"Setting aside the moral arguments—"

You mean the power and water.

"Setting aside the power and water, and—"

Don't forget the industrial-scale plagiarism. The brazen theft.

"Setting aside the copyright fuckery, the power and water, and—"

Don't forget the maniacal, suicidal inflation of the bubble. Arguably the greatest single mis-allocation of resources in history, aside from war.

"Setting aside the financial madness, the copyright fuckery, the power and water, and—"

Don't forget the willful destruction of creative livelihoods, the willful destruction of education itself.

"Setting aside the destruction of art, writing, and schools, the financial madness, the copyright fuckery, the power and water, and—"

Don't forget the purposeful degradation of human cognitive capacity. The planned and designed addictive dependency.

"Setting aside the cognitive degradation, the destruction of schools, the financial madness, the copyright fuckery, the power and water, and—"

Don't forget the ghoulish ethical camouflage used to obscure, indeed to erase, the responsibility for decisions in budget austerity, insurance claims, regulatory oversight, medical decisions, court filings, and even real-time combat.

"Setting aside the monstrous mechanisms of official irresponsibility, the cognitive degradation, the schools, the financial madness, the copyright fuckery, the power and water—"

Are you going to say it doesn't work?

"IT DOES NOT FUCKING WORK"

#ai

If your stated goal is to make computing into a “utility” (aka subscription) you can only obtain from Big Tech and if your entire industry is comprised of rentiers, it makes perfect sense to also make actually owning a general computing device as expensive as possible.

As far as Big Tech is concerned, this is a feature, not a bug.

It’s capitalists acquiring capital and pricing it out of the reach of those they want to make dependent on them.

Also: fuck these people. https://social.heise.de/@heiseonlineenglish/116301661509651336 https://social.heise.de/@heiseonlineenglish/116301661509651336

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.