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points by slopinthebag 10 hours ago | 0 comments
i suppose i differ in the opinion that the most important thing about software are the users, and to the extent that AI can be used to create better software faster for them we should use it. i don't share the same moral qualms about AI, but even if i did i think there would be a strong argument that the benefits outweigh it.

developer communities can also be valuable but i think increasingly people are finding they can be quite toxic. the chillest communities i've found have actually been ones primarily made up of non-devs vibecoding. no egos, no endless arguments, holy war battles, or bikeshedding. they just build stuff and share. it's kind of nice acutally.

[–] palata 10 hours ago
> even if i did i think there would be a strong argument that the benefits outweigh it.

I disagree. I think AI centralises power and reinforces inequalities, and that's before we talk about cybersecurity and carbon footprint.

It is not clear at all that the benefits outweigh that.

What is clear, though, is that it's a very useful tool to write software.

[–] slopinthebag 9 hours ago
i think open models decentralizes power and especially takes power away from large corporations with software monopolies based on licensing.
[–] palata 8 hours ago
In practice, right now, they don't. I hope they will, obviously.

Then about inequalities... you don't run an open model on an affordable RaspberryPi. The more money you have, the more you can leverage AI. Open weights or not.

[–] slopinthebag 7 hours ago
what do you mean they don't in practice? you don't believe people and companies are using AI to build their own tools to replace expensive dependencies?

one example i've seen is modders using AI to bring back older games that ip laws are killing. the whole stop killing games movement will be made obsolete soon when modders can simply produce working, open source versions of these games.

and you dont need to run models locally, you just need competition in the provider market. and we can see this in action - go look at how many providers serve deepseek, all at competitive prices.

[–] palata 4 hours ago
> what do you mean they don't in practice?

In practice most people don't use open models?

[–] slopinthebag 33 minutes ago
because it's cheap to use closed models, but if they became more expensive the open models are right there.