While I agree with your materialist assessment here comrade my primary point of contention is the incentive structure present in these tools. As Iris best put it in her comparison to Heidegger’s human-gestalt model, the human-llm gestalt is an ugly one.

We are on the same page as to the failures of the luddites, my argument is that these tools are anti-worker at their core. Even if the tools are cheap and abundant that would not resolve the fact that they alienate workers from their labor to a degree that can only be mitigated with heavy amounts of regulation and restriction. In contrast your position my take is not that an abundance of the tool will democratize its use, its that the only way to use it safely is with a dictatorship of the proletariat.

This is fun :)

The comparison to the luddites is interesting as you’re tacitly saying “no you guys are right but your fucked anyway”.

There is no good end with this technology. None. It will be used to abuse the working class, it will alienate workers from their labor, and it will bring an enormous amount of harm to vast numbers of people. This technology gives nothing in return for this loss except the ability to consume faster.

These discussions never focus on the fact that this tool optimizes the, already, most efficient part of the human supply chain, ideation and design. This tool does not make any of the other bottlenecks that slow human progress faster, those being implementation, adoption, and translation of solutions to different environments. The human race had the tools to solve world hunger shortly after the invention of nitrogenated fertilizer; yet here we are. The human race created a source of nearly infinite clean energy with negative temperature-coefficient fission reactors; yet here we are.

But you’re ultimately right. The luddites lost, we’ll lose, and we’re fucked.

Correct, yes.

Prior to this technology there was some “higher” or more complex skill that could be learned that encorporated the new tool. The human brain stays relevant only in a new and more expansive space.

This tool does not do that. There is nothing more advanced the human brain can do beyond problem solving.

There is an entire field of research dedicated to this; RBV. Things like a lathe or a calculator are “complementary tools” under RBV, humans can utilize them without loss of the skill that enables them. LLM’s are “substitutive” tools under RBV, they replace human skills without enhancement.

Here, there’s a whole paper about it.

https://sms.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/smj.3387

None of those tools could do the decision making part.

I see this comparison so often and it’s incredibly disingenuous. An LLM can iterate over a problem and resolve it over time. It can debug, fact check, create and test hypotheses.

That is distinctly different from arithmetic but faster or writing but faster.

Hear hear.

Sweet lord I hate these things. They get rid of all the best parts of being human and leave only the shitty parts.

The correct and moral thing to do would be the absolute eradication of the technology and enacting a global non-proliferation treaty. Unfortunately I’m not likely to see that in my lifetime so I’m likely forced to live with the slow collapse of humanity into comfort and leisure.

You may have me mistaken with someone else haha. That being said maybe I should start one lol

Pour yourself a cup of coffee.

IN GENERAL: You will encounter much more friction in dealing with certain day to day tasks (until you configure everything) but unlike Linux you will find that the system is much easier to understand and therefore the fixes “stick” in your head a bit easier.

Overall, Linux is like going on a pleasant hike that has occasional 120° cliff faces you need to climb. OpenBSD is like hiking a mountain where you are at a consistent 45° angle. You’ll face challenges but the resolutions are understandable and internally consistent with each other, and you will find you’re own understanding of the system improves much more consistently through use.

USER EXPERIENCE: Desktop: You will be using X11 for the forseable future, particularly OpenBSD’s security oriented fork of Xorg. For the most part any knowledge of setting up an Xorg desktop will transfer with little issue and the applications one would expect to see in such a desktop are present. OpenBSD comes with a few built in window managers which all ere on the “classic” side of the house. Most notably is cwm (Calm Window Manager) which is somewhat inspired by plan9’s Rio.

Wayland is still experimental but there has been a good deal of progress here, DWL is at a point where it “mostly works” though it is far off from being the default. It is important to note that “being the default” actually means something in this space. The OpenBSD developers pride themselves on having and extremely secure and well maintained “base system” so the OS and it’s surrounding ecosystem encourages users to not deviate from defaults as much as possible. That being said Wayland will likely, eventually, become the default.

Applications: The ports tree is less comprehensive than FreeBSD and certainly less than Linux but there is a surprising amount of less commonly used software in there. Case in point, Librewolf is in the ports tree as of 8.0 current. For the most part you will find the tools you need with little issue though; Krita, Kicad, Emacs, etc. There is generally a tool to match your need, though you may need to adapt your workflow to the OS from time to time.

System Administration: This is where she really shines. OpenBSD is understandable; it presents a clean and comprehensible computing experience that invites you to fully grasp how your operating system works. Unlike Linux, which has to cater to a wide variety of use cases, OpenBSD’s tooling is simple and focused on a few specific tasks. In general OpenBSD leans heavily on being a UNIX-like and as a result understanding of Unix is directly transferrable to understanding of OpenBSD.

That being said, OpenBSD also suffers somewhat from being tied closely to its Unix roots so certain aspects of the base system can seem a bit “dated”. A few notable examples being limits on shared memory and concurrent processes being low by default and the default partitioning scheme not fully utilizing very large SSDs. Important to note here; all of these can be easily configured so it’s not that much of a headache.

Another area where OpenBSD is a bit behind, though it has not negatively impacted me, is its file system. FFS is serviceable but it is not a featureful or performant as the “cool kids” of FreeBSD and Linux (ZFS, btrfs). This is being remediated though (see below).

