very unpopular opinion

True! I think your opinion sucks lemming! 😎 /s

But seriously, while I do think STEAM sounds a little dumb compared to STEM (and I'm young enough where I saw the name changing happening in real time and despite being at the age where it's easy to impress on kids, I never really cared for the name), I absolutely agree with the idea that we need to teach STEM kids and professionals more about the non-tech side of hard sciences and subjects.

SHTEAM sounds and looks stupid as shit, but we should absolutely take steps to properly educated up-and-coming STEM majors that they need to understand how their work and inventions affect humanity, along with actually having an appreciation for the work that they will do. Not teaching these things is how we create idiots that are proudly declaring "Mecha hitler" and "AI will kill us all, and that's good!"

People complain about electives and gen ed classes in college like, "why do I, a science major, have to take an ethics class?" and then go on to become Sam Altman. As a STEM major, I fucking hate those people. I understand you want to get your money's worth in college, but having to learn history and take one ethics or culture class should always be mandatory. I have learned so much about people and become more knowledgeable about humans and empathy through arts and ethics classes, and have gained an appreciation for them. It also affects how you do tech in general too. So often do I hear about coders, security analysts, data scientists, etc who make music, art, literature etc, and feel like it affects and improves how they work.

AI is the car of modern times. It's convenient, ruinous for the environment, and a danger to anyone in proximity of one. Hell, we even wasted tons of land on highways kinda like what we're doing with datacenters. But boy, does it get you from point A to point B quick.

rationing:

Limit lines of code or diff size. Limit scope. Limit PR per user per month. No bots, obviously. New users don't get to send anything, they can comment and vote, at best. And bring in negative ratings for contributors: low quality, suspicious code, bad PRs.

This is another way of saying deceleration, a word that accelerationists hate.

You are claiming it's irresponsible, why do you say so?

AI is just a technology, how you use it makes it bad or not.

Nuclear is the cleanest safest energy we have, but you can also make bombs with it.

https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/no-such-thing-as-just-a-tool

attack it with ethics!

i'd be curious if you eat chicken from the supermarket? Have you ever lived next to a chicken factory, breathed and listened to that one? Do you drink Coca Cola? Sorry to break it to you, but we're all complicit in things that are destroying nature and humanity and just because you've desensitized yourself to the other ones don't mean they're not happening. You can rage all you want at each one, but it's not going to be constructive. At some point we just have to come to terms with reality that we're also responsible for this reality and I don't agree with AI's effects on nature either, but I think if we're smart we can leverage its capabilities in the window of opportunity available with the people who are most capable (good developers) to create pathways leading toward better things. Or just go yell and rage some more, as you wish.

Funny questions to ask me, specifically, but you couldn't know that lol.

To answer your questions: no and I haven't for 20+ years, yes and yes also for 20+ years, and no. Not eating chicken and drinking Coke are about the easiest lifestyle changes you can make. You can cry about how you're not actually responsible for the things caused by your consumption, but you're still making it happen by consuming it.

but having to learn history and take one ethics or culture class should always be mandatory.

Fuck it, one of each. Programmers had the opportunity to show they could handle not getting a humanities education with their diploma and they blew it.

intrinsically the more irresponsible

That doesn't claim it's intrinsically irresponsible. You can use AI responsibly

In other words, you found an article whose headline seems to make your point for you - which you probably didn't even read or you might have an actual answer. I did read it, and found the reasoning spurious, like jumping through a series of philosophical hoops to prove all taxes are illegal or that birds don't exist. The author's example of a Chinese dish with an unusually large amount of chopped peppers being more easily eaten with chopsticks than with a fork, could just as well have been a bowl of broth that's much easier to eat with a spoon than with chopsticks. All it demonstrates is that any tool can have appropriate and inappropriate use cases. They're still just tools.

I find this comment a kind of masterpiece, because there was both no actual name calling, and you refuse to type FartMaster's actual name.

You won't trick me into solving basic logic problems that you and your bot cannot!

Stop complaining about vibecode, just review it

Hahaha. Not a developer, huh?

There is no way I could possibly review my coworkers' 1000s of lines of code he posts daily. I just blindly approve it because fuggggit we don't care about quality only velocity.

This is different from before because before he would normally post 2 or 3 small code changes per week. Also, he would have tested it himself so starting off it would already be in a good state. Also, since he tested himself, we could talk about the change since he still had the context.

Now it's just ship, ship, ship. We literally can't "review it" like we did before. That world is gone.

That looks like it's the name for an STD

There's plenty of people who are both vegan and boycotting companies like coca cola, as well as pushing back against the way the corpo ai crap is going. Just because bad things exist doesn't mean they have to, or at the very least, that you have to use them or be complicit.

