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by RodgerTheGreat 93 days ago
LLM enthusiasts will always point to whatever scraps of personal value they've extracted from their use of genai as a rationale for their indispensability. Arguing from personal utility rings hollow for anyone who takes the externalities of these "tools" seriously: their erasure of the authorship of their training corpus, their erosion of social contracts, their putrefaction of the commons with endless waves of slop, etc. I'm glad FreeBSD has managed to hold the line against this sort of shortsighted ends-justify-means thinking, and I hope they don't soften their stance against slop in the future.
1 comments

Agreed, but for some reason the majority of folks don't care about these externalities at all.

I see the externalities and the harm they are and may cause, and at the same time I find it increasingly difficult to avoid using LLMs as there is personal value to be extracted. Further, so many others are using LLMs to pump their productivity numbers (reality may differ and time will tell) its hard to keep up without using LLMs.

Aren't there several papers that indicate that the productivity boost doesn't exist when you start measuring productivity instead of going by feels?