It's clear that AI assisted coding is dividing developers (welcome to the culture wars!). I've seen a few blog posts now that talk about how some people just "love the craft", "delight in making something just right, like knitting", etc, as opposed to people who just "want to make it work". As if that explains the divide.

How about this, some people resent the notion of being a babysitter to a stochastic token machine, hastening their own cognitive decline. Some people resent paying rent to a handful of US companies, all coming directly out of the TESCREAL human extinction cult, to be able to write software. Some people resent the "worse is better" steady decline of software quality over the past two decades, now supercharged. Some people resent that the hegemonic computing ecosystem is entirely shaped by the logic of venture capital. Some people hate that the digital commons is walled off and sold back to us. Oh and I guess some people also don't like the thought of making coding several orders of magnitude more energy intensive during a climate emergency.

But sure, no, it's really because we mourn the loss of our hobby.

My biggest problem with the concept of LLMs, even if they weren’t a giant plagiarism laundering machine and disaster for the environment, is that they introduce so much unpredictability into computing. I became a professional computer toucher because they do exactly what you tell them to. Not always what you wanted, but exactly what you asked for.

LLMs turn that upside down. They turn a very autistic do-what-you-say, say-what-you-mean commmunication style with the machine into a neurotypical conversation talking around the issue, but never directly addressing the substance of problem.

In any conversation I have with a person, I’m modeling their understanding of the topic at hand, trying to tailor my communication style to their needs. The same applies to programming languages and frameworks. If you work with a language the way its author intended it goes a lot easier.

But LLMs don’t have an understanding of the conversation. There is no intent. It’s just a mostly-likely-next-word generator on steroids. You’re trying to give directions to a lossily compressed copy of the entire works of human writing. There is no mind to model, and no predictability to the output.

If I wanted to spend my time communicating in a superficial, neurotypical style my autistic ass certainly wouldn’t have gone into computering. LLMs are the final act of the finance bros and capitalists wrestling modern technology away from the technically literate proletariat who built it.

When I started in security, one of the prevailing attitudes was "The weakest link in the chain will always be the human."

I would like to thank every LLM provider and startup for changing this paradigm by introducing a much weaker link in the chain.

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@jenniferplusplus/116127090589590254

which is why there is no hoarding of all the computers and RAM for data centers that don’t even exist. what we are witnessing is a mafia-type collusion to remove from commercial circulation all the computational power people need to continue about their daily digital lives without paying rents to IP-thieving techbro clouds.

THERE IS NO RAM SHORTAGE.

THERE IS A BIG TECH COLLUSION TO CREATE A PC TECH SHORTAGE

memory is just the beginning. techbros are out to kill the PC market

25 years ago today, Bad_CRC posted the primordial meme video "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" on Newgrounds.

In honor of this important anniversary, I downloaded the original Flash SWF file from Internet Archive, played it using Ruffle in a full-screen window, and replaced the audio with the original MP3 of "Invasion of the Gabber Robots" by The Laziest Men on Mars. So this is probably the highest fidelity encoding possible, without going back to the original forum GIFs.
https://jwz.org/b/yk3i

Hello fediverse! Today, we're excited to announce that we are launching a public preview of Halide Mark III.

After over a year of development, we're ready to roll out some of the amazing new features in Mark III. Today we're showing off Looks.

In addition to Process Zero II, we're also launching an all new, black and white look we call Chroma Noir.

For the full details, check out our lengthy blog post!

https://www.lux.camera/mark-iii-looks/