There is one key difference though, drivers and car manufacturers are sometimes held accountable for their actions

Honestly, if I can use an AI agent that is not coming from an evil corporation that's destroying the environment, I would use it to help me solve problems like figuring out why I have a build error, why I'm getting certain error messages, why a piece of code isn't working as I expected, find potential bugs, etc.

It can be a great tool to help you grow, like having a tutor explain where and why you made a mistake so you can learn from it.

NOT if you ask it to do the job for you and generate your code.

That's the neat part, you can.

If I had to pick one, it'd be Olmo 3 from Ai2:
Non-profit. Ai2 is a research institute, not a company that needs to sell you a subscription or harvest your prompts.
Fully open, not just "open weights"
Ai2 publishes the training data, the training code, every checkpoint and the logs. Anyone can check exactly what went in, and in principle rebuild it from scratch. You don't have to take their word for anything.

Runs locally. The 7B version runs on an ordinary gaming laptop or a recent MacBook. Your code never leaves your machine, there's no data centre involved when you use it, and the energy cost is your laptop being on.
Apache 2.0 licence. No usage restrictions and no strings attached.

Good enough for the tutor use case. Explaining errors, walking through why code misbehaves, and pointing out likely bugs are all well within what it can do.

To be fair about it: the training data is largely scraped from the web, like nearly every model. The difference is that Olmo is honest and auditable about it.

If strict consent matters most to you, StarCoder2 is cleaner (only permissively licensed code, with an opt-out)

ah, okay bravo 👏 I might gamble that statistics would be more on my side with those, but I think the point I'm trying to get across is still valid which is there is a lot of bad shit going on in this world that we are complicit in to some degree just by participating in society. Arguably, for example, even using the US dollar is promoting a war-fueled economy. Of course, I still use it, because the decentralized sovereign alternatives do not yet let give me the liquidity I'd like.
I came to this sub looking to learn and mostly all I see are people getting angry about things they don't like in a way that is not effective. Do they have the right to do so? Sure! I also have a right to be critical of it and say this is not the learning environment I was hoping for coming from reddit.
I would rather go somewhere I can have constructive conversation over positive things within our control because there's only so much time in the day and I don't spend it all on my computer.

I don't have to actively boycott Coca Cola, I just don't drink it. I would argue equally that the people who are actively boycotting it should put their time toward something more constructive like reviving the soil.

I've read this article before. Found it very reductionist. For example, it says that weapons might be good for Ukraine, but they're bad in general. You can't just "in general" something like weapons or AI. They have thousands of different contexts and use cases. Sure, a weapon can make somebody homocidal in one context, but it might make somebody a militia in another context. AI can be a slop generator for a vibe coder, and a bug detection tool for Linus Torvalds.

I'm not a fan of how modern politics and social justice is so reductionist nowadays. "One aspect of X is bad, so we must reject X altogether". Can we add even a little nuance to our discussions? This mindset is brainrot.

how sad that's what you decided to highlight...

im old enough to know this is exactly what happened

Yes, exactly. That's what i said.

False dichotomy, one can do both :)

Just seems wild to me to go "I already do bad thing, so more bad thing is fine" rather than "I am doing bad thing that I could be not doing, so I will stop doing bad thing and also not do new bad thing"

Except that a basket isn't analogous of AI, a smoky two-stroke engine that pollutes the air with unburned fuel and oil mix is. And your reliance on the engine will atrophy your legs lol

You're on the slow-roll group ride saying you need an engine to keep up and we're looking at you with disgust because you're so loud and we can't breathe.

My analogy is fine, you waisted it, but Lol Funny enough, I love 2 strokes.

I'd rather rip it on my KTM down a single track any day of the week rather than suffering slowly on a road bike.

Both are a workout, only one is really a full body workout, way more fun and comes with adrenaline.

I read it

I've said it before, and I'll say it again : eventually you just fucking end up with "be a complete person; here's the entire dewey decimal system."

STEM is meant to deal with logic based thinking and the problems unique to that industry, like for instance, a huge gender gap. Shoving arts and humanities in doesn't fix the issue. Cross disciple collaboration is great, expanding your horizons and putting ethics into practices is great, but that's not what STEM is.

There are already plans for these things in practice (hippocratic oath, iron^[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calling_of_an_Engineer] ring^[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring] ), which need to become more widespread. We don't have to have STEAM toys and SHMEAT courses.

I swear, some people still think Prohibition was a great idea.

My best idea is that we make it illegal to provide llm access as a service - maybe everyone who uses one should have to set up their stack themselves.

Are we gonna set up a Great Firewall to block providers in other countries too? And VPNs, and all the other fun stuff.

A tool is thus any kind of thing that lets you do something you wouldn't otherwise have been able to.

Immediately goes on to using a fork as an example. Wtf are you doing eating with a fork that you couldn't be doing with your bare fingers?

Argument is stupid, and falls apart at the first hint of critical thinking.

Wtf are you doing eating with a fork that you couldn’t be doing with your bare fingers?

