I never made a case against LLMs and similar ML applications in the sense that they negatively impact mental agility. The cases I made so far include, but are not limited to:

— OSS exploded on the promise that software you voluntarily contributed to remains to benefit the public, and that a large corporation cannot tomorrow simply take your work and make it part of their product, never contributing anything back. Commercially operated LLMs threaten OSS both by laundering code and by overwhelming maintainers with massive, automatically produced and sometimes never read by a human patches and merge requests.

— Being able to claim that any creative work is merely a product of an LLM (which is a reality now for any new artist, copywriter, etc.) removes a large motivator for humans to do fully original creative work and is detrimental to creativity and innovation.

— The ends don’t justify the means, as a general philosophical argument. Large-scale IP theft had been instrumental at the beginning of this new wave of applied ML—and it is essentially piracy, except done by the powerful and wealthy against the rest of us, and for profit rather than entertainment. (They certainly had the money to license swaths of original works for training, yet they chose to scrape and abuse the legal ambiguity due to requisite laws not yet existing.)

— The plain old practical “it will drive more and more people out of jobs”.

— Getting everybody used to the idea that LLMs now mediate access to information increases inequality (making those in control of this tech and their investors richer and more influential, while pushing the rest—most of whom are victims of the aforementioned reverse piracy—down the wealth scale and often out of jobs) more than it levels the playing field.

— Diluting what humanity is. Behaving like a human is how we manifest our humanness to others, and how we deserve humane treatment from them; after entities that walk and talk exactly like a human would, yet which we can be completely inhumane to, become commonplace, I expect over time this treatment will carry over to how humans treat each other—the differentiator has been eliminated.

— It is becoming infeasible to operate open online communities due to bot traffic that now dwarves human traffic. (Like much of the above, this is not a point against LLMs as technology, but rather the way they have been trained and operated by large corporate/national entities—if an ordinary person wanted to self-host their own, they would simply not have the technical capability to cause disruption at this scale.)

This is just what I could recall off the top of my head.

I don't think people understand the price we pay for these ads. Companies _generally_ are going to operate so they don't lose money. In an industry I am familiar with, I booked someone to clean my home. The total cost was somewhere around $350, about 125 of that went to the actual person cleaning the house. The rest went to a combination of google for the ad and the company I booked through. This industry generally has a 35% marketing expense (sometimes way more) so somewhere around $75 of what I paid to get my house cleaned went to Google. How much better of a job could have been done if the cleaner got a 60% raise? How much better would the local economy be if all of that money stayed local?

Insurance is negative NPV. Trying to make it NPV neutral by giving people tools to self-insure. Starting with an app that lets you self-insure your phone with friends and family.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/open-insure-self-insurance/id6...

By default we use both based on regex:

DEFAULT_INCLUDE_PATTERNS = { ".py", ".js", ".jsx", ".ts", ".tsx", ".go", ".java", ".pyi", ".pyx", ".c", ".cc", ".cpp", ".h", ".md", ".rst", "Dockerfile", "Makefile", ".yaml", ".yml", } DEFAULT_EXCLUDE_PATTERNS = { "test", "tests/", "docs/", "examples/", "v1/", "dist/", "build/", "experimental/", "deprecated/", "legacy/", ".git/", ".github/", ".next/", ".vscode/", "obj/", "bin/", "node_modules/", ".log" }

The most interesting part of this article for me was:

> Have multiple checkouts of your repo

I don’t know why this never occurred to me probably because it feels wrong to have multiple checkouts, but it makes sense so that you can keep each AI instance running at full speed. While LLM‘s are fast, this is one of the annoying parts of just waiting for an instance of Aider or Claude Code to finish something.

Also, I had never heard of git worktrees, that’s pretty interesting as well and seems like a good way to accomplish effectively having multiple checkouts.

- Remove (or perpetually switch to) daylight saving time

- Make everyone use the ISO8601 date format

- Have everyone drive on the right side of the road

- Eliminate the "sidewalk shuffle" by standardizing on always moving to the right

- Customer support lines/banks/etc must shift their opening hours slightly so that they are open outside of business hours, so that working people can use their services

- Make all instant messaging programs use XMPP, Matrix, or another open protocol

- Put the UK back in the EU

- Change world elections to be Alternative Vote, or similar

- Add another month and make all months shorter and the same length. Have an intermission period at the end of the year to iron out the remaining time. A la gormanuary.

- Delete America's guns, give America proper healthcare

- Standardize on Esperanto

- Replace Python with Ruby

- Make it so that Microsoft actually remembers my login session when I click "remember me" instead of logging me out all the time

This, I think, will fix most of the world's major problems.