I've thought since the beginning of all of this that the biggest mistake was calling all of these LLMs and other tools that they smashed together "AI". It's misleading and ruins the reputation of all of the tools. If someone had made a coding tool that ONLY did what "AI" does with coding, no one would give a shit. But now because an LLM spelled "Strawberry" with too many "r's" well that means it's all slop and it's all shit.

As for the people throwing shade for ethics, EVERYONE breaks their ethics for consumption and EVERYONE has their justifications. I'm not saying that environmental issues aren't important, they very much are, but giving others shit for their choices when half of your clothing and your phone partly relies on slave labor and stripping of the environment weakens your attempt. It's easy to sit on a high horse and judge others for their use of AI. It's much more difficult to understand the nuances of why they do. Just like you would want someone else to try to understand the nuances of why your shoes cost $150 and the 9 year old who made them was only paid 2 cents.

The point that I'm trying to make here, is that you can complain about AI without shitting on others.

A JIT compiler is not a usual compiler (also definitely does not apply to C or system programming).

Feel free to name whichever study you think says what y’all keep repeating, because I haven’t seen that shit.

This names a few. Also, I can speak from personal experience and from what other people using AI tell me. It does indeed negatively impact your ability do the thinking on your own. If you don't feel that impact, maybe in your case there wasn't much to lose in the first place :) If you "haven't seen this shit" then maybe you should take off the blindfold.

This is bad faith. Pivoting to unrelated criticism is pretense.

Not at all. It's just another very relevant part of the argument. The stealing machine is power and money hungry af and it's not being fed. It will die.

failing to update your beliefs.

Beliefs are unrelated. It's the reality of these companies' numbers. Show me at least ONE of them that isn't selling hw and is profitable.

Decentralized development will continue, if nowhere else, among the unceasingly horny randos doing image and video stuff.

Were is this decentralized development you speak of? Also, training an AI to create porn is pretty different than one trained to do coding, writing, research, etc.

We will in fact have to live with programs that can program, but thankfully, using one won’t give you a lobotomy.

Talking about facts as if you knew the future, lol. Is that way Coreweave is going down the drain? It won't give you a lobotomy but it will make you dumber and also use any data you provide it.

Efficiency is an important part of the ethics discussion, so anti-AI arguments look undeveloped when they ignore this point. Just because your ideology does not care for efficiency does not mean its an important part for others.

Ex. Many maintainers may be interested in ways to efficiently triage the increasing amount of bug reports without having to rely on AI systems
Ex. Many on Lemmy believe capitalism is an inefficient system and should be overhauled in order to more efficiently distribute goods and services.
Ex. insurance systems can lead to more unjust and widespread harm.

Its not an either-or scenario purposely avoiding efficiency in favor of other morals can result in serious negative moral consequences. Much like how sacrificing other ethical considerations in favor of efficiency can result in negative consequences. Fulfilling as many desirable ethical standards is the most optimal outcome to software.

For AI, this means that ignoring the impact it has had in the field to call them "slop clankers" looks ignorant and purposely misleading without proper nuance addressing the negative impacts it has on ethical concerns that are directly tangible to projecgs.

• licensing
• maintainabilty
• project longevity and community growth

Asking FOSS projects to account for the more intangible ethical concerns (ex. broad sweeping and competiting concerns about culture theft, the enviroment, and capitalism) and then enforce it on the ideological diverse set of contributors just comes down to ideological policing for intangible improvement to the project, harming the long term viability of FOSS.

Much in the same way people discuss the user base of bluesky over its actual technical merits, which makes bluesky feel more ideologically isolated compared to FOSS.

This is also in addition to the fact the device this post is being viewed on is built on top of these intangible ethical conflicts, desired for their efficieny utility in the modern world. AI also has these issues at scale but then we're introducing the problem of "a what scale is it okay to violate ethics." It doesnt make sense to shame people for using a device deeply integrated into the operation of the world, or at least readily used by a non-negligible amount of people.

Relevant article:
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2026/jun/02/ethical-use-proprietary-develop-free-software-foss

People who are concerned about the big ethical concerns of AI should really be working to make and learn about ethical ways to use and develop AI as well as holding techconglomerates and billionaires accountable (ex call your reps). Not harassing volunteer developers and disparaging their projects for consequences that have not played out (yet) in these historically well maintained projects. Saying established projects like Linux have gone 'full slop' and slandering maintainers as bootlickers just reeks of FUD, fragments the community, foster ill will in FOSS, and is unproductive to the development of FOSS when it is needed now more than ever.

