Is atheism a philosophy? Sure, technically, though how intentional it is will vary from person to person. Is it a religion? No, and that’s a patently absurd thing to say. Atheism is, in effect, a lack of religious beliefs. You’re saying that a lack of religious beliefs is in itself a religious belief. The furthest you could really go is to say it’s a perspective on religion, but a religion itself it is not.

I generally try to avoid using AI for my hobby projects, but I think there is still a niche for it in working out issues that take a disproportionate amount of time to track down manually relative to the scale of the fix. Things like a subtle typo somewhere or missing some hyperspecific nuance of whatever stack I’m working with. In those particular cases I would say it actually enhances my own creative ability insofar as I don’t need to spend hours of effort banging my head against a wall until I eventually figure out what went wrong, and I can put that time and mental energy into the stuff that’s actually interesting to me.

But yes, in general I do agree it’s kind of useless otherwise for creative endeavors or passion projects. It’s great for helping with code being written solely for a paycheck, but for personal projects it largely defeats the purpose of working on them in the first place. I think the trouble is that in general AI does make a lot of things easier and I have a lot of anxiety about getting into the habit of overusing it in that way, so I try to keep it as a sort of last resort.

This is so divorced from reality that it’s frankly insulting. I “believe” in it because I’ve gotten good empirical results, not because I put blind faith into it. On the contrary, I’m extremely skeptical of anything it produces. And yes, I can vet every line of code. I’m skilled at what I do. I know how to do code review, whether it’s written by a human or a machine. I can judge code and architectural quality or whether the root cause it landed on is accurate.

More often than not, the work done by the LLM is effectively the same as what I would have ended up with anyway, except instead of taking an hour or two to step through all the layers of the application to find the root cause I get an answer in about 5 or 10 minutes. How do I know it’s not slop? Because I can read the code it references, understand the exact reason that the bug occurs, and fix it myself and watch the bug disappear.

I’ve been on the internet long enough that not a whole lot tends to get under my skin, but you asserting that I lack the ability for critical thought and just blindly trust the LLM output because I’m incompetent and don’t know what I’m doing is beyond insulting. The irony is that you’re the one applying your preconception to apparently anyone who disagrees with your dogmatic view. It’s called post hoc rationalization: AI is obviously useless; therefore anyone claiming it has utility is doing so on blind faith and isn’t applying critical thought because otherwise they couldn’t possibly have come to that conclusion. I would suggest you reflect on the way that you’ve approached this dialogue, but the level of arrogance on display here tells me that you almost certainly won’t.

Also, because I expect you to point and say that this is evidence that I’m some rabid AI zealot frothing at the mouth to defend the tech: I have no absolutely love for AI companies and I don’t have a serious stake in the actual tech beyond it being a part of my workflow (societal/economic/environmental concerns notwithstanding). I don’t care about it any more than I do the literal physical hammer in my toolbox. I just think you’re a condescending asshole for telling me that actually, I only think it’s hammering the nails in because I’ve put my faith in the hammer and I’m too oblivious to tell otherwise.

This is just… objectively false. LLMs aren’t miracle machines, but they’re capable of performing certain tasks well and can be very useful in the right context.

I’m sure that you’ll paint me as an AI shill incapable of independent thought for admitting this, but since starting a new job this year I’ve used LLMs most every day for software development tasks. It’s excellent at catching mistakes and tracking down root causes that it would take me sometimes several times longer to find manually. The latter literally saves me days to weeks in the context of broad refactors, where there are hundreds or thousands of opportunities for me to make a typo or miss a case.

And no, I’m not blindly pushing “slop” into the product. I consider myself good at what I do and I’m capable of vetting every line of work that it does and recognizing when it’s low-quality or misses the mark in some way.

Again, I’m not claiming they’re miracle machines. They’re subject to their own limitations and certainly aren’t suited to every task. But to claim they can’t be used for “anything useful” is completely disconnected from reality and, at its core, simply dogmatic.

In what universe does “LLMs are good at some programming tasks now” make someone part of a pro-AI cult? This is the exact kind of black-and-white dogma you seem to be upset about.

Good point, I guess I rescind my argument.

As much as I can’t stand AI fanatics, I think some of the anti-AI rhetoric (especially on Lemmy) can be just as dogmatic. OP didn’t make any “extraordinary” claims. LLM agents have actually gotten remarkably good at many programming tasks, in particular tracking down bugs, and some of the things they’re able to work out are genuinely impressive. At the end of the day it’s another tool, but it can be a powerful one in the right context.

That’s not to say anything about the environmental, social, and economic issues surrounding the tech and the industry. Obviously large companies are acting completely recklessly in all of those domains and I don’t intend to justify that aspect. That said, I think it’s disingenuous to frame OPs post as “making extraordinary claims” and it detracts from legitimate (and IMO mostly unimpeachable) arguments against AI.

I do kind of take issue with the presentation here. Pointing to the number of countries without access is rather misleading because it gives a country as large as Pakistan the exact same weight as somewhere like Tuvalu. In terms of population, the list of blocked countries is I believe around 30% of the world population. That’s definitely still significant and IMO worthy of a headline on its own, but the way this article focuses only on the raw number of countries feels disingenuous for the sake of being able to showcase a big attention-grabbing number.

Better security, better fractional scaling, and proper support for mixed refresh rates and VRR, to name some of the bigger reasons.

That was obviously a joke though, and it wasn’t even OP.

That KDE Plasma 5 is finally usable and stable, after having decided to stop pushing the ridiculous plasmoids on the user […] is like having an old whore finally becoming a respectable woman.

Yeah, I stopped reading here.