Evan Prodromou
Thanks so much to everyone who responded.
From the comments, my guess is that many responses misunderstood "hacker culture" as a concept, even though I included a link.
This might be due to the poll coming out around the time that Anthropic announced Project Glasswing:
Evan Prodromou
Regardless, the question was about the style and traditions associated with creative and curious computing, often expressed in Free Software or Web hacks. It's a joyful, principled and humourous culture that I consider myself a part of. The network we are on now is inspired and guided by that culture.
Evan Prodromou
I don't know what that will do to hacker culture. I don't think LLMs will kill it, though. Even if we can't get jobs on our own terms doing the work that we love, and even if the work seems unimportant because it can be done by an LLM, I think many of us will keep doing it, because we can, and because we love it.
Evan Prodromou
LLMs threaten that. If people can get pretty-good software without hackers in the loop, our jobs become more precarious, and our ability to hold employers and others to our principles would drop precariously.
Evan Prodromou
One reason this culture has survived and thrived is that many of us can get employment by building software, hardware, or systems that the world needs. Our skills in these areas make us highly sought after.
Evan Prodromou
There's a chance that hacker culture might evolve in a positive way. I don't know. This challenge may push us in another direction.
Evan Prodromou
One thing few hackers I know want to acknowledge is how much our culture has inspired the AI/ML community. People who work in the space are adamant about open source tooling, patent-free technology, and shared research. This doesn't always bubble up to executives, of course, and it's not universal, but I'd point to people like LeCun, Bengio and Hinton as standard bearers of this open culture.
Evan Prodromou
I think there's also a real deep question about training data. If the LLMs have been trained on code and text made by people like us, could our traditions, principles and values be encoded in there, somewhere? It's an interesting question.
Evan Prodromou
Anyway, my answer is yes, but definitely changed.
Evan Prodromou
@jalcine excellent point!
Neo-Rodneyite: Yap Szn ✍🏿📖
@evan interesting but more of a thought experiment given how it's a mirror of what dominant cultures get to be represented. Could even be considered a calcification
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