As I count my blessings

In this essay, I will argue that, your favourite “tells” that a document was produced by AI, at best, is wrong, and depending on your position, in life, at worst, is dangerous and harmful.[...]
So who trained [AI]? A lot of the early training, data annotations and other manual processes, happened with cheap labour in African countries. There are multiple sources that have revealed the hidden economy of workers that big-tech outsources these kinds of tasks to African countries with unstable political situations, weaker workers rights, and cheap labour.

I appreciate a lot of work Cory Doctorow has done in the last decades. But the arguments he presents here to defend his usage of LLMs for this rather trivial task (which TBH could probably be done reasonably well with traditional means) are part of why the Internet – and therefore the world – looks like it does right now. It’s a set of arguments that wants to delegitimize political and moral actions based on libertarian and utilitarian thinking.

But the mundane reality is much simpler: LLMs fail to effectively solve the problems we have, while creating a vast new class of problems to be solved. They are, ultimately, completely mis-aligned with our needs, and incompatible with the society we live in.

everyone's talking about their teams like they were at the peak of efficiency and bottlenecked by ability to produce code
here's what things actually look like:
- your org rarely has good ideas. ideas being expensive to implement was actually helping
- majority of workers have no reason to be super motivated, they want to do their 9-5 and get back to their life
- they're not using AI to be 10x more effective they're using it to churn out their tasks with less energy spend
- the 2 people on your team that actually tried are now flattened by the slop code everyone is producing, they will quit soon
- even when you produce work faster you're still bottlenecked by bureaucracy and the dozen other realities of shipping something real
- your CFO is like what do you mean each engineer now costs $2000 extra per month in LLM bills"

1. How often does the team routinely ship new versions of the software they build?
2. How often do things break when the team ships a new version?

The social group I still identify with shares my values. We value learning. We value the merits of language design, type systems, software maintenance, levels of abstraction, and yeah, if I’m honest, minute syntactical differences, the color of the bike shed, and the best way to get that perfectly smooth shave on a yak. I’m not sure what we’re called now, "heirloom programmers"?

• I use slippery floss because my teeth are closely spaced, so I need to wrap around the posts 5 times rather than 3. It is also easier if there's a tail on each side, so I use about 9 inches of floss (the length of the FlossGrip plus a couple inches) each time. This is about half of what I used with just my fingers.
  
• It's easier to wrap the floss with dry hands, before I brush my teeth.
  
• The FlossGrip is embossed on one side with "FlossGrip", which makes it easier to keep track of which post I wrapped first, for unwrapping.
  
• The little slots that lock in the floss are compressed by wrapping the floss around the posts, which means there is a just-right tension that lets the floss slide in, and then holds it securely.
  
• It helps to angle the FlossGrip to match the actual angle of each gap between my teeth, not what I imagine the angle to be.
  
• It also helps to minimize the pressure I use to get down into each gap, so I don't irritate my gums.