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RodgerTheGreatyesterday at 10:45 PM1 replyview on HN

The articles you publish are, in principle, a celebration of the cleverness in programming and hardware design behind video games; a vehicle for appreciating human craftsmanship and artistry.

LLMs are the product of taking the creative output of countless millions of people and turning it into a statistical model which completely erases the attribution for all that material. They can regurgitate interpolated, plagiarized copies of someone else's code, divorced from its original context, but they are structurally incapable of showing where that code came from, who wrote it, or why.

Using these tools, and using your public profile to contribute to the normalization of these tools, is profoundly disrespectful to the programmers, artists, and writers whose work was strip-mined by megacorporations to build those LLMs. You are prioritizing your personal convenience while enriching bad actors who are bent on obliterating the open web, open-source culture, and the craft of programming. It's dissonant.


Replies

grg0today at 12:50 AM

I don't disagree with your views, but attacking Fabien and saying he's being disrespectful seems like a stretch to me.

I think a better way to put it is that Fabien's blog is an inspiration to anyone looking to understand computers and programming in detail while taking a history tour of old games and systems. He personally has the skill to do so and then present the interesting bits of the system in a very compelling narrative. It gives people someone/thing to look up to. To find out that part of the analysis/output was produced by an LLM crunching through the code base is a major disappointment since it removes or diminishes the human element of the work.