I’m mostly just displeased about honest discussion being stifled.

Also, it probably feels bad (yes, it’s not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but if I can avoid making people feel bad I think it’s worth it) to type a constructive comment only to receive downvotes because your opinion isn’t popular. Maybe not for you, but for others. I don’t want people to be discouraged from expressing opinions that aren’t immediately harmful. I imagine once upon a time abolition (obvious good) was unpopular too.

I also think we need an honest discussion on AI. From my own hater position, I’m skeptical of proponents because the well has been poisoned: are you a normal person, or are you an unironic “get on board or get left behind! And if you get left behind, your Luddism means you deserved to get left behind. Can’t wait till these people are suffering for not getting on board” type? But you seem actually genuine and not that type, so I’m happy to have the conversation with you.

I know it becoming widely adopted is against the interest of me and people I know. It devalues my skills (whether in reality it can replace me or if it can’t but out-of-touch CEOs buy the hype it can and act as if it can, the end result of how my skills are valued is the same), and as a person with a job I don’t want to have to reskill on my precious free time, or become an AI’s babysitter because it can hypothetically what I do 10x faster with 5x the mistakes instead of just letting me do the job I enjoy. (I do not know if it could actually do my job faster than me or what the mistake ratio would be.) “Get on board or get left behind” feels really callous and unwilling to address peoples’ complaints that aren’t just about self-interest but also about the tech’s reliability, environmental concerns (saw some debunks, never actually investigated myself if those “actually it is not the environmental disaster you think it is” things were true so I do not know what to think here); the ways it can be used and is probably being used right now to astroturf, push narratives, surveil people; “move fast and break things” with no regard for the consequences and treating people who want to be careful as obstacles to be broken so they can move fast to higher profits.

Right now I mostly see people using it for bad things so I end up perceiving it wholly as a bad thing. I might have felt differently if most people approached it cautiously, as a thing capable of hallucinations that has to be double-checked in LLM form. If we were genuinely moving towards a world where you do not have to work to survive instead of “you have to work to survive, but also we want to take you out of a job and will give you no help in transitioning to a new one, just a callous ‘get on board or get left behind’.” If we knew there was an environmentally-responsible approach around it. If there were laws or some societal development helping us out against the deception and astroturfing it can be used for, if deepfakes stayed in the realm of funny things like “US presidents rank Zelda characters on a tier list” instead of “Here’s a picture of you naked so I can paint you as promiscuous in a hiring/social environment that looks down on it. Here’s a realistic video of you throwing a bomb so I can get you arrested. Here’s a politician who didn’t actually throw a bomb throwing a bomb so I can present ‘proof’ they did and influence public sentiment to believe something untrue.” I appreciate the cancer detection though.

It is a tool, but mostly being used for bad as far as I know and I’m very very scared of that, and feel the people praising it and wanting it are overlooking those things. Of course, it’s possible they are aware of and against the bad things, and just don’t want to preface every statement on AI with “yeah I know about the bad stuff” because that can get pretty tiring! But every pro-AI statement just makes me fear further societal adoption and approval of a technology that I do not trust them to use wisely and constructively without hurting many others around them, and that in my country will not be regulated for safety anytime soon. I feel like it’s like giving children a car in a world where driving lessons are very optional and driver’s licenses are unnecessary. In that world I’d probably hate cars. Then again, I guess you could say the same of the internet, and I have no issue with the internet because I grew up on it and am better able to decouple all the bad actors on it from the internet itself.

I do understand the benefit of moving people to more productive ways of doing things and incentivizing that while deincentivizing less efficient ways of doing things, especially since people are resistant to change. In general, we want better things for cheaper. We want doctors using the vaccines that are 95% effective, not 50% just because the 50% vaccine is the one they know better and they do not like change. The promises of capitalism. I too would like my 4-hour-a-day work week, robots doing my domestic chores, and a cure for arthritis. So yes, I understand the whole “we think AI makes people more effective, and will financially incentivize using it while deincentivizing those who do not,” I just also don’t think it does make people more effective or that the cost in the current climate is worth it. Or that anyone who is not a multimillionaire will end up seeing any of the fruits of those productivity gains—they’ll just be made to work the same hours, having to outsource all the parts of their work they find fun or relaxing to an LLM because it’s more efficient to have it do it so all they get is the sucky part where they play prompt engineer/nanny, for the same wage. Also don’t think we’re set up in an economy that can handle the massive displacement of workers it is promising. I daresay that if I had to put one doctor/biomedical scientist out of a job with AI knowing that would unlock the arthritis cure I’d take that deal while also feeling bad. But if I decrease all white-collar fields by like 50%… I want that arthritis cure but there’d better be some safety net to help that mass suffering (and drastically reduced consumer spending, bad for the economy and the wellbeing of those in that economy). If I had to suck all the joy out of my job and become a glorified prompt engineer to provide an actual benefit to lots of people I might take that deal. Doing it to provide the boss 3% more profit by cutting the cost of employees, no thanks.

