I've never understood the water argument... yes, it takes a lot of water in the initial setup to fill the water cooling loops, but isn't not constantly burning water, right? it gets cooled off again and goes around the loop

I'm not saying this situation is different from all of the other technological paradigm shifts in history.

But what concerns me is that authors of articles such as this feel no need to differentiate themselves from other anti-technology arguments in history.

Emotional rejection of AI will lead to the same outcome of emotional rejection of cars, the printing press and computers.

Additionally, when it comes to the software field, it will be sure way of selecting yourself out of the work pool.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--bH6O2_Vvk

"After trying Kagi/Duck Duck Go, I have gone back to Google for search and I freely grant that I find the “AI Overview” to be useful."

I feel compelled to point out that Kagi does offer AI-backed answers if you want it to. Just pose your query with a question mark to trigger the AI response in addition to the usual search results. It is not ever the default or only answer, and I pray Kagi keeps it that way!

I use the AI option more often than I thought I would, usually for things that I don't consider controversial or complicated.

I see a lot of people throw their hands up in the air and say "I have no control over this, might as well go all in on AI".

But we as individual consumers have more power than we think. We don't need to use these AI features and products. We've survived perfectly fine without AI. Made plenty of scientific discoveries and lead enriched lives without it.

The biggest "fuck you" to the pricks who pushed this on us would be if we collectively went "meh".

The important question is: Will my work competitor also resist AI? We have no way to organize this, and hence, as they say, "resistance is futile".

Why? AI is enriching my life and letting me focus on solving hard problems. I don't believe in the sentience crap and am just using it at face value for what it is, a useful productivity tool. Every software developer's main purpose is to automate and reduce the amount of boring manual labour required. By this logic, should people in the past have "resisted the software development department"?

Why are we glossing over the fact that it's all trained on stolen code, stolen art, stolen books? It's unethical to use it, it's unethical to take money for it. It should be either free or killed. I really don't understand why we just collectively accepted that.

I guess i'll give a super-unpopular take.

Listening to developers complain about AI doing things to their life and the world at large when they have spent the past 30 years automating just about everyone else they could out of a job (Since this has been one of the primary uses of software) is ... something else. It sounds like a a a mix of hubris, arrogance, cognitive dissonance, ignorance, etc.

Only when it started to affect their world did any developers start to care, and even then nobody seems to ever stop and say "hey what were we doing the past 30 years, maybe we should think about this", it's instead "hey look at what these other people are doing with AI, someone should think about this".

I admittedly flip-flop on this quite a bit. I use LLMs in my work and for a bunch of pet projects I don’t really care much about.

For the pet projects, it’s not really a big deal. I’m the only user, and I as the user don’t care how it works under the hood.

Work is a different story. I have never felt more disconnected from my work than in the last 6-8 months. It takes a huge mental toll to read into our code and figure stuff out, almost like I just got hired and I’m working on new code for the first time. I’m asked to read “specs” written by LLMs that are unintelligible and I find my brain disconnecting immediately. Tickets, also written by LLMs pose the same problem.

I’m asking teammates questions because I want their answer and I’m told to just ask Claude.

None of this feels good, it may be where the industry is heading but as a professional it feels wrong.

I see good ethical reasons to be against AI, but I see no reasons why “resisting” would lead to anything but irrelevance. So I think this is terrible advice