Just a PSA.
Sorry to link to Reddit, but not only is the dev sloppily using using Claude to do something like 20k line PRs, but they are completely crashing out, banning people from the Discord (actually I think they wiped everything from Discord now), and accusing people forking their code of theft.
It’s a bummer because the app was pretty good… thankfully Calibre-web and Kavita still exist.
It’s a powerful tool that people are using without restraint. I think this to be expected in the first few years after any new powerful tool is found. Humans will find a way to mess it up.
See radium cosmetics and ideas to dig the Panama canal using hydrogen bombs. Social media is probably as much or even more dangerous than LLMs.
But they aren’t distinct things, they are both heads of the same capitalism hydra. How much of the training data for these LLMs has been harvested directly from Social Media? I sure as shit don’t know and I would argue nor do many other people.
Radium is probably a good analogy actually. Thank you. It’s toxic in almost every application we can imagine, it’s got a legacy that extends out to the current day, it formed a massive economic block, and it turns out it should only ever have been used under the strictest controls. We should never have had “entrepreneurs” being the driving force behind it.
It should have ALWAYS been a controlled substance that required people who understood and respected how fucking dangerous it is. Instead we are intent on jamming LLMs into every aspect of life regardless of how badly we suspect and/or know it will fuck everything up.
Unfortunately I don’t think caution is a virtue that is rewarding in most circumstances to most people. New tools need to be extensively and rigorously tested before being used.
I don’t even think it’s a individualism/capitalism thing unfortunately. I’ve been in cultures/societies that are not either and both still use these tools to further their goals. It’s just power at the end of the day.
It’s like the nuclear bomb. It doesn’t really matter what the underlying economic system of US or USSR were, they still used it to further their goals.
I think the insidiousness is in the power of the tool. For most people it’s just too powerful to not use. I can be an excellent photographer or artist and not make a dime if I don’t engage in social media.
For me that’s the sad thing. Self-hosted small models have been extremely useful to me to perform selective tasks that completely changed how things work. It’s allowed me to manage my research and information processing so much better. But I also know most people don’t put any limiters on it and use it for anything and everything.
I have played around with a bunch of tools at a self hosted level. The big thing I found puts inherent brakes on the process is the technical capability to actual use them, when I played around with ESRGAN to upscale images I was limited in application by time and equipment, I achieved better results than I could have on my own, markedly worse results than if I had the technical ability and equipment to just reshoot the images with better resolution.
I tried some photogrammetry, similar outcomes. I could have done better by being better with Blender. NERFs as well.
What we have is people yelling “Monorail! Monorail!” And using free credits or buying them.
The industry is already losing obscene amounts of money and the actual use cost is still entirely obscured from the general public. Once enough of the world is hooked on using LLMs for everything we are going to see the true costs emerge, then it will be another iteration of the haves and the have nots, society as a whole cannot afford to make LLM usage profitable, where does that get us?