Let's not perfection be the enemy or progress. See my examples. Caring about climate can be taken to arbitrary lengths as well. Are you eating red meat? No? Are you vegan? No? Are you eating sustainably grown food?

The depth to which one can argue are endless. IMO, ethical models are a great first step. They change the equation and give some agency to people. Would you rather homestead or install rooftop solar offset your state's goal heavy electricity? It's a continuum and having choices pushes the entire frontier forwards

Conveniently ignoring the rest of the text. People don't know what a c compiler will generate either, a minimal code change can trigger a different optimization, generating completely different output.

Compilers aren’t all that deterministic without effort. Example, both gc and clang if ran with parallelism can produce different results purely off file system lookup differences alone. This means intermediate archive files can be equivalent in content from the perspective of functions built but differ in order. This can easily filter up to the final binary being different. Making compilers bitwise deterministic is a lot more effort than running the same compiler on the same input. This is ignoring things like timestamps and other common sources of non determinism. But I can say the Debian reproducible build project has most of this figured out but compilers are not as deterministic as your comment implies. They can be, but you should really check that your final binary is bit for but the same. If you’ve used any parallelism it likely isn’t.

If we then bring in lto et al it gets worse.

Let’s take just gcc, are you setting -frandom-seed, SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH, -file-prefix-map, are you ensuring the input file list is deterministic? If you’ve used any can’t affirm yes to at least these 4, note these are just the things I can remember, you do not have a deterministic compile chain.

That article mentions five papers, three of which are the exact poorly-designed studies I already referenced. The last one is literally the one you just dismissed.

The math exam one pretends that yanking away a trivializing tool for the home stretch of an exam renders people "less able"... instead of just surprised and unmotivated. We'd observe the same effect if some students had a calculator yanked away, without warning, for the last three questions. This is the most blatantly confounded study, and it does not stop articles from screaming 'ten minutes with a chatbot will melt your brain!'

The cancer one says doctors had access to a tool that made them much better at detecting tumors, but then we took that away and hey look they got marginally worse at eyeballing the charts. Like that's the important part of this story. People stopped practicing an expert ability, for months, and got slightly worse at it! How unique! Naturally the article summarizes this small and temporary dip by saying doctors "lost their ability to detect cancer independently." Like the devil sucked it out their ear.

The other two are interesting but disagree with each other on the part that matters. The fake-news study says AI helps people spot bullshit (positive, surprising) without them learning that skill independently (neutral) but leaves them feeling confident they have (genuinely terrible). Except the data workers survey says users don't feel like they're thinking critically when using an LLM, and lacked confidence in the model's output. You could pick at the assumption 'the model is usually right except in my area of expertise, but... that's pretty god-damn far from the article's claim that "their critical thinking skills deteriorated." That's simply not what it fucking says.

The stealing machine

Fuck copyright.

Beliefs are unrelated.

You believe the chatbot is rotting people's brains despite the people doing the studies explicitly telling you otherwise. Pretending I was referring to these doomed companies, immediately after calling that tangent unrelated, is why the pivot is bad faith. You're suddenly talking about something else, therefore my ongoing disagreement must also be a defense of that, somehow. It's "so you hate waffles."

Your read on the whole thing is so skewed that I see no point in continuing the conversation. You want to believe that the stealing machine that is fucking up people, the world and the entire economy is good. Fine, it's stupid but you're free to be as stupid as you want. It's still economically a sinkhole and it will die. So have fun while it lasts I guess.

If this whole technology is so wonderful, why hasn't a single non-hw company been able to make a profit? And what will happen once they have to pay for all of the information they used? Food for thought, my genius friend.

Fuck me - listen to the people who wrote the studies. They say these shrill articles are wrong. What they found is not what you keep parroting. If you can't engage with that correction, except by calling anyone who disagrees with you stupid, what good are your precious cognitive abilities?

I am also saying these companies are fucked. Do you understand that? Can you not handle when someone only says you're wrong about one specific thing? Nothing I am saying is about profit. You made a claim about how tools affect people's minds, and I am trying to treat you like honestly believe it.

Just Do SoMe ReSeArCh…. Buddy you missed the whole ass point of my conversation.

How about you research “straw man argument” first before you continue to comment.

I’m not arguing on your point, I’m saying your point is utterly irrelevant and useless to this conversation.

That’s just a scape goat opinion for easy the guilt of using stolen tech. And knowing the science on human brains when using AI why fucking bother?

