steve jobs famously called the personal computer "a bicycle for the mind", in that it's a tool that makes you more efficient. calling language models "an automobile for the mind" in that it gets you there very quickly, without any expended effort, locks you into specific intrastructure, and is bad for the environment, seems pretty apt.
this post was submitted on 17 May 2026
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Showerthoughts
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locks you into
Can't go wrong with offline and open-source!
Locking in in this context means that you're relying on an LLM for your problem solving - atrophying your skills in the meantime, making you dependent on a model. So you can indeed go wrong with open weight abd self hosted ones. At least thats my understanding of this.
Here's the scary part... The skill of developers has been for about 20 years: "look it up on stack overflow. Find a similar problem. Fix it to suit my environment."
But... No one is posting to stack overflow anymore. So LLMs have effectively become stack overflow.
I try to not let the skill atrophy by doing it the old way. Can't. The well is running dry.
What I will say is that LLMs make parsing logs a lot easier. So, doing things the old old fashioned way is still in the cards.
It's weird out here.
No one is posting to stack overflow anymore. So LLMs have effectively become stack overflow.
Remember when Google gave relevant search results? Pepperidge Farm remembers….
it wasn't what i was getting at, but that's also true. the model requires a certain setup to be effective, so now you're locked into that. the model does things a certain way, so now you're locked into that. nobody reads the code it produces, so now you're locked into that.
all the while every other way of doing things disappears from your mind.
considering the massive accidents of models deleting codebases and production db's, the fact that the tool may be open source doesn't really help.
besides, i don't know any open source models. i know of open-weight models, but i've yet to see anyone share the training regime and source data for an even vaguely effective model.
The analogy is flawed:
The car gave mere humans superhuman traveling abilities.
AI gives Big Tech unprecedented surveillance power and control over the entire society, but puts people out of work and debases everything it touches.
Cars empowered people. AI empowers corporate fascists.
Cars empowered people at first.
But look at every single american town or city and you will see that it crippled them, made them dependent and robbed them of their freedom.
Maybe you should post this showerthought in the "fuck cars" community where more people might agree with your hot take.
Otherwise most of us know that cars are what you make of them. You can choose to walk a few miles a few times a week to run errands, even if you have the option to drive. This is how I live my life. I guess I live in what some people would call a "15 minute city" where everything we need is within walkable distance. So we're all healthy fit & get fresh air & exercise every day simply by living here. I also have this automobile to drive me over 100 miles in 2 hours which is what I'm doing tonight which would be impossible for me to walk or run or bike that distance in 2 hours.
I wouldn't exactly call this a hot take showerthought if you look at how many studies there already are that show the effects of car dependency in most of north america.
I am german, my work place is 700m away from where i live, the next supermarket is 450 meters away and i don't live in a big city where those numbers could go down to under 100m.
So, i know that my "hot take" is not true for most parts of the world. But my statement was specifically about american cities and towns. There is also the very big problem of segregation of incomes. If you can't afford a car, you can't afford to live in certain neighborhoods because you simply can't walk 15 minutes to the next supermarket or to your work.
And i cannot NOT call this crippling and robbing of freedom.
I am 100% with you on the fact that cars also enable freedom. And as i much as i rely on public transport, i also enjoy the freedom of simply hopping into my car and drive exactly where i want and when i want.
But depending on where you live, a car is a necessity instead of a "freedom-enabler" and that... is crippling....
That is great that you live in a walkable area. They were saying that cars have destroyed areas by making them non walkable. And that's not necessarily the residents fault, and a lot of the people that live there probably want it do be different but aren't able to move.
~~AI~~ LLMs empower little people, too, though. They've taught me spreadsheet formulas and ways to use them at my job that I didn't even know existed. Granted, I didn't take any Excel course, and they didn't always work on their own (as expected of LLMs), but they at least gave me enough ideas to find out superior ways to manage my daily data.
That’s like saying getting injured in a car accident empowered you because it taught you humility.
Like props on finding the silver lining but it is objectively not a good thing for you and you shouldn’t view the event with gratitude
That's a wild analogy. How did it hurt me versus finally solving my frustration from being unable to find solutions online? I check manually first...
And it does not take away jobs because it messes up too much anyway in deeper stuff. Those who were laid off will be back soon enough, probably with better employers. All the "replacement" going on in big tech is only mounting technical debt from its incompetence; the bubble will burst spectacularly over the coming months or years. With that said, for bite-sized, instantly verifiable tasks, I think it's mostly okay if you at least tried to figure out the solution on your own first.
It harms you in the form of directly causing cognitive decline.
Just look at the way you have advocated for it within this very comment. You argue that it’s a valid “pressure release valve”, an avenue to seek solutions when you are otherwise frustrated.
Those moments, the ones where you have seemingly exhausted all possibilities, are the ones where your mind starts working. You are training yourself to interrupt the process. You can tell yourself this story about how you attempted to make an effort first, but the truth is your patience for that will get smaller every day.
And then what’s the plan? Why would I hire someone who is ultimately totally interchangeable with all the other prompters who can only forward what AI told them? Why would I give you a raise when I could just replace you with someone equally capable of reading off “AI solutions”?
