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The effect LLMs have on people, even or perhaps especially on the ordinary and non-technical, where they're encouraged to offload their curiosity and critical thinking into an LLM with a chat interface; the exploitation and disposession of workers in oppressed countries by imperialist states and their respective corporations; the ever increasing consumption of natural resources like water along with draining power use; the preventative measures taken against new generations of programmers, preventing many from entry into the technical workforce; the hoarding and monopolizing of computer component production; the onslaught of AI spam erecting new barriers to hosting your own publicly accessible services; the overwhelming harm this technology causes the world over.

All this and more makes me firmly against LLMs entirely. Whether or not an LLM can 'understand' or whatever technical details you could possibly prod it with, do not matter one single bit when you look at the social output. Liberalism would have you overly focused on intent, imagined or real, when reality suffers the concrete result. Some technologies shouldn't exist and this is one of them.

What technologies should exist are ones that embody the idea that it's possible to reduce the barrier between 'user' and 'programmer', 'beginner' and 'expert', 'library author' and 'implementation writer', and other unity of opposites. With Lisp, its the norm to design small languages (often with macros), in an incredibly interactive environment with a host of introspective tools at your disposal (clos and mop, conditions and restarts, the debugger, etc). The compiler is offered as an interactive process as opposed to an entirely batch-oriented process though that does exist as needed. Emacs has its self-documenting nature, along with this kind of built-up social repertoire (the style and norms of Emacs and Emacs package development) that ensure at some level its approachable or discoverable, even if massive.

Tools built with such properties, which can be found outside of just Lisp and Emacs, make it much more likely for any given 'user' to quickly become 'library author'. Meanwhile, with the proliferation of LLMs with chat interfaces, you have something whose entire shtick is to be an interface of that barrier, never reducing it. In fact, its really fucking evil because it presents the illusion of enabling someone to understand more than they actually do. It's a god damn lie to keep them hooked.

With all that said, if you ever find yourself thinking up a statement like "<words acknowledging AI is bad or some harm it causes>, but <words excusing some kind of AI usage>" I prefer to not interact with you at all. I don't want debate, I'm not an internet activist. This is simply one of my lines drawn in the sand. Do not cross.

Anyway, hey there, I'm zyd. I'm a non-professional programmer and fucking weirdo, interested in things like Emacs, Lisps, gamedev and whatever else my AuDHD ass latches onto. One day I'd like to make money by applying some of the crap I know, but I'm not there yet. I despise introductions so hopefully this rant makes my values somewhat clear.