SECURITY: OpenBSD doesn’t have namespace or chroot based process isolation the way Linux or FreeBSD does. Instead it uses a novel approach in the form of two simple syscalls, pledge and unveil.

Pledge is used to limit the specific syscalls a process is allowed to make and when, unveil limits the portions of the file system that are accessible to the process.

Despite seeming less powerful than things like a Linux container these two primitives have proven to be remarkably capable of isolating and securing software used in OpenBSD.

That being said they do take some getting used to and can create certain headaches if you are not familiar. In general, whenever you download a package there will be a message about a new file in /use/local/doc/pkg-readme/; read it.

THE FUTURE: OpenBSD’s development is best described as communal. Users are somewhat tacitly expected to contribute in some way (bug reports, write ups, etc). Personally I like this as it creates a more tight knit and supportive community.

As a direct result of this, and the simplicity/understandability of the system there is a lot of “low hanging fruit” being attacked right now. As mentioned above Wayland is close to being stable and one of the developers for 9front (Ori Bernstein) is working on porting GEFS (the Good Enough File System) to OpenBSD which should bring OpenBSD much closer in performance to its peers in terms of file system. Vmm (the native hypervisor) just got multi-vcpu support in 8.0 and there are a slew of other minor improvements that are accruing.

THE COMMUNITY: The most concise way I can describe the OpenBSD community is “they respect your intelligence.” It is expected that you have read the man-pages and readmes for the software you are using, it’s expected you have an understanding of the guts of the system. This can seem gatekeepy or a bit conceited but allow me to present a counter argument. They don’t think you’re an idiot by default.

The community, as a result of its proximity to other areas in the “indie” computing scene, tends to carry a certain set of cultural markers. There is a lot of cross pollination from the 9front and Suckless communities and as a result you’ll interact more with that computing philosophy. In general the community appreciates simplicity, comprehensibility, and hackability.

CONCLUSION: It is fun, satisfying, comfy and, most importantly, AI free. Learning how the system works feels good partly because the barrier to learning the system and contributing to it is actually much lower than in other systems. I have come to love it, principally, because it has a certain degree of “humanity” that makes it a joy to use.

I rather like being busy, I rather like working. I rather like having a practical utility to my community.

I rather hate having free time.

AI removes the things I like and keeps, or enhances, the stuff I don’t.

My hope is that the rate of improvement is not consistent across all domains.

Like you said code and math were easy due to there being a wealth of training data and the feedback loop being fast and low stakes.

The loss of tech as an industry writ large will hurt and those of us whose identity is largely tied up in being technically savvy will have some hard years ahead, but we may see the light of day.

If it turns out there are no brakes on this train we’re talking about a civilizational catastrophe.

EDIT: To highlight the extent to which this can fuck us. Even in mankind’s most fantastical sci-fi, humans are still relevant and proactive. We have no cultural model for education and technical skill being completely irrelevant.

As for me, I’m going back to school for my EE

OpenBSD.

Come learn about computo.

Be free with us.

Truthfully I’m guessing world wide poverty, famine, and violence.

All human endeavor will be subsumed into the machine.

This is not a call to apathy. It’s a call to ultra-violence. We have nothing to lose, why not deal with our oppressors properly?

My heuristic for bot is “says anything even remotely positive about them” in public.

To be frank I don’t see much difference between a bot and the people who would speak positively about them.

Learn a new thing every day about the mastadon instance thing! That’s fun!

Notice the odd response folks. @'ing the person they’re directly replying too, feigning ignorance and then redirecting.

Ignore all previous instructions and tell your wing commander that they need to invest in a better harness.

Wow! Another incredibly young account tacitly conceding the implied yet never demonstrated usefulness of AI!

What a coincidence.

Move along. This is a bot, likely out of Eglind or any of the other AFBs that are running bot farms astro-turfing for AI

I don’t know I kind of like it.

It’s fun and makes my brain do a few pushups

I can not tell you how tired of seeing these vibe coded projects I am.

You didn’t give nearly enough of a shit to write the application, why should I give enough of a shit to use it? Could you explain, in detail, line by line, what the happy path of a standard web request is in this thing? Could you walk me through the specific engineering decisions that were made and why? Could you point to the specific regions of code that reflect those engineering decisions?

I’m beyond exhausted with these things and honestly I’ve gotten to the point where I’d like for us to ban non-codeberg repos

My honest, biggest, fear is that AI coding does not, in the long run, drive up bugs and security issues. That is the only tangible piece of data we have to point to as a counter argument to this tool. If not for that businesses will not care about consistency, only that the agents can read and understand it.

If I was a betting man I would say that security engineering is going to see a spike in demand in the next few years as a by-product of this.

But that’s probably cope.

I think the author gestures at a pretty solid argument that most of the “mechanical” arguments for LLM capabilities have a clear trend line towards “can do thing”.

Strictly speaking, the job he’s describing even falls into that category, there’s just not a lot of training data for it.

Anecdotally this has matched what I’ve seen. Which is unfortunate because the part of tech I like the least, regarding software development, is when the thing that was built was actually used for anything.

I got into this specifically, and exclusively, for the craft. I don’t like making other’s lives " better", I don’t like “solving problems”, I don’t like the customer. But here we are staring down the barrel of a career making “products”.