@gloriouscow Yea, maybe I should cool it. Anti AI posts get me acknowledgment and dopamine hit.

I want to gush more about Horse Girl Game, but no one else seems to want to play it. My other projects are stalled while I do CI maintenance (and I'm procrastinating on that too).

Tbh, I'm not doing too well, and I don't think a lot of my peers are either. And my living situation is _good_.

@cr1901

The one thing that probably has the most influence on our beliefs about people are our personal relationships with people different from us, and realizing that they are still people at the end of the day. I don't know why it seems to be a particular quirk of the human soul that we often need a personal example before we can feel empathy, but that seems to just be how it is.

I know people that use Claude or other tools, and that is costing me a lot of mental energy and quite a bit of cognitive dissonance. I know some of these these people are talented, passionate, intelligent people who got into coding for the same reasons we all did. We can believe they are ethically challenged, perhaps. but we are all flawed, messy creatures who make daily ethical compromises in some way.

I'm really honestly surprised that more people here don't personally know anyone that they hold in any regard whatsoever that use an LLM because it seems like I'm the only one struggling with trying to understand why people I know and respect can look at the ethical costs and shrug. (meanwhile vegans are like "lol, first time?")

I know what I'm seeing is the result of a lot of frustration and hopelessness. I don't personally know what to do about it, either. But I'm just worried that we never will as long as we abandon nuance in favor of a perpetual fediverse circlejerk.

I've pretty much disowned my family for their beliefs. I am not ready to give up a good chunk of my friends as well. I can't. I can't just sit here angry at the world, utterly alone.

@gloriouscow I think your stance is reasonable. I think part of my problem is that I see using AI tools to build the future as a deeply personal attack on a worldview I hold dear ("maybe we shouldn't take our knowledge base for granted").

I've found AI stuff utterly hilarious before:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBHg832c_6I

God knows I'm not morally consistent 100% of the time (no one is).

@cr1901

i can wax sixteen different ways of cynical about it.

I am not really so much concerned with the affect of software quality long-term as much as I am concerned with our eventual irrelevance.

That assumes a generous prediction of the trajectory of AI, of course. I do believe that AGI will be achieved, and I am absolutely convinced we have no plan for it whatsoever.

I think that people can actually use Copilot to review PRs without that being the end of open source itself and all of civilization, but it is a technological truce at best.

there's been a lot of discussion over what our motivations as programmers even are. I feel my sense of personal pride giving way to thoughts about my legacy and my lasting contributions to the world, and start to wonder, if AI could help me accomplish that, ... well, the intellectual opiate starts to smell temptingly sweet.

There is an undeniable jealousy to see the ease at which people can make their ideas real with a few prompts now.

What would probably help more than Claude is if I could stop starting projects I never fucking finish.

But everything I am struggling to make now feels like I am casting irrelevant, trivial detritus into the turbulent sea of an uncertain future.

oh, I gave the world a cycle-accurate 8088 emulator. I should get a goddamn nobel prize.

I miss feeling optimistic about our future, but I couldn't tell you the last time i did.

@gloriouscow @cr1901 I want to challenge your premise that we're speaking to an audience who isn't here, to the AI pushers.

The way I see it, if you're worried about being made irrelevant, if you believe this current push by the technofascist AI cult has any chance of leading to anything like "AGI", then you are our primary audience.

My goal in speaking out against and debunking their parlor tricks is to build a feeling among people who feel threatened by AI and forced into adopting it that all our enemy has is smoke and mirrors on top of standard capitalist abuses, not any miracle technology that is going to deliver them a win over us.