Based on the title of the post, it’s an .appimage so I assume it ships all neccessary dependencies in it as well?

Double Counter essentially acts as a bouncer bot for Discord servers

If you give a Discord Bot sensitive data, I’m sorry but you’re clearly the issue. Bots are software, you (hopefully) wouldn’t download a random piece of software from an untrusted souce and give it access to your sensitive data and you should apply the same level of caution when it comes to Discord Bots too.

The first article has really interesting views, although it is a bit too philosophical for my taste. “Tools influence/change people and the environment they are used in”, sure can’t argue with that. But change is nothing to be afraid of and should be embraced, although you’d have to consider if change happens for the better or worse. And I see AI more like a knife in this situation: I can use a knife to slice food into smaller pieces that are easier to eat or to stab people. With great power comes great responsibility and a bit of self control topped up with rational thinking helps with the decision how to use what you have available in the best way possible. I will not refuse to touch a knive because I could hurt myself or others and I will force restraint upon myself to not give in to the intrusive thought of running up to people stabbing everyone in my vicinity. The same way I will not refuse to use AI because I could get too lazy to do my job and just vibe code everything while endangering every system that runs my code, I’ll force myself to do the right thing and use it to help me with my projects while keeping a close eye on every change it makes, validating that the output is safe, actually working and performing well. That’s my interpretation of the article at least, it may not be “just” a tool, but it is a tool, and just like every tool, is should only be used by people that know how to use it. If I missed the point or misinterpreted it then I’d like to reiterate that I’m not very good with philosophical metaphors.

The second article, which is written with AI assistance itself, sweet irony, is a bit too much for me to counter-argue every point written there, and I refuse to also use AI for this task in a similar fashion than the author even tho it would make the task easier. In summary, most points seem to not apply to coding at all or only apply to vibecoding, which I will not try to argument against since I agree that AI is not flawless and has its dangers (like pretty much everything else in life) and I too hate vibecoders. If you use AI as I described, as a tool that assists you, most counterpoints are non-issues. To highlight some of the more important mentioned concerns: Code Quality will not suffer if you review the output carefully and manually fix issues that made its way into the output, De-skilling of Developers might be of concern if you really leave most of the tasks up to AI but this once again leans more towards vibecoding than AI assisted coding, if you still write the majority of code yourself and you carefully check the output of the generated parts you will still have to understand what is going on any why it is written the way it is. One argument that I have conflicting views with is “Intellectual Property and Licensing” but this is a topic I could start an argument even outside of AI context. On a smaller scale, one example I like to bring up is that there are only so many ways you can sort an array and usually there’s always only one fastest/most efficient way, so should we allow this algorithm to be copyrighted/licensed in the first place? On a higher level, let’s look at the video games industry, if game mechanics are patented like Nintendo is famous for, it usually only hurts the industry as a whole, especially with more trivial things. And where should one draw the line? Where does inspiration stop and code theft start? And can you even claim ownership for your product after you probably also got lots of code from projects on Github or snippets from StackOverflow? That’s why most of my projects are open source as well, I took from the wider coding community so now it is my turn to give back as well, learn and take from me like I learned and took from you. But I think this topic by itself is very subjective and there are lots of opinions on the matter. To get back to the AI context, I don’t know how much of a difference it makes if the AI now takes your code and a ton of code from other people, then mashes it together into a different shape so that it fits my project or if I take just yours and adjust it myself using my skills and experience. One thing I do acknowledge and criticize is that the AI companies not only never asked for permission, but also never financially (or otherwise) compensated the creators of the training data while trying to charge you for using the service AIs provide, which is why I never paid for AI, neither for tokens nor via a subscription. You got the data for free, I use the AI for free. And at the same time, I may have “stolen” code in my works, but my work is also open source so feel free to “steal” it back.

So when will we ban code snippets? And autocoplete? Actually, lets go back to punch cards already!

I’m seriously getting sick and tired of this topic. AI is a tool, if you don’t like it, don’t use it, but let others do what they want. I hate vibecoders as much as I hate full anti-AI haters since both are equally wrong. AI is a powerful tool and the next step for assisted coding, but that’s it, do not let it do all the work and just allow it to work on it’s own without double-checking what it is actually doing. If you prefer to type everything yourself, letter by letter, go ahead. If you found an AI that produces perfect output that doesn’t need any adjustment/corrections, send me a link. If you have no idea what you’re doing, I do not want your code on my pc, no matter if you wrote it yourself or let an AI generate it for you and anything in-between. It’s that simple. Or at least it should be.

And if the environment is your biggest concern, LM Studio is free, so is Qwen, Gemma, Mistral, GPT-OSS and a ton of other models that you can run locally on your PC. You will need a somewhat powerful PC and some more patience than with the top models running on almost unlimited resources in a datacenter, but they get the job done eventually nontheless. The job of assisting you, that it, no vibecoding! They’ll break your stuff even faster if not kept in check.

