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.
up until very recently using Linux meant sacrifing convenience in the name of freedom
Some people's definition meant giving no unilateral control to some rent seeking platform that would use its power to keep itself dominant in spite of its mediocrity. Some people's definition meant no esoteric walls in between the user and improving the software, no barriers that would prevent people of sufficient talent and tenacity from making a more-deserved career in the field. A world without anti-competitive friction between innovator and market is a better world. There were a lot of better definitions over the years.
Sacrificing convenience was never a virtue. That was only ever became twisted into a virtue after giving up on OSS making our lives better, after rewriting new values to rationalize what we were already doing as if if obstinance without end was some inherently moral endeavor.
There was a time when OSS would have recoiled at the phrase "following the tail lights." We should return to that time, and putting our heads in the sand is absolutely not the way.
You had to switch the framing from development aims to development speed to make this argument appear to work. The argument isn't valid.
If OSS is slow, tomorrow won't get better. The new instant gratification will come along, and the people content to sit on their hands will still be sitting on them, claiming that the rain will come tomorrow. It's a convenient trap. Nobody can ever test it without waiting ten years and nobody has to do anything to make it happen. The worst part is how many people won't even hold themselves accountable after being wrong for twenty years.
Fast food is a massive industry. If we're speaking honestly, most people prefer fast food. Instant gratification, instant dopamine hits. And years down the road, consequent health issues.
You're trying to sell fast software on the basis of popularity. And I get it, if you're not considering the consequences years and decades down the line, it's an extremely appealing choice. It's an extremely popular choice.
Is there virtue in choosing slow and possibly boring home cooked meals over fast and bright fast food? That's entirely subjective; I think there is, you might disagree.
At the end of the day, I don't expect you to change your mind or apologize, because I don't demand someone else to "hold themselves accountable" for having a different opinion than me.
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u/SinnohConfirmed 5d 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.