Preach. There was a lot of fuss made when I was in school about "humans are the only animals who use tools" - of course by then all kinds of animals had been documented clearly using tools, but they were still teaching the kiddos (self included) that "humans are special."

I have been making and using software tools for 45 years, a tool is something you use to make a job easier, faster, cleaner, safer, a tool might make the impossible possible, but that's far from a requirement for "tool-ness."

I read it

Did AI translate it for you first?

There's an example used in regulatory circles: electricity would never be permitted in homes under today's regulatory standards - we only accept it and its hazards because it is so incredibly common and useful in daily life and we've been accepting it since before we cared so deeply about safety.

So, have today's goalposts moved so much that "AI" no longer passes modern society's definitions of acceptable? I feel like such a technology would have been cheerfully embraced in the 1960s.

It was.

If the goal was to reduce the amount the average American drank alcohol year over year (and that was the goal) it was an overwhelming success; not only during prohibition but thereafter as well.

Banning stuff and then enforcing the ban works really well and we have tons of evidence of it working; not just in the US but literally world-wide.

boy, does it get you from point A to point B quick.

Not so long ago, face to face interaction was the only way business was transacted, people were employed and paid.

In today's world, if we could get past the baseless RTO mandates and let the 60% or whatever it is of modern workers work from home or wherever is convenient for them to work, get the commuters off the roads, restructure the food distribution systems to eliminate that need for cars, we really could make a significant improvement in the environmental impact of cars and trucks.

In the world of AI, I suspect a huge chunk of current AI usage, energy burned in data centers, etc. is "wasteful" - investigational, experimental, learning usage. If we can get past that kind of usage and eventually use it for what it's good for and leave it alone for counterproductive wastes of time, it should also be a clear net-benefit for "getting stuff done" not only faster, but more correctly and valuably. Which software is more valuable: one coded by humans over the course of a year, with a half dozen undiscovered security vulnerabilities, or one coded by those same humans over the course of a month with those vulnerabilities exposed and fixed?

If you're concerned about the environment, those humans commuting to work for an extra 11 months add up to far more environmental impact than the AI they used to accelerate their work. Good luck getting their employer to give them 10 months off with pay for delivering the same valuable product faster and better.

sometimes held accountable for their actions

Very weak theater.

I'm sorry, who or what exactly regulates knives? Knife manufacture? Knife ownership? Even knife sales... If you're referring to ballistic knives or switchblades, sure - those are like guns, but the 99.999% of knives in the world? The ones anybody with a piece of metal can hammer out and sharpen for themselves?

I mean, it is how ice cream became so popular... https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/ice-cream-prohibition-era-craze

However, the end of Prohibition was a much better idea than the start of it.

You might want to rethink that position: https://www.anthropic.com/research/self-replicating-ai

There's many good reasons why even Bachelor of Science degrees have such a load of core courses across the academic spectrum.

I used a local model today to write a long form regex for me today. it would have taken me 30 minutes. instead it took 3 seconds and worked out of the box.

I think this is a perfect example of what LLMs should be used for.

You seem to have missed the 1001 negative side effects of Prohibition, that eclipsed the tiny ideological victory of reducing drinking.

https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/prohibition/unintended-consequences

Additionally, there is no consensus on whether Prohibition was even successful at that, owing to a lack of hard data.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_States

This is quite aside from the fact that today we've figured out that criminalising drugs and users is the wrong approach and does a lot more harm than good. But we STILL have people like you.

Yes. That stuff is necessary. I am agreeing with that, while maintaining that "STEM specific initiatives" need to be STEM specific. I'm talking about conferences and toys, not courses.

Ok. But did you understand the regex? That's what people are missing out on. The learning aspect.

Why is it bad if people get angry at things that are happening in the world? Would you rather we get angry at fiction?

absolutely. I know regex, better than most devs I know personally.

I also don't use it all the time. I happened to have it up and just said, "hey fucker, give me the pcre regex to find all instances of these keywords in a string like this"

reviewed it, threw what I had into my code, ran my tests and everything was golden.

Hmm, yeah I don't think this medium of communication is able to carry the nuances, because I also agree that the notion of "I already do bad thing, so more bad thing is fine" is wild and I'm confused if you took that from my message. I'd like to think most people who have employed some common sense and want good for the world would agree with that statement!
What I'm trying hard to communicate on this forum and seeing a lot of resistance toward is that the repetitive divergent anger (maybe we call this rage?) toward something is not constructive. I understand it's a natural human reaction and has its place, but at some point I'd like to see humanity take radical responsibility for our shared involvement in the roles that contribute to why the world is how it is today.
I would argue we've been fairly unconscious about it, but now that the internet exists and we have this ability to exchange ideas across vast amounts of space, we can use the tools at our disposal in a spectrum of ways that range from good to bad. How can we make space for our human experience, but then also apply collective wisdom to make well-informed actionable steps forward?