Also just not comfortable with trusting the outputs of inherently nondeterministic technology. Way less testable, especially with LLMs as opposed to something that we expect to just spit out a probability or classify.

Headline makes it seem like this is another complaint article. They actually propose a solution, though I do not know how workable it is, so it’s worth a read.

As a person who vehemently doesn’t like use of AI in coding projects, you didn’t really do anything worthy of a downvote. Wish people could stop using it as a “disagree” button and would only use it to downvote

• fuck you you stupid idiot can’t you see ai sucks, you personally are everything that is making the world worse and i hope you die, subhuman scum (incivility and personal attacks, this includes if they are being uncivil to someone you disagree with)
• sign up for my new site at http://scamsite.com/!
• did you know that birds fly? here’s a picture of a bird (in the open source community, on a topic that has nothing to do with birds)
• bleep bloop, i’m definitely not a robot pretending to be human, definitely no astroturfing here

Melody Made of Code

Scales

I was expecting more CDEs and do re mis than I got. Thanks for letting me know this exists though!

Never have I been happier to be proven wrong

My first instinct was to say “cursed,” my second is to think “huh… kind of cute actually”

Hey, thank you so much for helping me! Now I have a better idea of my options and what wants are viable and which are not.

• https://gardinerbryant.com/the-omarchy-framework-thing/
• https://crimier.github.io/posts/Framework-Omarchy/
• https://community.frame.work/t/framework-supporting-far-right-racists/75986/2

TL;DR: Framework is sponsoring Omarchy and Hyprland. Omarchy, at least, is really linked to far-righter DHH; cannot find nearly as much about Hyprland on a quick search besides “toxic”.

Going to be an interesting thread to follow as someone who wants a Framework for the repairability. And friends recommending it; and honestly in a world where social media is probably flooded with astroturfed comments instead of real experience, and review sites are ones I highly doubt actually touched or bothered with the products, I am gonna trust word of mouth. But I can be convinced into reconsidering (price, performance I can get out of a laptop, and the Hyperland/Omarchy thing).

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“For all my projects, the motivation is the same,” Champion told The Register. “We tend to look past the technology that surrounds us and shapes our lives. My work is about forcing us to look at it, and seeing the beauty in engineering.”

Really like this!

Hey, thanks for clarifying, I appreciate it!

Picture for people who do not want to click the link.

Am I just colorblind? I see 0%, 42%, 12%, and 1% in red. I see 13%, 12%, and 8% in green. You would have to remove “no change” in 42% for your assertion about green square percentages summing to more than red square percentages; though it does keep your point about drawback vs. benefit percentage true since “no change” is neither good nor bad.

Huh, I read the article and I don’t see anything about more companies experiencing gains than losses. Are you talking about a different article than https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/20/pwc_ai_ceo_survey/?

Only 12 percent reported both lower costs and higher revenue, while 56 percent saw neither benefit. Twenty-six percent saw reduced costs, but nearly as many experienced cost increases.

This is the closest thing I saw.

I think that is one of my problems with AI. People who were once creators, and who were the only means to produce it (either you became a creator by learning the skills or hired a creator to do it) did things. Now that a machine can do it they babysit it at best. If they enjoyed the process of creation, something was lost. I would hate washing clothes by hand and am glad I have a washing machine to do it for me. But if I enjoyed it I am sure I’d have to use the washing machine at a laundromat job because it is more efficient, while lamenting the lost enjoyment from handwashing myself and instead becoming a glorified babysitter. And in my personal life I might not even have the time to wash clothes by hand if I liked it and would keep washing with the machine. Much easier to make time for something if that is the only way it can get done; much easier to have time to handwash clothes when that is the only way you can have clean clothes without buying new.

I admit I now work a non-tech career. And my motivation to do my own hobby projects went way down because “well if AI can do it since it’s greenfield,” but I also do not want to use AI, so nothing gets done. Small hobby project so I could learn would be still building something new only I could do (or that I’d have to hire out). Now if something else can do it I feel like I am handicapping myself so I can learn (even though I have never even used AI to code), which feels very different. Like having to learn math without calculators while knowing they are a possibility, vs. learning math without when calculators are not invented yet so you cannot have that complaint. Yes, I know, abacuses, but I hope you get my point. Going from the project being something only I or someone else with the skills could have done, so it makes sense for me to do it, it was efficient, to “well I have to to learn the skills but it would have been faster to just get AI to do it.” (If that is even true! Maybe I am getting overly influenced by bots pushing AI and it would be faster for ME to do it.) That makes it feel way less motivating to try myself.

And that does not even get into whether AI can even do it. So many comments (that may or may not be bots, not sure) nowadays in dev communities seeming to change their tune from “AI slows me down. It’s faster to do it yourself correctly, making mistakes that are easier to catch, than to use the hallucinator that makes mistakes that look correct so it’s harder to find those mistakes in the first place” to “actually you have to use it, it’s just a tool, and it is getting better every day, get on board or get left behind, maybe it sucks at brownfield projects in industry but it can whip up your hobby project or quick web UI much faster than you can.” Not sure if this is actual people changing opinions as they have more time with the tech and it improves (and is it? Because there are both reports of it getting better, and reports of new models being worse).

