[LUG]Re: writing shell scripts

[Sebastian via list <list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear all,

> And Oliver gives very useful advice. AI such as Chatgpt, Claudebot, 
> Gemini et all are very very good at this sort of stuff. I've played 
> around and written entire web apps using gemini within five minutes, 
> using my preferred perl webstack (plack) and it did it in a way that I 
> learned new stuff about plack despite having used it for over a decade.
>
> Or just as a reminder. Eg, sed above, ask it, "bash, how delete first 
> line of a text file". Boom, several answers. Honestly, this year has 
> been a revelation for linux users in the ability of these assistants 
> to genuinely offer good advice on technical aspects. Just... don't 
> give them anything confidential...

I admit I may have Luddite tendencies, but I'm still surprised to find 
this sentiment in a LUG. These generative AI systems go against 
everything which I thought the FOSS movement stood for.

They're massive drains of processing power; as someone who got into 
Linux for the sole reason of keeping older, slower PCs alive, and found 
my passion for FOSS grow from there, I am disappointed to see the 
normalization of this terrifying level of resource consumption. This 
could plausibly be the equivalent of draining an entire laptop battery 
for an LLM to respond to just a couple of queries.

The behaviour of the companies developing generative AI effectively 
deprives us of our copyright, which in combination with reciprocal FOSS 
licenses, is one of the few things which gives Linux communities power 
to keep their users safe from the old Embrace, Extend, Extinguish tactic 
of proprietary software vendors. People outside of the technology world, 
such as authors, are unhappy with generative AI too - but as a result we 
are potentially now facing the prospect of mandatory book licensing 
agreements, which will poison independent publishing just like it 
poisoned the music industry.

Most importantly, the interaction of generative AI with the capitalist 
free market robs us of what I think is the most profound freedom, that 
is to learn by practice, imitation and collaboration, and thereby 
improve ourselves individually. I am convinced that the temptation to 
instruct an LLM to do a task in lieu of learning how to perform it 
directly will always outweigh the theoretical benefit that generative AI 
could have on education.

Nothing I've written in this email is particularly original at this 
point, but it is guaranteed 100% human-written :)

Best wishes,

Sebastian


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