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Fed up with vibe coders, dev sneaks data-nuking prompt injection into their code - Ars Technica (arstechnica.com)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 4 points 2 months ago (1 child)

You are missing the most important questions here: who can afford it, and who owns it.

It’s easy to be pro LLM when $20 a month is not a big deal.

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  • [–] -2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Self host an open model, but yeah 20 a month is not that expensive for what you can do with it.

    But that's not what anyone in this thread is saying, they're saying LLM code bad and stealing so let's poison open source projects. Also sharing code is bad now, when I'm sure many of these people would claim they like open source code.

    Again, I think knowledge and code should be free for all to use so that we all benefit from it.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    I figured you wouldn’t be able to look past your own personal experience. I’m sorry to say that most people outside your bubble cannot afford either the subscription nor the hardware to run usable LLMs locally.

    “Sharing code is bad now” because a handful of companies scraped it and not only they haven’t given anything back, they are reselling it in different shapes, and telling people that now all that data is proprietary. So, yes, stolen is an apt word for it.

    Anyway, all this talk about “democratizing” knowledge is bullshit. Libraries democratized knowledge. The internet democratized knowledge. Anyone can learn how to code if they put the time and read a book and practice.

    But delegated thinking is the opposite of acquiring knowledge, so what the hell are you people yapping about.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 months ago* (1 child)

    You don't have to delegate thinking, I'm sure many people will but it's absolutely not a requirement for using LLMs as the intended tool they are.

    On the topic of price, I'm sure people were saying the same things about books (oh must be nice you can afford books), then the same about computers and the internet. They eventually became more affordable.

    Not even going to touch the "I couldn't understand economic heardship" aspect.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    You are betting on massive corporations having a change of heart and putting all their resources at the disposition of the public, for essentially free. Otherwise, AI will never be affordable in the sense that everyone could have free access to models that matter.

    And I know that you said that self hosting is a possibility. But let’s be real here: public weight models are available because they pose no risk to the bottom line of the companies training them. There are zero competitive models trained by a non profit. But even if that wasn’t true, the current DRAM shortage is proof that these companies will never allow anyone to match them. Same goes for electricity and water.

    Honestly, after all these years of witnessing big tech shitting all over us, I cannot understand where all these hopes come from. Would be endearing if it wasn’t so reckless.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (1 child)

    I'm just showing that as technology progresses and scales it generally becomes cheaper and peoples access increases, again were literally on the internet now and have phones in our pockets that can do it, whereas 40 years ago PCs were much more expensive and internet was slow as hell.

    We shouldn't trust big tech, I'm on Lemmy so that should be a bit of a given lol.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    I’m just showing that as technology progresses and scales it generally becomes cheaper and peoples access increases, again were literally on the internet now and have phones in our pockets that can do it, whereas 40 years ago PCs were much more expensive and internet was slow as hell.

    Even if LLMs were free to download and use, who is going to subsidize training and fine tuning, when it takes hundreds of millions of dollars? Also, LLMs are software, not hardware. If there's anything that we know about software is that it doesn't become faster with time, quite the opposite.

    The thing I don't understand is that people believe the BS when all this is out there in the clear. Massive corporations open source models that pose no risk to their bottom line, then they spend millions of dollars to market their newest and latest, rinse and repeat, all fuelled by debt. Thus, self hosting will never catch up, and when the money dries up, there will be zero incentive to make more advanced models more affordable. In fact, since most of the time model improvements scale following training and hardware expenditure, they will become more expensive.

    We shouldn’t trust big tech, I’m on Lemmy so that should be a bit of a given lol.

    Is it though?

    Like here you are, telling me that an example of "technology progress" is that "were literally on the internet now and have phones in our pockets that can do it, whereas 40 years ago PCs were much more expensive and internet was slow as hell", when the phone market is effectively controlled by two companies, Apple and Google. Now imagine the same landscape with LLMs.

