like "the dog in the manger" from childhood stories.
I bet you do, you probably don't recognize it because it has different names in different places (for me, it's known as "pies ogrodnika" - "the dog of the gardener"). It's an old tale.
> If you can't spend the time to write it, why should anyone read it?
This isn’t your thought; you are merely regurgitating a sentence we have all heard many times before, practically word for word.
Presumably you think there is value in posting yet another copy of that other person’s thoughts in this discussion, despite having spent no time or effort in thinking it up yourself.
Why is that? Is it because you think there is inherent value in the sentence you transcribed, in spite of the near zero effort you spent creating it? If you think anybody here should read it, then you have undermined your own point. If you don’t think anybody should read it, then you shouldn’t post it.
> despite having spent no time or effort in thinking it up yourself.
I mean, how can you say that he didn't think it himself? I thought this same thing and realised apparently I'm not the first. You have no idea how many of my blog posts ideas have come in HN first before I could publish. People can have the same thoughts. And have em all the time as well.
Psss.. See how @sm-silversight who commented on your post said the same thing I did? That's realtime example right there.
Coming back to the topic at hand. I agree with the OP. If you don't care to write it, why should anyone read it? AI has good usecases. But am not sure writing is one.
Writing is not just about the end result. It's also about the thought process. I learn about the topic more as I write. I correct my incorrect understandings as I write. When am pissed, my article has a different tone. Am rude, too direct. When am content/happy, different one. All of this is sterilised into something robotic where the author won't even remember what he/she wrote? What's the to like? For brownie points?
> how can you say that he didn't think it himself?
Because the same sentence has been repeated practically word-for-word ad nauseam all over social media for years. What do you think is plausible - that they repeated something that is damn near omnipresent in the discourse, or that they never saw any of the many, many times it has come up and independently came up with the exact same formulation? They are perfectly able to step in and claim that it was their original thought if they want to.
> What do you think is plausible - that they repeated something that is damn near omnipresent in the discourse, or that they never saw any of the many, many times it has come up and independently came up with the exact same formulation?
Both are fully possible.
We're talking about a simple sentence that sounds a lot like something a primary school teacher or parent of young children would say. "If you won't do/don't/haven't done X, why should I Y?" is very normal moral/ethical phrasing.
I suppose I heard someone say it before I spelled it out in that way, but I am pretty confident I would ultimately have used a sufficiently similar expression, because I have been on the receiving end of the problem.
And that is putting aside the communicative compression of aphorisms. People don't use shared aphorisms to avoid ever doing the thinking themselves; they use them to shorthand more complex arguments for a listener who has already heard them. They are shared macros for agreed concepts. (Using them correctly requires having done the thinking they package up at least once).
I don’t care what’s possible, I asked what was plausible.
Do you think that they came up with it independently? If you aren’t willing to say you believe this, you are just asking me to waste my time arguing with a phantom opinion nobody holds.
“Just do it” is an incredibly common, generic phrase, but if a new shoe manufacturer chose it as their slogan, it isn’t plausible that they came up with it independently of Nike.
> I don’t care what’s possible, I asked what was plausible.
OK then. BOTH ARE PLAUSIBLE. Clear enough?
It's absolutely not up to me to decide whether they came up with it independently.
But then again, it isn't up to you, Jim.
> If you aren’t willing to say you believe this, you are just asking me to waste my time arguing with a phantom opinion nobody holds.
This is the weirdest thing to put in a comment you could simply not have made. If your time is so valuable why are you here commenting on HN?
Again: aphorisms have value regardless of how many times they are used. People can use them without you having the right to demand proof they thought them up for themselves like some prep school debate bully picking on a younger child.
> > If you aren’t willing to say you believe this, you are just asking me to waste my time arguing with a phantom opinion nobody holds.
> This is the weirdest thing to put in a comment you could simply not have made. If your time is so valuable why are you here commenting on HN?
It’s basic intellectual honesty. If nobody believes that they came up with it independently, putting it forward as if it’s a real argument is just a form of trolling. If I don’t believe it, you don’t believe it, and even the person who posted it doesn’t claim it’s original, you’re just baiting me to respond to a position nobody holds.
Do you believe that they actually came up with it independently? If you do actually believe this, then a discussion is not a waste of time. But if you aren’t willing to claim that position, it’s pointless me arguing against it because it’s just you deliberately wasting my time on something you don’t believe.
> aphorisms have value regardless of how many times they are used.
This is a cornerstone of the point I was making. You’re literally supporting the point I was making.
Selecting between alternatives is also a very valuable skill. Also known as "taste".
You are a senior software architect, you "prompt" 10 junior architects to write a software architecture proposal and then pick one which you send the client.
Would you say it's worthless, because the senior architect didn't care to write it?
There are plenty of industries where "taste" is a real job.
Or you think that for some reason prompting a LLM and forwarding it's output after vetting is different than prompting a human and forwarding the output after vetting.
> Would you say it's worthless, because the senior architect didn't care to write it?
