it's 2026. my work machine is a macbook pro with 64gb ram.
i would rather spend a few hundred or thousands of dollars a month to make way more, than waste time and still lose to people who are using the latest commercial models which are 3 months ahead of the open source.
I am jokingly agreeing with you: Bill Gates famously claimed 640 kilobytes of RAM was sufficient for everyone, which felt like a funny parallel to people telling you "open source models are sufficient for everyone"
There's obviously a competitive advantage to having better tools, and I find it amusing/absurd that some people don't get that.
Heh, if you're using LLMs heavily for work I think odds are pretty good you're doing pretty trivial stuff. It might not be trivial to you, but you're probably just not very good at this.
Anyone who heavily uses LLMs for their work is pretty obviously ill-equipped for their work, and likely getting even worse at it with time, yes. You can throw around as many "things people from the US worship because they make money" positions/industries as you want. Nevermind that you're "pretty sure". People who both know what LLMs are actually capable of without major issues, plus are already capable enough to do their job don't need to use LLMs heavily, they'll use them for what little they're actually useful for. Only incompetent (or uninterested & incompetent) people lean on them very heavily.
Edit: To clarify what I mean by this:
Anyone who uses LLMs for larger-than-small-module code generation, pretend-not-vibecoding (a.k.a spec-driven development), or outright vibecoding, etc., is using an LLM "heavily", IMO.
The appropriate things to use them for is information retrieval, plus as a basic extra signal in debugging, code understanding, quality checks, and so on.
Also, it's not illegal to be incompetent. Most people were incompetent long before LLMs showed up, it's not some rarity.