Most people just don’t care and the tiny majority that does will just be ignored by Sony. Who cares about a tiny fraction of customers protesting when demand is so high that the PS5 Pros are out of stock everywhere https://www.tomsguide.com/gaming/playstation/ps5-pro-restocks-latest-updates

But think about the profits! We need more people to exploit, if there aren’t enough people to replace those who demand disgusting things like “actual living wages” with ones that are just happy to get any job at all, where do you think we’ll end up?? We’d have to actually value workers, no, human life itself, instead of just pretending to do so while treating them all as replaceable as they are! And, most importantly, this would hurt my bottom line! I need a new yacht this year, ok? You just don’t understand how important my wants truly are, ok?? So stop spreading such nonsense! ~ Pretty much every CEO out there, probably

Since I want to write in a bit more detail about my personal LLM/AI journey so far I will just give a Tl;Dr here: I started as a hater for that barely functional piece of junk that dared to call itself AI and slowly started to come around once it became better and more reliable. Now, let’s start with the story time.

I still remember when cleverbot was the best way to talk to a computer and it was pretty shit, then suddenly ChatGPT popped up one day. I obv. had to give it a try and I was amazed that we already got that far and it happened basically over night (I know now that at that point the first LLMs existed for quite some time but it took a while for them to blow up and therefore me discovering their existence). At that point, they were pretty inacurate, couldn’t even do simple math (which I found really ironic since that is basically the only thing a computer can do and very well too) and was inaccurate most of the time. I always had to double check each output and had to manually fix it pretty much every time, if it even was salvagable in the first place. But usually, I was better and faster at any task I could possibly give it so I became anti AI, started hating on the technogy and mocking people who used it.

Half a year later I finally decided to give it another try and it actually improved. Simple math was correct most of the time, it started to get most facts straight and some tasks like formatting text was either correct or just had some small mistakes I could easily fix myself. That was the turning point for me where I stated using it more often and hating it less.

Now, I actually like AI/LLMs. I use it almost daily for questions about pretty much anything that isn’t about recent news (which is still very prone to errors) or about a nieche topic (same issue). The main reason why is because I stongly prefer getting taught new things with the chance to ask follow up questions or to clarify things I didn’t underatand. I also use it to do simple tasks for me I don’t want to do myself, like formatting texts in specific ways. And I also use image gen whenever I need an image, be it for my profile picture, banners or anything else, since I hate drawing stuff myself, do not have the money to commission stuff from actual artists and noone but AIs want to do it for free.

And as a developer, I of couse use AI coding tools. However, I have to say that I’m not a fan of agentic coding, better known as vibe coding to most non-developers, where you tell the AI what you want and it does all the coding for you. In my experience, the result sucks. Too many unneccesary comments, too many checks that usually just degrade the performance of the software and at some point, shit just starts breaking, the AI can’t fix it and the codebase is too messy for me to read into it and fix it myself so I have to start over and do it myself anyway. For small stuff, like a simple script to inject into a website to make a table sortable or a cronjob that deletes every file in a temp folder that is older than a week, I have no issue with letting an AI vibecode that for me, then reading through the result to make sure it actually does what it should before using it. But for larger projects, I just give the AI access to my codebase and then chat with it when I’m stuck, unsure which approach fits best or give it smaller tasks to do for me and always check the output manually, never trust it fully. So after auto-completing words, then lines, then code snippets/chunks, I see coding LLMs as the next step that lets me generate even lager chunks, or even entire files, but with a more cautious approach. And it replaced the rubber duck for debugging.

One thing I almost never do is use AI to generate, enhance or even correct texts I’m writing. Take this comment for example, I bet I’ve made multiple mistakes and an AI could find better words and write everything way shorter while still getting the important bits right, but for some reason I do prefer to rather keep the human imperfections in it. Only for more… professional settings, I sometimes rely on AI to do a bettrr job at writing than me, and most of the time, it delivers.

Now, what I am still concerned about is the future of AI. What I haven’t mentioned so far is that I never paid for AIs and never will. If they are trained on stolen works where the creators of said works never received any compensation, neither will any AI company see anything from me. But as long as I can use it for free, I will continue doing so. However, I fear that this will soon change, since investor funding will not last forever and looking at the current hardware market and electricity costs, they will need a whole lot of money to keep going. And I’m pretty sure ads won’t cut it this time so I’m really curious how this will end: Will the bubble burst and every large AI company will have to downscale massively to survive or will enough people decide to pay to keep them running the way they do right now? Once again, I will enjoy the benefits while they last and run local models once they try to start charging me, or just return to doing everything myself like before, but I will never support them financially.

Shame, I would’ve loved to try it out but since it doesn’t run on linux I never could. I bet it would’ve been great on steam deck too.

Greatest piece of ragebait I’ve ever seen on Lemmy so far, well done. I’ll take it personal, therefore, have my downvote.