Lemme ask you a counter question, the senior architect writes the proposal and the junior writes it. Which one do you think client likes better?
Moreover, Your focus is on the end-result. Sure, in corporate environment, most people don't care about what they do as long as the end results checks some boxes. That wasn't the discussion here. The discussion is about writing and reading in general. Whether it's worth my time or not if you don't mean (forget mean, don't even remember) what you wrote.
Also, in your own example, the client don't care as well. As long the client's checks all the boxes his/her/their manager said should satisfy. Nobody really gives a damn about the quality.
Also, are you saying you'll be fine paying for Financial Times, WSJ and NYTimes KNOWING all they do is shove the story through an LLM? Neither will there be a soul, nor will there be any material effect on people who reads it.
> Or you think that for some reason prompting a LLM and forwarding it's output after vetting is different than prompting a human and forwarding the output after vetting.
There is difference no? I forward the output to get good feedback and correction from someone BETTER. And there is a process involved in it which showcases the "TASTE" you mentioned from the person whom you are forwarding your output to be vetted and that person comes up to you with feedback. And guess what? You learn from the person's feedback. You don't go back again and again forever to learn the same thing. That's exactly what am trying to point out.
> nor will there be any material effect on people who reads it.
This is a ridiculous thing to say - "because the Weather app in my phone is 100% automated with no human "soul" in it, I will not take it into account into how should I dress today"
> the client don't care as well
This applies here too. If you didn't pay for author's output, are not a subscriber to their Substack, why should they bother to hand craft you a quality human written post?
> If you didn't bother to write it, I won't bother to read it
So the argument is that effort should be somehow matched. Ok, let's go with that. It's well know that writing something takes 10x more effort than reading it. So if we use the market argument, if it takes you 10 min to read a blog post, the author should spend 1 min writing it, because writing is 10x more intense, and this is only possible with a LLM. You might say "but there is one author, and 1000 readers". That gets us back to the paying argument.
OK, how about 'nothing is real, nobody will ever care again, let's all never listen to anybody else ever again'?
That's more or less the same thing expressed more nihilistically. But nihilism is, like, just a word man (to 'The Dude' it up a bit). Perhaps we are either fiddling on the deck of the Titanic, or just staring at the waves?
What do you think the results will be of the machines consuming only their own slop and Habsburging themselves intellectually, and then all the humans abandoning any attempt to either talk or listen? As a global civilization of humans? I'm not sure we've explored the likely consequences of 'if you can't spend them time to write it why should anyone read it'.
The Google Play review process has been slower and more painful than the App Store review process for 5+ years at this point. At least you get to communicate with real people at Apple; it’s all bot-driven with Google.
More specifically – because I think this is an aspect that has mostly been lost to time – when the CSS Zen Garden was first created, table layouts were still the norm and there was huge pushback from a surprisingly large number of developers who insisted that it was impossible to use CSS for nice-looking sites. The accusation was that CSS sites were all “boxy” and to get something nice-looking, you had to use table layouts.
It was pretty obvious even back then that they were just people who didn’t want to learn something new and they would not listen to anything pro-CSS at all. In fact, developers who insist LLMs are not useful for development remind me of them a lot.
Anyway, the CSS Zen Garden was released, and it seemed to shut everybody like that up overnight. It conclusively won the argument that CSS sites could look as good as table-based sites and could even do things the table-based sites couldn’t.
Pay attention to what you are staging. Generally this means `git add -p` or similar.
Pay attention to what you are committing. Generally this means looking at what you have staged before writing your commit log message.
Pay attention to what is in your pull request. Generally this means looking at your commits / draft pull request before you ask for code review.
If anybody other than you sees crap in your pull request that should obviously have been ignored, it means you have failed to pay attention to what you are doing three separate times.
> You clearly haven't seen the people who are lazy and so just do `git add . && git commit -m ... && git push -f origin` every time.
I’ve worked with and managed plenty of people like that and those are the people I least want doing something like this. Seeing the flotsam and jetsam of .DS_Store etc. are an early warning sign they aren’t paying any attention to what they push and the sooner that gets caught and addressed the better.
I have experienced this in person with a developer who was failing to debug something. An error message was popping up on screen and he was reflexively clicking it away faster than anybody could read it. Even after being told “an error message is popping up, don’t dismiss it”, even after being told “[do the thing that triggers the bug] and then completely stop without doing anything else”, and a whole bunch of other ways of phrasing it, he was unable to understand that the error message contained useful information that we needed to see. I’m not even sure he was consciously aware it existed or that he was doing it. After many failed attempts at getting him to stop I literally had to take the mouse away from him and do it myself. I was shocked that apparently nothing anybody could say would stop him from dismissing the error message without even looking at it.
I think this comes from the same problem as notifications on iPhones: if you dismiss them accidentally then it is very difficult to find out what it was.
It is missing the equivalent of the "history" in e.g. browsers and YouTube.
If a user dismisses an alertbox on desktop, why isn't there an history menu item that shows the previous 100 alert messages?
