Comment by gmerc
10 days ago
Why do people fall for this. We're compressing knowledge, including the source code of SQLite into storage, then retrieve and shift it along latents at tremendous cost in a while loop, basically brute forcing a franken version of the original.
Because virtually all software is not novel. For each single partially novel thing, there are tens of thousands of crud apps with just slightly different flow and data. This is what almost every employed programmer does right now - match the previous patterns and produce a solution that's closer to the company requirements. And if we can brute force that quickly, that's beneficial for many people.
> Because virtually all software is not novel.
That isn't true, not by a long shot. Improvements happen because someone is inspired to do something differently.
How will that ever happen if we're obsessed with proving we can reimplement shit that's already great?
At the code level it's still rehashing the same ideas over and over again. I wrote lots of things from software 3d on a weird system to jit to websites to telephony software to compilers to firmware for hardware to cloud orchestration and many other things and none of this was novel - someone wrote every single pattern from them before even if nobody put them together the same way. Putting known pieces together is not novel. And as a proportion, almost all software produced is just business apps of various types, with absolutely nothing novel in them.
Also from actual researchers, I know just one person who did something actually novel and it was with queuing.
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I agree.
While I'm generally sympathetic to the idea that humans and LLM creativity is broadly similar (combining ideas absorbed elsewhere in new ways), when we ask for something that already exists it's basically just laundering open source code
Months (years?) of publicity from AI companies telling us that the AI is nearing AGI and will replace programmers. Some people are excited about that future and want it now.
In reality, LLMs can (currently) build worse versions of things that already exist: a worse database than SQL, a worse C compiler than GCC, a worse website than one done by a human. I'd really like to see some agent create a better version of something that already exists, or, at least, something relatively novel.
>a worse database than SQL, a worse C compiler than GCC, a worse website than one done by a human.
But it enables people who can't do these things at all to appear to be able to do these things and claim reputation and acclaim that they don't deserve for skills they don't have.
License laundering and the ability to not credit or pay the original developers.
Laundering public domain code no less
copyright laundering machine. which could poison the very notion of ip / copyright, either open or close source. the only code that can't be laundered becomes code hidden behind a server api