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Comment by prologic | Hacker News Reader

This set of proposals, are (sorry) just stupid. It's like saying to someone, you are not allowed to saw wood using an electric saw, you must do it by hand. What are we doing here?! LLM(s) are just a tool. Use it as such. You should own the work anyway.

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Linus Torvalds said last week that LLMs were just a tool. Lorenzo Stoakes had the impeccable rebuttal that "it's a tool in the same way a nuclear bomb is just a tool" - of course it's useful but there is clearly more to it than that.

I'm happy for Debian to at least consider the other aspects of social impact, ethics, copyright, and maintainability.

You wouldn't program a computer with a nuclear bomb!!!

An LLM is a tool.

A nuclear bomb is a tool.

And programmers are the biggest tools of them all.

/ba dum tis

It's more like: food processing tool A is known to be defective. We ask employees of this restaurant and supply chains to avoid food processing tool A. This seems eminently reasonable. The question is whether the tool is in fact defective.

Sure, kind of, if the supposed defect is only one of the reasons, and if ‘food processing tool A’ was a hot-button topic that many people have deeply philosophical and ideological opinions about. Oh, and for good measure, if the proposed ban is for ‘food processors’ in general, and a material amount of pushback is coming from a bunch of greybeard industrial cooks that used one particular food processor a couple of years ago, weren’t all that impressed, and have been railing against food processors ever since.

That's just it though. The tool(s) aren't necessarily defective. Just because you can chop off your own hand with an chainsaw or do a botch job of sawing a plank of wood because you weren't watching what you were doing with the electric saw, does not by itself make the tools (Chainsaw, Electric Saw) defective.

The tool makes the food taste bad in ... say ... 20% of the cases, and in 5% of the cases it contaminates the food with salmonella.

Yes you can have the chefs taste the food before serving, and test it for salmonella. But it would be completely reasonable for a regulator to ban such a tool, and even more reasonable for restaurants to have a strict policy against using this tool.

You may as well ban every technological advancement in society then. There are risks to everything we do, build and support. Ban 'em all! Let's go back to the dark ages where everything is safe!

WTF. Food safety is just a reasonable thing for a mature civilization to do. It has nothing to do with banning technological advancement.

Let's just put this argument to bed shall we? Let's consider another case. Leatherman pocket knives. It has a ~20% chance of cutting you, a 5% change of killing you if it pieces the wrong place in your body. I'm speaking from experience, where I sliced my thumb open (by accident of course!), but it was quite bad that I severed a nerve.

Needless to say, I don't feel compelled to take a moral or ethical stance on the use of such tools -- in this case; pocket knives and their inherent dangers.

Every time no matter how sophisticated or the no. of safeguards you put in place, can still inherently pose risks.

I'm not even arguing about food safety. Just think about the many restaurants that prepare and cook up the Japanese pufferfish. That's not even a tool problem right there, that's a skill and trianing problem. That shit™ will can can kill you if not done right.

At least in the US, no, not many, and the fish itself is very import restricted to keep the toxic parts from reaching the market. Hmmm.

Or does it?

https://youtu.be/gOReKxH5NlA?t=154

I agree "not by itself" was said, mostly your comment just made me think of this newer tech for table saws. And, made me think "when is a design inadequacy a defect"?

My partner went to a carpentry school in Seattle 7 years ago where I learned about sawstops and I remember thinking the same. A pretty amazing technology exists that saves lives and limbs, and it is weird that we allow table saw without this technology.

Interestingly there was a discussion here about exactly that a couple of years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39977058

Why don't you come back to talking about software rather than using terrible analogies.

LLMs write bad code / so do people, a lot of really bad code.

LLMs write security bugs / so do people, so many god damned security bugs.

Yes, people make mistakes. But they make far fewer than LLMs.

Ironically, any SoTA LLM would be able to make a better analogy than you. Sometimes the average human is the slop generator

Yes, they are. But that’s exactly what Proposal B (the only one without moral panic) says: allow its use, but place the responsibility on whoever uploads it. If you upload broken or unlicensed code, that’s on you. Proposal B is the most pragmatic and realistic option.

Yes. this I agree with. It's teh same thing many corporations like the one I work for are doing as well. Expecting and mandating that even if you use these so-called "AI" tools. that you are a) responsible and b) accountable for the "work".

> This set of proposals, are (sorry) just stupid. It's like saying to someone, you are not allowed to saw wood using an electric saw, you must do it by hand.

Stupid? Since when has there been a lack of clarity in copyright status with electric vs. hand saws?

Probably since we all started getting our legal advice from you and every other “I think that it’s illegal so it’s illegal” developer-turned-fake-lawyer on the Internet. Oh, wait, that never happened.

This has nothing to do with copyright status or copyrighted works. If it did, Debian wouldn't even be a thing. You can't be a puritan about this; How much of Debian can one say, hand on heart, is truly not inspired, or influenced by other people's work, copyrighted or not.

> This has nothing to do with copyright status or copyrighted works.

It's literally the first rationale of choice 1 of proposal A. How does this have "nothing to do" with it?

Yeah, I agree, it's really stupid. It's like discussing whether contributors are allowed to use google search, stackoverflow, an encyclopedia, etc.

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