That may be an issue for messages from people but almost anything that pops up because the computer wants to tell you is useless and certainly doesn't need to be findable later. If you want to work on the problem, you can do that when you're ready, at your own initiative, not in the middle of what you're actually trying to do. Programmers wouldn't stand for a language that pops up a modal dialog when you type incorrect code but we think users are somehow less deserving of respect and ready to drop everything to deal with some stupid notification telling them they did it wrong or the software is broken like a crying child demanding his mother knows that he hurt his finger.
Reflexively dismissing error message popups is reasonable behavior because they're almost always unhelpful. It is often easier to mindlessly trial-and-error your way around obstacles than waste your attention on them.
> If you want to work on the problem, you can do that when you're ready, at your own initiative, not in the middle of what you're actually trying to do.
As I explained earlier, what we were actually trying to do was debug the problem, and reading the error message was a necessary part of that.
It’s weird you’ve cooked up this little fantasy that the error message was getting in the way when it was the most important thing in the whole process and that was the entire point of the anecdote.
> Reflexively dismissing error message popups is reasonable behavior because they're almost always unhelpful.
Not when you’re trying to debug the problem the error message is telling you about!
I'm justifying (via spleen venting) why someone would have the habit of reflexively closing popups without reading them. That that habit carries on even in the rare case where it would help is separate but shows how strong it can be.
By the way, I've seen the exact same thing in a student I was teaching how to use computers. He was asking me what's wrong and demonstrated that an error popped up, which he immediately closed - several times in a row! At the time I thought he wasn't really trying to solve it himself so he didn't bother with the message but now I realize it's just how people have reasonably adapted to the obnoxious way computers keep jumping in front of you screaming for attention.
> Programmers wouldn't stand for a language that pops up a modal dialog when you type incorrect code
I have no idea why you think this. The only reason I wouldn't like it is because I might be doing something that requires incorrect code as a placeholder, but if the modal didn't come back after being dismissed (and just sat in a history) I'd be pleased as punch. It's why I moved to rust - I wanted the compiler to stop me.
Not only do you think this, but you think it's somehow a sign of being egotistical and disrespectful that anyone would like to know when they're screwing up. Weird.
I don't agree with much of the above but I do agree that we should endeavor to minimize error notifications and the like because people don't read them. We (as programmers) should endeavor to make things "self-heal" or work in such a way that most people don't have these kinds of notifications interrupt them. E.g. if "error X" happens a lot find a way to make the action that causes "error X" work without an error. Easier said than done though.
As an aside I really like video games that have a running log of everything characters have said. Persona 5 does this. It's a rare feature from my experience!
It's so weird to me that this kind of thing wasn't a day-1 kind of thing. Android's has loads of issues too[1], not least of which is that you need to manually enable it.
1: you can't get access to actions or details in the history (e.g. no long-press to change settings), nor does it show you ones you didn't dismiss by hand afaict (I've been having Discord notifications disappearing almost immediately after making a noise, but there's nothing in history even though I saw it for its whole half-second existence because it popped over my screen).
Almost everyone has this popup dismissal reflex. People don't read them and click or tap them away instinctively. I think software creators should know this by now and stop using popups in their software.
Sometimes the reflex is so strong, it is extremely hard to stop it, even when you're aware of it. Something like that has happened to me once. There was some kind of password form, where it said DO NOT PRESS ENTER after typing the password. I pressed enter. It took me several attempts to get through it.
I'm guilty of dismissing useful messages sometimes, so I'm running a program, RetroClip for macOS, that records the last 30/60 seconds of screen capture into a ring buffer in RAM (with compression, but the CPU/GPU/power usage seems to be almost negligible). It writes out a file when you press a hotkey. Very helpful in these "wait, wtf did just happen" situations.
The person I replied to described their frustration with a colleague dismissing an error message without reading, not a user. I'm not shaming users not providing clear actionable feedback with stack traces and reproduction steps. I've known fellow software engineers throw their hands up and ask for help because they're 'getting an error', that's what's annoying (because they should know better, ok what have you done before asking me, etc.) not users.
You can usually safely dismiss sentences that start with “It’s widely accepted that…” because if it were actually true, they wouldn’t need to hedge like that. The usual reason to start a sentence like that is when it isn’t as widely accepted as they claim, but they would like the reader to believe that it is. When something is widely accepted, you can just say it without the weasel words.
Requests has been dead for over a decade. It doesn’t support HTTP/2, it doesn’t support HTTP/3, it doesn’t support async, and they ignore security vulnerabilities for months.
Nobody should use requests. If you are still using it, the quickest way to get off it is to switch to niquests, which is actively developed, supports all the things I mentioned above, and API-compatible with requests - you can just do `import niquests as requests` for an instant upgrade.
Claude Code’s been doing this for at least a year already and I assume Claude Cowork does it too as a result. That’s already millions of users, so it’s not “just a neat idea with no adoption”.
Learning isn’t stealing. They didn’t take our culture away from us and nobody is “buying our culture back” from them. We never lost it; it never went anywhere.
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