I’m sure enough people have told you to yeet her into the sun. I empathize if you decide you want to work this through with her. I have had issues like this with my own partner.

I found this video essay by Dr. Fatima helpful to empathize in my case. You agree on some of the fundamentals it seems. She has a habit and somewhat agrees that it’s bad. But due to stress or whatever reason she can’t kick it. So try to help her to work on this. It’s good to keep in mind that even half-measures can do lots of good. Maybe she isn’t super principaled in her AI abstention like you, but there’s a wide range between occasional indulgance and full-on dependency.

One seemingly small thing that reduced a lot of conflict for us was me replacing her search widget on her android. She kept quoting AI summaries from Google at me and I kept getting annoyed until I offered to help by changing it to DuckDuckGo. Maybe you’re better skilled in configuring your devices and can offer to protect her from addictive design patterns she is barely aware of.

That seems totally reasonable too.

Idk, given that we can’t really conclusively prove that anything post-2022 is slop-free, don’t you think setting a no-AI policy is still good for setting social expectations? And making people spend effort to conceal AI work is not a bad thing, since one problem with slop-PRs is that they are low-effort.

And I use tons of old projects that haven’t made an anti-AI declaration (and have to use a bunch that are slop-permissive e.g. the kernel), but I still appreciate every one that does.

I can tell you the two languages I would learn right now if I had the spare cycles.

1. Zig is a C-replacement language that took a no-AI stance early on. It doesn’t have compiler-assured memory safety like Rust, but it does try to revamp structures (like alloc or error handling) in a way that makes it more obvious to the programmer what is happening. I’d love to learn more, but cycles…
2. Gleam is a language that is part of the Erlang/BEAM ecosystem. It’s a functional language, so it’s a bit of a mindfuck if you come from a Python-/C-esque perspective, but if you like formal logic it might well be up your alley. It has a good web tutorial if you’re interested. Neither Gleam nor its runtime Erlang-OTP have taken a stance on AI as far as I know (Elixir has a permissive stance), but at least I’ve seen no red flags as of yet. The people at Gleam just generally give me a vibe of being deliberate and careful with their code.

I don’t think it’s impossible that the underlying tech of LLMs will be evolved into something undeniably useful. But I don’t think “helping with Python” will be that.

I think on !fuck_ai I can suggest, you could also just learn the relevant bits of Python? Learning to express your thoughts in code and understanding the tools you use feels way more empowering than relying on blackbox-extruded code.

In my book socialism is about workers controlling the means of production, and historical socialists did not agree how that would work in detail.

Libertarianism on the other hand is primarily about the rejection of personal restrictions, stuff like: “I should be allowed to freely copy and share media I have legally acquired.” or “I shouldn’t be forced to pay taxes.” This individualist thinking makes it usually unable to adress structural inequality.

But he also literally has a book titled “Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free”.

That sure sounds like a zinger, but going off Wikipedia he does argue in that book for a loosening of copyright, which is pretty much what I meant. I don’t hate those positions though I’ll note they’re more libertarian than socialist. He has a whole personal freedom + monopoly control shtick, which works great for me in a lot of scenarios, but doesn’t quite work on GenAI tech.

You can call me exceptionalist, but I think LLMs stand out because the adoption of the tech basically requires very capital-intensive and thus centralized operations for model training. This makes whoever runs them (likely capital or a state) a powerful arbiter of information space, maybe best comparable with algorithmic feeds in monopolistic social media.

I think it is necessary to say: “Hey, we as a society shouldn’t run things like that. There are better ways of distributing information that work just fine.” A tech-neutral attitude can’t achieve that.

Funny horse-butt-creature notwithstanding, Dotcorows AI takes have been rather mid. Quoting from Guardian…

In this book, at least, he isn’t animated by the headline-grabbing concerns, whether existential risk or AI psychosis, deepfake porn or election disinformation, because those are unintended consequences. His target is the revenue model and the bubble it has created: “To be an effective AI critic, you need to strike at the source of AI’s power, which is the investment capital it attracts.”

He isn’t falling for AI doom and he is aware of the bubble, which puts him near the better end of the spectrum. But he’s also unwilling to fully criticize community damage resulting from LLM use. That may be because he’s fond of LLMs himself for his text editing and is repping the “it’s just another tool” defense. So he isn’t willing to go all the way when it comes to criticizing the global theft of labour that continues to power this industry. Information wants to be free, dontcha know?