It is not how I roll and it never has been. I don't and won't make things that are responsible for putting people out of work; I make things that make their jobs less shit. I won't make choices that make things more dangerous or less ethical.

This is a choice you can make. Beware of sitting back and saying "we" when you could be in a position to say "you".

It's possible to do no deliberate evil, to avoid using euphemisms for firing people, to avoid fire-at-will culture. It's also possible to fight against major ethics lapses and immorality.

At the best — highest-paying, most dynamic, most fun — job I ever did, I probably did more good in the relevant industry in one afternoon by writing down my concerns, printing a resignation letter, making both my employer and their client aware it existed and offering to sign it, than I've ever managed since. (You can maybe only do this once per working lifetime; use it wisely)

Even the project I worked on that I was sure would put dozens of identifiable people out of work didn't, because we found a way they could use the product to continue their original tasks until their existing contracts expired/they moved on/they retired and their team could be scaled down through gentle non-replacement.

One of the earliest things I was taught about system design is that sometimes even jobs that appear to an outsider to be noisy, exhausting or miserable give people purpose and meaning; you have to look people in the eye when you talk about things that could eliminate their job role. You don't replace a job that doesn't need replacing. And you have to look at the things they do with care and duty and make sure your systems do the same.

If you come from a corporate culture that treats this as anathema, you should work to change it or quit.

The owner of the company lead us to a large open office with about 30 people working in there, mostly women, and whispered to us that he expects he'll only need three of them after subscribing to our product.

That's when I realised the brutality of what we are doing, and the sales guy I was with realised we should be charging significantly more.

And the relevance here is how this disruption played out. Will the same happen to open source? See it already for instance in how AI makes some maintainers burn out. Where will it lead?

"We"?

Why is it our fault that governments have completely abdicated their responsibilities? Why is it our fault that everyday people literally refuse to become politically or economically literate and/or vote?

Tech has given the world, for essentially free, the entire wealth of human knowledge at their fingertips. We've given them ways to learn and communicate. We've overhauled transportation and logistics and payment. Fairly soon (decades), human labor may be obsoleted and who knows what good that may bring us.

And, yes, we also gave them mass surveillance and gig economies and hyper-addictive systems. Just like engineers gave us guns and chemists gave us poison and physists gave us nuclear bombs and doctors gave us lobotomies.

They had quite literally decades to recognize the threat. We screamed the dangers from the rooftops and in congressional hearings. We told people social media is poison. Betting sites are poison. You are the product. Watch out for market capture. You need to legislate us.

Normal folk called us crazy nerds and basically told us where to shove our concerns. But now it's our fault, naturally. We didn't do enough. We didn't perceive all possible outcomes, assume the world would be negligent, and refuse to make things we thought would be helpful - as if someone else wouldn't have thought of such Einstein breakthoughs as "socialize online" or "couch jumping online" or "taxis.. online".

And just to be clear, I'm speaking collectively just because you are. I make very boring stuff that is well within the confines of the law and only serves to help people.

Relieving yourself of thinking and effort, whether through a machine or another human, is not the liberating force you think it is, especially when that effort isn't just grunt work, but the very process that helps you develop and grow.

Exactly this. I've been very confused by the free software advocates that seemed to hate AI until I realized their reasons for releasing software under an open source license were very different than what I assumed they were.

Even before AI we heard lots of complaints like "I made a popular open source library which is now used by corps with trillion-dollar market cap and I don't get anything out of it; halp". There was always some kind of a conflict, now the nature of the conflict just changed

One of the major cultural problems in open source software is it got dominated by people doing it purely for self promotion. Then it becomes an interview question, then all the incentives are warped on the promise of “get PRs merged, get paid big money”.

But yes, you are right.

LLM’s are pouring massive amount of gasoline on existing issues and people just keep shrugging. Fake news always existed. Now one dude in India can flood multiple sock puppet media accounts with right wing content/images (actual example from a few months back) at a scale previously unimaginable.

People could always die crossing a street. Still, cars changed the discussion about pedestrian safety pretty materially. People didn’t simply throw up their hands and go “people have always been able to die crossing the street.”

That is kind of net loss at this point. Hey, on the bright side we get onslaught of slop, ai psychosis, constant stream of doom trolling.

And ideology of pointlessness where any time you do or learn anything, you get told that why bother you should have used AI.

The kid forever locked in candy store is happy for a bit, but then they get hungry and feel bad. And no matter how much sugar you eat, it wont get better.

And frankly, I think most of the source of outrage is this:

> Yeah on the one hand opening your code got you credit which was nice for the ego and for getting paid, and AI trains on it and doesn't give credit where it's due.

Turns out, a lot of people didn't really do things in the open to benefit the others, in pay-it-forward style. They just did it for selfish gains. Which is fine, just like keeping source closed and selling licenses is fine. The problem is with lying - doing something for personal gain, while claiming it's for greater good, thus getting more gains through dishonesty.

LLMs just shone a light onto it. People who had betterment of others on their minds, don't have a reason to consider LLMs training on their output as taking anything from them. On the contrary, their outputs now contribute to a general-purpose problem solving tool that will (and already does) help humanity with way more problems that anyone imagined.

I personally am more than happy to know LLMs may have trained on my content. I don't begrudge the companies the $0.000001/year they probably owe me for my relative contributions. I get orders of magnitude more value for myself from LLMs every day, in my personal life alone.

There are other reasons to dislike LLMs and fear or hate what AI is doing to the world. But people who feel something was "stolen" from them, who now close their blogs and turns repos private because LLMs - they're just showing they had ulterior motives for their work - which again, is fine if they were up-front about it. The OSS subset of those, just paint themselves as being grifters all along.