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  • [–] -1 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    I think the reality is open source and normal people are who continuously push progress forward, how much of the internet scaffolding is literally on the backs of open source projects?

    A shit load.

    LLMs are no different, and I can't agree with you that open source models are not a threat to the big players.

    I'm not sure why you're downplaying what I'm saying about extending access and lowering prices, yes of course corporations don't do it out of the goodness of their capitalist hearts, but history shows that it does in fact reduce in cost over time, which was your initial point. "Oh must be nice for you that you can afford $20 a month and have your own homelab to self host models."

    I grew up lower middle class, my home was repossesed by the bank during the housing crisis and my parents divorced.

    I moved out at 18 and joined the workforce and have managed to get a middle-class wage via my efforts and a bit of luck. I hate my job and the morons in charge but the job market is shit.

    I love open source software and the ideas beyond knowledge and work should be shared with others so we can all benefit (which is unfortunately not how this capitalist system works) and yet we have Linux, we have an amazing amount of open source projects that people do simply because they want to. Those are the people we should support and the ones who freely train and fine tune open source models.

    To your point about "software doesn't become faster with time" mother fucker I remember windows 95, you're delusional if you don't think we've come an insane amount. I remember webpages taking minutes to load, interlacing vs non to help with image loading.

    In the realm of LLMs, the software itself on the open source side has improved leaps and bounds in just the past 6 months on my same hardware.

    I understand your negativity, it's hard not to fall into it when the world is how it is right now and things feel like (and are) getting worse in most ways.

    Phones require specialized hardware and designing, to run and produce, LLMs only require normal consumer grade hardware and the desire to learn how to make it work. Will it ever be mainstream? Based on Linux vs Windows/Mac, probably not, but that doesn't mean it's pointless or impossible.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    LLMs are no different, and I can’t agree with you that open source models are not a threat to the big players.

    This is just plain wrong. Again, there are zero open weight models that haven't been developed by private companies. These companies, at the same time, offer superior closed source models because that's their whole business model.

    ... we have an amazing amount of open source projects that people do simply because they want to. Those are the people we should support and the ones who freely train and fine tune open source models.

    They are not.

    There might be some people fine tuning models, but I can confidently assure you that there isn't a single non profit entity out there that is spending tens of thousands of dollars in compute alone, just to give their model away for free. And that doesn't even begin to account for data collection.

    To your point about “software doesn’t become faster with time” mother fucker I remember windows 95, you’re delusional if you don’t think we’ve come an insane amount. I remember webpages taking minutes to load, interlacing vs non to help with image loading.

    What are you even talking about. Websites in the 90s took longer to load because connections back then ran at 56Kbps tops, or ~5KBs, with latencies in the order of 500 to 1000 ms, when the average website would be like 10KB. Nowadays, an online newspaper weights 5 to 20 MB with average bandwidths of hundreds of megabits per second, with latencies of 50-100ms. Web development and its traversals are in such a particularly shitty state, browsing the modern Internet on less than 4GB of RAM is borderline impossible. In other words, software has become slower, and hardware is doing the heavy lifting now. And I can say this because I work in the field.

    Phones require specialized hardware and designing, to run and produce, LLMs only require normal consumer grade hardware and the desire to learn how to make it work.

    This is such a massive mischaracterization.

    First of all, it's easier to put a phone together with off the self parts, than it is to build a meaningfully useful LLM even with $50,000 worth of hardware at one's disposal. Second, running a LLM was never the issue. Being able to produce and run a meaningfully useful LLM that has no strings attached to private interests is.

    Honestly, I think you are out of your depth. Being a hobbyist is fine, but holy crap please inform yourself. None of this shit is easy or free or even cheap to build and run, and every foundation model is controlled by private interests.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    "self host an open model". My dude, you need pretty beefy hardware to run a slow and shit model that won't even compare to the 0.33x models you get with a copilot subscription.

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