“Go try the tools to assess them and form your own opinion then!” I’m fresh out of a CS degree and don’t feel knowledgeable enough in coding to be able to assess if it would be flawed or not. I trust expert opinions (or at least more experienced opinions, which I assume to be most users of programming.dev) over my own, which usually helps but is awful when the experts conflict. As for just learning to code well so I become qualified to judge for myself, I’m still hearing conflicting things! “It’ll speed up your learning x5, it helped me with this thing that otherwise would have taken hours of forumscrolling and trial and error” vs. “it makes so many mistakes, especially when you are learning and do not yet know how to catch the AI mistakes, you shouldn’t use it.” I personally do not feel great about trusting something that (as far as I know) is not actually citing its sources, that does not know and is not speaking from experience. I hate the idea of trusting a black box where I cannot look at the insides and see how it came to that output or ask an expert who knows more than me about what the insides are doing (because yeah, I admit cars are black boxes to me because I do not understand their working, but I know someone does!). I hate the idea of trusting something made to be nondeterministic by design to be correct all the time, or having to be its babysitter-corrected-reviewer instead of just making it myself. But maybe it advanced further than I thought?

End result: too many conflicting ideas, paralysis, do nothing. (And even if AI does actually make you faster, doing it without AI is still infinitely faster than doing nothing.) God I hope typing that conclusion helps motivate me to get back on those projects, building my skills I have not been using at work back up.

I don’t know what to think anymore. Do not want to fight a losing battle and be a stupid Luddite, also recognizing Luddites were not exactly “all tech bad” but “who is the tech doing things for and who is it doing it to,” wanting to get ahead and not have things done to me without also promoting use of a tool that does things to others. Not wanting to get automated out of a job, “you’re so smart andioop, you are sure to get a good job!” only to see knowledge workers threatened while being autistic so the social skills are not so hot (I can work on improving! But I feel I’ll probably never approach the level of a non-autistic person applying the same effort, nor will I ever get some nonverbal cues) and not liking the idea of manual labor… also recognizing that people who can change things do not care about the people getting automated out of a job so I have to figure out how to reskill while having a full-time job, into something that will not just be automated away too (but everything I am good at is stuff people claim AI can do). Thinking about how disruptors, even of men-in-the-middle, not only can take out fat cats but also little guys like me who learned how to do that kind of job, so maybe being forced to do something else for society is good, but also that families and lives depend on a job and the unregulated surveillance capitalism society I live in does not always have us doing meaningful work that contributes to something useful for society so maybe the disruption does not actually force us to pick something more useful to society now.

Still don’t like AI, but also scared of being wrong and getting eaten because of my own bias and not being willing to move on and change with the times at the old age of my 20s. Also not even sure how to change with the times.

checked community, this specific instance of the post is Opensource and not Europe or Denmark so I think it’s okay for me to open my American mouth and say: I hope they manage to resist. If Denmark can put up a successful fight, there is hope for the rest of us, including the Americans being crushed under Big Tech.

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Thrilled. I recently started trying LibreOffice thanks to a friend of mine and I admit that as someone used to Microsoft Office or Google Workspace, I feel like a total idiot always searching up “how to [do something] libreoffice” for things I know how to do already in Office/Workspace (or am confident I could figure out by fooling around in them for a few minutes).

Hey, I missed that caveat, thank you for pointing it out!

Oh yeah, you are absolutely right, that is another thing that bothers me. (Obviously I still believe listening to minority voices is important.) Me bringing that up is specifically directed at the type of person who might dismiss opinions from people because they are white males, especially if the opinion is about not liking the way majority demographics sometimes get spoken about. It is me saying to that type of person that they cannot dismiss my position of disliking punching up at demographics by going “of course you’d say that, you are the demographic being punched up at!” I am from the non-male, non-white demographics that they are trying to empower with this “lol white man bad” stuff.

And yes, fully aware speaking ≠ the many harms that went way past speaking done to minorities in the past. But also this kind of stuff is what I think contributes to some more people being funneled towards alt right perspectives. “Yes, white men bad is a hypocritical stance” video -> more “silly stupid liberals” videos (whether they do actually point out legit problems with social justice or not) down into “The world is actually completely stacked against white men, who are just better than the other demographics which is why women are only good for breeding and men of color are too stupid for anything besides manual labor. Structural/systemic oppression, biases, and other genders don’t exist, that’s woke DEI nonsense. Also, the stupid liberals telling you otherwise are also telling you lies that vaccines work and climate change is happening.”

I’d rather focus more on the people pushing AI or consuming it uncritically (which does include Baby Boomers, yes, but also people all over the age spectrum), and less on age groups we are unable to get out of.