Alex Kretzschmar on Nostr: I’ll bite. This isn’t a binary situation though. For example, last week I decided ...

I’ll bite.

This isn’t a binary situation though. For example, last week I decided the open source esp32 firmware I wanted to use build my 5yo a plane radar tracker didn’t quite work how I wanted.

I could spend many hours staring at the code, forking the code, and perhaps, maybe, eventually, make it work how I imagined.

Instead, i prompted an LLM, played dolls house with my daughter for 45 mins whilst it did its thing and then flashed the resulting firmware (which it one shot).

The upshot here was I spent more time with daughter, made her something i wouldnt have even attempted before because the time investment was too high and learned a little about esp32 firmwares when i queried what it did.

Idk if this makes me a slave to the tech or not. I mean, we all drive gasoline powered cars around quite happily despite their obvious negatives. And use electricity generated by coal. And eat food with microplastics that was mass produced inhumanely.

My point is, just simply using AI is not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself.

Of course there are bad sides to it. But simply preaching “shame on you” for using a new technology (still in its infancy too!) isnt a good thing either. Things are never going back to how they were, and open weight models do democratize the whole thing.