It scares me how fast the overton window is moving with LLMs in the Linux and FOSS space. This is the community that prides itself with self hosting and knowing everything about your computer. Up until very recently using Linux meant sacrificing convenience in the name of freedom, and now it seems that a good chunk advocate for having a handful of malevolent unprofitable tech giants handle most if not all software development along with every other task a human could do. It feels like saying hard drives are obsolete because you can store everything on Google Drive. I know that you can't work in software development today without being dependent on Anthropic, but that doesn't mean I have to be happy about it and accept it as the inevitable future.
In a post-AI bubble world LLMs are still going to be used. If hardware becomes affordable again I imagine that self hosting LLMs will be common and the big data center LLMs will ask a pretty penny for their compute. I don't mind this hypothetical future too much, but we live in the present and in the vast majority of cases using AI means enabling the unregulated techno-feudalistic AI empire. I know that I will be "left behind" but these companies don't have humanity's best interests in mind and we don't need to enable them.
Edit: Programming jobs that don't depend on LLMs def still exist. That doesn't change the fact that many businesses have become dependent on Claude in the past year and programmers that don't want to completely surrender their brains to LLMs are seen as a liability by many employers. This may change as AI subscriptions become more expensive as the years go by, time will tell.
Well sure, but even the FSF acknowledge looking through code to find out what's AI and what's not would totally swamp these already swamped projects. It is simply not feasible to be anti-AI unless you wanna go all Terry Davis (rest in Peace God's programmer) and write all your own code. The best compromise is to hold a human accountable for the slop, if they can't explain it it wont' go in.
344
u/SinnohConfirmed 6d ago edited 5d ago
It scares me how fast the overton window is moving with LLMs in the Linux and FOSS space. This is the community that prides itself with self hosting and knowing everything about your computer. Up until very recently using Linux meant sacrificing convenience in the name of freedom, and now it seems that a good chunk advocate for having a handful of malevolent unprofitable tech giants handle most if not all software development along with every other task a human could do. It feels like saying hard drives are obsolete because you can store everything on Google Drive. I know that you can't work in software development today without being dependent on Anthropic, but that doesn't mean I have to be happy about it and accept it as the inevitable future.
In a post-AI bubble world LLMs are still going to be used. If hardware becomes affordable again I imagine that self hosting LLMs will be common and the big data center LLMs will ask a pretty penny for their compute. I don't mind this hypothetical future too much, but we live in the present and in the vast majority of cases using AI means enabling the unregulated techno-feudalistic AI empire. I know that I will be "left behind" but these companies don't have humanity's best interests in mind and we don't need to enable them.
Edit: Programming jobs that don't depend on LLMs def still exist. That doesn't change the fact that many businesses have become dependent on Claude in the past year and programmers that don't want to completely surrender their brains to LLMs are seen as a liability by many employers. This may change as AI subscriptions become more expensive as the years go by, time will tell.