Where are these “better employers” who will “probably” save you going to come from, and why would they bother? Is that assessment based on anything in particular? Why go to bat like this over something you can only call “mostly okay” for particularly small tasks?
People argued the same about calculators.
Is this just your bit? Make an inflammatory quip then edit in an entirely different paragraph after the person responds?
And in turn, people have employed this exact counterargument for each and every single one of the scams the owner class has attempted to employ in recent memory, from the metaverse, to crypto, to NFTs, and now to chatbots that tell you how very special and smart you are. “Industrial revolution was a very good thing! Therefore this totally unrelated and unproven proposal is equally very good! Yayyyy!”
Go read Richard Dawkin’s new article where he convinced himself his chatbot was sentient because it told him he asked the most intelligent questions of anyone on earth. Or look up the direct studies on the cognitive harm being caused, hey, for the time being AI can probably even help collate them for you
Cars don't empower people. We've had "super human" travailing abilities long before the car. Cars take away freedom. I don't understand how being forced to use one method of travel for daily commute is empowering.
I've come to dislike the word empowered. In recent times it is, more often than not, used to gaslight people into accepting something that has far more negative consequences than positive.
So obviously you don't like cars, that's fine, I respect that. But your comment makes no sense. It's like if I said, "I don't like cake, I don't understand how being forced to eat cake every day is enjoyable."
Having a car does not force you to drive it. Not having a car forces you to NOT drive it.
You can hate cars, hell, you can hate me just for having one, but saying it FORCES you to drive it everyday is just nonsense.
It's not your or any others singular car forcing anyone to drive. It's the expectation that an adult person can drive and needs to use a car that forces or at least pushes everything towards driving.
If the design and soundscape of almost any space weren't impacted negatively by cars I wouldn't think they'd be forcing anything onto me. But that is reality even in nominally not car dependent inner city Germany. So that's why I hate cars.
I don't understand how being forced to use one method of travel for daily commute is empowering.
You're.. what? You're not forced to work where you work; you can change to a closer workplace. Cars made it possible at all to go as far as you can for work. How do they remove freedom if they increase your options for where you can go?
I wonder if the most objective viewpoint is just that of neutrality; it's not better nor worse but just different. EVs sourcing from nuclear energy are probably objectively better.
", in theory." Should probably be added to the statement that you can change workplaces. Cost of living, availability of good paying jobs, and a variety of factors work into that flow.
And that is not a byproduct, it's like that by design.
No, I whole heartedly believe that the scientists who made the first LLM, before openai got involved, did not have malicious intent.
It was kind of impossible to know how far it could go anyway; seeing the pace at which it's been advancing, even despite all the hallucinations, has been blistering. I mean, look at me; I'm recording this partly via Whisper+ using an offline, open-source model by speech-to-text (manually cleaning it up after delivery, of course, but still). Even just 6 years ago, people would have been, like, "WTF?! How is that sorcery possible?"
Wasn't it even just 2 years ago that it struggled big-time with legible text and kept butchering hands and fingers on visuals of generated people? Even that already is a thing of the past, which itself was incredible to even see at all right after COVID times. The speed is bewildering...
Anyway, I digressed a bit. The book Empire of AI comes to mind in terms of researchers' intentions indeed.
Not everyone is a fat overweight non athletic person. And the computer/rise of tech and luxury did more than cars or LLMs.
Cars fundamentally caused more societal change because you can't have mass computer production without efficient vehicular transport.
Interestingly LLMs manage to turn crazy not only the people most fanatical about it but also the ones who make opposing them a core part of their identity. And I encounter a lot more people belonging to the second group.
Against photography "Could you find an honest observer to declare that the invasion of photography and the great industrial madness of our times have no part at all in this deplorable result? Are we to suppose that a people whose eyes are growing used to considering the results of a material science as though they were the products of the beautiful, will not in the course of time have singularly diminished its faculties of judging and of feeling what are among the most ethereal and immaterial aspects of creation?" ~Charles Baudelaire
Against the printing press "Writing indeed, which brings in gold for us, should be respected and held to be nobler than all goods, unless she has suffered degradation in the brothel of the printing presses. She is a maiden with a pen, a harlot in print." ~Filippo de Strata
It's painful how much people don't realize that what they really hate is billionaires, not linear algebra.
This.
Fire turned us—a species capable of digesting raw meat and starchy tubers—into wusses who can only eat processed foods.
"For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise." ~Socrates. On the invention of writing.
You can eat raw plants
Humans generally have trouble thriving on diets that our closest primate relatives have no trouble with.
Yeah eating raw meat is something to strive for, anyone who doesn't do that is [insert string of moronic masculine toxicity]. /s
I don't think they are attacking our brains they are learning from our brains how to manage the world we have created. We are happily training them to inherit our institutions and any stupefying effects these models might have are probably around the least of the problems they will present to us. And we stopped running not because of cars but because of calories.
Ideally thinking will turn into more big picture. Usually you have a team of people working the details. Now you can have the trivialities sorted out automatically. Humans will hopefully grow into thinking the hard stuff even more hardcore.
Or thinking will become a hobby or a profession of a select few mostly for entertainment—like physical athletes of today.
But on average most people will likely become dumb due to ai.