If you listen to a lot of the perpetually online folks, even now, you’d think Gaza genocide is the only thing on the ballot, on any ballot, ever. You’re not allowed to vote even for a school board member if they dare to talk about anything but how they personally gonna stop a genocide.

Conservatives might use him to run as one of them, as a “used to be”, they eat this shit up.

This is such a bullshit take. Yeah, “open source models” exist, and someone probably uses them for something. Most of the slop being commited is generated by the big ones though. Because, as any sloperator will tell you, only the latest and greatest claude is actually good, and all the problems with your slop is because you didn’t use the latest the bestest. So while most of the slop is generated by big corpos, we need to talk about evils of big slopgen corpos, and how they impact the world.
And when you say “yeah, who cares, if we can use it we need to use it”, you’re vouching for this shit, you’re putting your voice, your money, your support, to worst people that own the worst companies.

There are, broadly speaking, two categories of problems with LLM generated code (well, everything, but code here specifically). One is purely technical, does it bring anything to the process, does it broadly speaking saves you time or effort. And the second is everything else: environmental impact, the bubble of it all, the consolidation of power to all the worst people, erosion of skills, death of education, inflation of prices of consumer electronics, psychological impact, and so so so much more, all lumped together as non-technical downsides.
A bunch of llm-proponents, and here we sadly have to include even Linus, are only engaged with the first category of problems, throwing the whole second category aside as “irrelevant”. And a lot of those people are smart enough so I don’t believe they don’t see this.
If there was only the problem of the tool being kinda shitty but useful for some people, I wouldn’t be so against it. I still don’t believe they actually benefit from it, but if they think they do, I’m not going to argue with them about it.
But it’s fundamentally not true. You can’t ignore the second category in your evaluation. To quote Linus himself,

But the solution is not to put your head in the sand and sing “La La La, I can’t hear you” at the top of your voice like some people seem to do

about the fact that even one of the downsides from the second category makes the whole “but I, a person with 40 years of experience, can use llm in such a way that it sometimes produces some benefit” not worth it. No benefit of it is worth the fact that the new generation of junior developers don’t know how to write code on a fundamental level, while elon mask owns all of humanity’s personal data and can do whatever he wants with it. Even if those benefits were kinda big, it wouldn’t worth it, but they aren’t.

Not actively working against this specific genocide in this specific country is bad, very bad, disqualifying. Unless you also make everyone shit their pants forever, then it’s OK to do whatever genocide you want, it doesn’t matter actually.

LLMs are tools and, like all tools, are more fit for some purposes than others

This is the whole problem, this take is disingenuous. Nobody who actually argues in good faith and knows what they’re talking about, argues that LLM isn’t a tool, or it’s something bigger than that. The argument that is being ignored is that LLM is a tool that inherently has downsides that are bringing more “bad” than it brings “good” when it’s useful. But proponents successfully argue that they can use LLM with some benefits, and act like they answered something, and any retaliation to that is unreasonable.
My favourite analogy is asbestos, and I say it as a huge disservice to asbestos. Asbestos is an amazing material that legit has many very important uses (way more than any LLM will ever have), but we’re not using it because we understand that no matter how great of a insulator it is, and how nice it looks as snow replacement on a movie set, and how wonderful it is in a cigarette filter, the supercancer it causes kinda nullifies all that.

and can be used to amplify good work too.

But at this point I would argue the downsides aren’t worth it. Especially when the bubble pops, subsidies run out, and people will be forced to pay the actual price

Anything that you can run locally isn’t worth it, unless you can’t do anything by yourself at all, and I mean anything.

they’re unleashing more and more ballistic missiles on Kyiv every week

They don’t though. They’re still doing it, but they’re not doing it more, and that’s not for the lack of trying.

And 3 accounts are already “contributing”. That’s not better. It’s worse.

They don’t have any code yet but 3 slopgen accounts are already connected. It’s worse, it’s actually worse.

Well, if you know the original McDonald’s hot coffee story, it started exactly because McDonald’s meant boiling, while the customers expected merely hot.
That’s why precision of the language is important, ans that’s why it’s wrong to expect the company to use your imprecise definition of the word, that’s how you get third degree burns from a cap of coffee.

Do you think McDonald’s shouldn’t write “careful, hot” on hot products, even if it’s not literally boiling and you wish it to be boiling?

Ah, so we immediately dropping the “uncontroleld” pretension, and go to the “preserving the cleanliness of the race” territory. Yeah, over the last 10 years literal millions (around two of those millions or so) people immigrated to Germany. What’s your problem with that?

It actually kind of works, if you compare how Germany is doing with the rest of the “western” world, it’s not worse than most.

There is no uncontrolled mass immigration, you weird uninformed racist dolt. It’s a dogwhistle that rightoids use to prop up the masses and stir hate which gives them power they use to stir more hate.

I’m relatively old, and spent some time teaching people how to use computers, both as a job and voluntarily. I don’t do that anymore as much, but there are a lot of people who continue using me as tech support because I like helping people.
My mom is nearly 80, pre-school teacher by education. She converted from Windows 10 to Linux with me giving her instructions on the phone, and even since the amount of problems she need my help with fell by at least an order of magnitude. Meanwhile her librarian friend converted to 11 and she needs help constantly, even though she was able to use 10.

Honestly, I don’t think so. I saw people do both, I helped people do both. Especially if you go with KDE, for a developed Windows user learning how to do random OS maintenance on Linux is often easier than to understand what they fucked up in 11. For not a poweruser it’s even less complicated, you’re asking your IT guy anyway, as long as all your tasks are being done it doesn’t matter.
It wasn’t the same when people were going from 7 to 10.

It’s so much easier than you think, it’s not even funny

The same way slopgen cleverly went around seemingly unbendable coryright laws: by ignoring the shit out of it, and half-scaring half-bribing the governments and the public to allow them to do whatever the fuck they want.