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.

"AI is built on the collective knowledge of humankind."

No. Nononononono. It is not built on _knowledge_, it it built on _data_. And not everyone's experiences are available as data, many communities are excluded. Also: "Collective" implies some sort of collaboration and shared activity. But "AI" is just accumulation by a few powerful.

So No. It's not collective but extractive, not knowledge but data, not humankind but the hegemonic western view. Everything in that statement is wrong.

A surge in new datacenters, each with the power demand of 100,000 households and a cooling water demand of 1,000,000 m³ per year to train AI models on material obtained without consent on hardware now unaffordable to consumers so fascism-adjacent tech billionaires can sell us the idea that any skill is now worthless and in doing so creating the largest economic bubble ever while simultaneously destroying society and environment.

I think that about sums it up.

#genai #llm

Cory Doctorow: "America is not great. It has been gutted by the Epstein class, who robbed us blind, raped our kids, and are now selling us shitcoins and chatbots and the spectacle of protesters being shot in the streets."

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/02/corprophagia/#that-makes-me-smart

We see big things and ignore the small. Ordinary, easy things, done over and over. Scrolling, buying, clicking, sharing. Looking outward rather than inward. ‘Our hands are tied,’ we say, while tying the knots.

Hundreds of small, daily, convenient knots, until the world becomes a prison & we talk of nothing but being free.

This is the part people dislike, because it sounds like blame. And it is, a little.

It is easier to say the world is too hungry than to admit that we are still feeding it.