ExFed

This is probably going to be an unpopular comment… but these articles are all super misleading. The physical books are getting destroyed, but their content is getting digitized. Is that a loss? Absolutely. But is there a benefit? Also yes.

The biggest loss is probably the fact that destroying the physical books removes them from circulation, making them essentially permanent additions to these companies’ book collections.

One of my favorite papers! On a similar note, I recently started reading A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout. Although it’s a lot more recent (2018), I’d argue it’s required reading in light of the LLM hype craze.

Absolutely, the author needs to be able to reason about their changes, no matter what. However, the reason why I think the two situations are fundamentally different, though, is that it’s a lot easier to validate the existence of features than it is the non-existence of bugs or malicious behavior. The biggest risk to removing code is breaking preexisting features, whereas the biggest risk to adding code is introducing malicious behavior.

Agreed. I have a sense that, eventually, development communities will figure out etiquette and policies to govern LLM usage. But how do you enforce that kind of policy? Right now, it’s essentially a judgement call by the maintainers. It’s hard to catch sneaky LLM usage.

On the other hand, I think there are objectively good ways to use LLMs for software:

• High-level design and planning
• Technical Research (although this tends towards the most popular tech)
• POCs & rapid prototyping
• “Textbook” solutions
• TDD Red/Green development (where the LLM generates failing tests based on the high-level spec, and the programmer writes the implementation)

25kLOC delta in a single PR should be cause for instant rejection

Not to pick at nits, but it would be VERY different if it was 1k lines added and 24k lines removed. There’s something extremely satisfying about removing 10k+ lines of unnecessary code.

Has “performance” or “merit” meant much to Trump for anything else?

This Pentagon has now indicated they’re willing to abuse the “supply-chain risk” label for political reasons, casting doubt over all future, legitimate uses of the label.

That’s a massive mistake and we’re all far less safe because of it.

OpenAI made a statement agreeing with Anthropic’s “red lines”. Google has yet to do the same, although there’s been quite a lot of chatter from employees about it.

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5758898-altman-backs-anthropic-pentagon-stand/

https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/27/employees-at-google-and-openai-support-anthropics-pentagon-stand-in-open-letter/

It’s also what happens when the entire world outsources manufacturing to one county: that country gets really really good at making stuff better than anybody else in the world.

all profits are wages stolen

Except when all the work is done by the owners. Employee-owned companies exist and are usually much better to work for.

It would appear you’re trying to argue against the contents of the above article by referencing an attribute or quality of the author. I believe we call that a genetic fallacy.

Would you like to try again?

Not when the entirety of your conversations are jargon and in-jokes!

/s