I'm explaining why AI (at least local AI) is indeed deterministic. Same inputs give you the same output

search for CompTIA "GreenIT" and you may find something.

As for the people throwing shade for ethics, EVERYONE breaks their ethics for consumption and EVERYONE has their justifications.

There might be some guilt feelings involved in the uproar.

But science is very clear that in order to keep a somewhat livable climate, we have to massively reduce CO2 emissions. This is a hard requirement. A planet Earth with 3 degrees warming will not be liveable for most humans.

The GenAI hype goes exactly into the wrong direction. We have to reduce, not increase. It is a civilisatory no go.

It is clear that as a society, and moreover in a plutocratic system where the richest people are deeply invested in fossil fuels, we are in deep internal conflict. But we cannot avoid this conflict. If we continue to let it happen, fossil fuels will kill us.

The CompTIA Green IT certification ensures knowledge and skills necessary to implement environmentally sound techniques within an organization's IT infrastructure. The certification enhances existing IT credentials to incorporate emerging technologies that shape the global green IT industry.

As far as I can tell, this is just a (defunct) set of standards and practices for companies to follow if they want to be environmentally friendly. It doesn't speak at all to the engineering and economic problem of how to build megawatt-scale data centers that produce more energy than they consume.

Yes, the AI is not great at the task without intense supervision and direction. Hence, it's not good at the task.

Example I'm currently working on. Unqualified junior dev yelled at AI over and over to resolve a bug without looking at the code. The AI noticed there was a discrepency between "user_name", "username" and "host_name" fields in the database. The discrepancy applied to two users, resulting from a poorly thought out decision to use "user_name" for a new version of this app. Instead of recommending correcting the two records, it created an additional backwards compatibility layer to pull the entire schema of a table, itemize every possible combination of columns, and write a generic lookup system for every possible combination of columns. This was not even a production system that needed backwards compatibility, it was still in development (6 months of development by this guy, I'm his replacement and finished it in about 6 weeks). And it was not a generic system to deal with that table in general, this was only inside the context of a single auth API method. Without basic intuition, it completely failed to diagnose the problems of its own creation, and just kept endlessly expanding the system to account for its own mistakes that it forgot hours later. The codebase that resulted from this process is absolutely disgusting.

There's a reason for this. It's not designed to do symbolic reasoning. It's designed to passively infer symbolic reasoning from linguistic analysis. It doesn't know what the hell it's doing.

A heavily documented simple algorithm. Not an original, complex, reasoned out system.

"the kind of expectations i have is that people do their best and i expect people to understand what they are doing."

my immediate response to some idiot thinking i accuse him of cheating because i voiced concerns over his methodologies: "look, if you want to drink mercury while writing code and dont see any problems with that, fine. go ahead. waste away your health. but at least have the decency of sitting under the venting hood and stop making it everyone elses problem."

That isn't what I remotely said. I was making the point that if you want to make a credible argument against AI on an ethical basis you command more authority by accommodating a charitable account of it's function e.g. not say it's useless.

I really appreciated your explanation; it was clear and I think you're correct. It's disappointing that Linus is either unaware of it or doesn't care about deterministic results.

yes. but even that is being ignored for cheap, fast construction of these monstrous-scale things.

Living in biking distance of what you need is the dream. I do and I'm so happy about it. Yet I don't hate friends that live in the countryside and have 2 cars. I'm trying to convince them to switch to an EV but I understand their lives are different.

Unfortunately regular Internet search has gotten terrible and most " search engines" are showing AI results so it's basically impossible to avoid. And I am missing nuance in conversations about AI contributions to software that consider "did you use Fable or an open weights model running on your hardware".

No...what's a chromebook? Did you not read my response? (hint: 2nd comment)

It's that "greater precision" part that is hard to ensure.

If someone is checking their work with AI or thoroughly checking the work after, great.

But it's a hard difference to teach

I agree. The main issue with AI in that respect is that there's no easy way to know how much it actually did vs how much value the user added while using it.

Things made mostly with AI are terrible in the long (or even short) run, but if important phases like analysis or design are mostly done without AI, the results are great, since it saves a lot of time for specific tasks.

I feel like this is the same as any tool, with the difference being that someone can fully hide that they used AI without it being initially evident, or lazy people use it as a shortcut to avoid learning. As long as you got all the base knowledge right and guide the AI yourself instead of letting it control you, it has potential.

Also, AI slop is so common nowadays that there's a bias towards them and all projects that use AI get labeled as bad by default, which doesn't help either.

You're wrong: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/6706

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/6706

Oh, thanks, duly noted.