No, opposing LLMs isn't "purity culture."
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I wouldn't be saying all this if it was just Doctorow, I'm even fine disagreeing with people I deeply respect. But he's not the only one saying shit like this, and I think it's worth calling out the broader rhetorical point.
@xgranade
Here's an excellent article by @tante criticising that broader rhetorical point: https://tante.cc/2026/02/20/acting-ethical-in-an-imperfect-world/It's really long, but totally worth the time IMO.
Somewhat tangentially, the backlash on the fedi along the lines of "Cory considered bad now" prompted tante to write a followup article which really gets one thinking: https://tante.cc/2026/02/20/on-alliances/
I recommend reading both.
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No, opposing LLMs isn't "purity culture." I've seen this now from quite a few different people, and I disagree vehemently. It is good, actually, to have moral principles and hold to them, even when people with more money than you find said principles annoying.
@xgranade honestly we need to update that meme to "Everything I Don't Like is Purity Culture".
And the problem largely comes from people who would consider themselves at least somewhat to the left.
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@xgranade I still keep hoping the Doctorow quote was just him doing a shit job of explaining his stance and he'll elaborate or that it's not true or is a misquote or something, because Doctorow was one of the few people left I agreed with on literally everything involved in tech and almost seems to be fundamentally counter to statements I recall him saying mere months prior.
I don't speak about this part of my opposition to its usage because I don't know what to actually do about this happening to people. It feels like I'm watching a bubonic scale parasite spread to everyone who even looks at a computer fondly for half a second and feeds on specifically the parts of their brain in charge of critical thinking and any and all technical skill that isn't just vibe coding or asking the LLM why it isn't working.
@disorderlyf @xgranade CD has his moments but he's ultimately a tech brightsider who is fully convinced that the master's tools will dismantle the master's house.
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@xgranade What is an LLM?
@Sickosocial @xgranade "Large Language Models" ChatGPT and stuff like that.
People (including me) like to differentiate these from the broader category of AI, because people do good stuff with AI tools without the externalities of LLMs.
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No, opposing LLMs isn't "purity culture." I've seen this now from quite a few different people, and I disagree vehemently. It is good, actually, to have moral principles and hold to them, even when people with more money than you find said principles annoying.
@xgranade yeah I always thought purity was refered to having principles instead of not having them and selling your soul to the devil because who cares
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@disorderlyf @xgranade CD has his moments but he's ultimately a tech brightsider who is fully convinced that the master's tools will dismantle the master's house.
@davey_cakes @disorderlyf @xgranade why not rip the master's tools from his hands and use them to demolish his house? Sounds grand to me. A hammer is a hammer is a hammer.
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@xgranade It could only be "purity culture" if we were denying ourselves something useful to put ourselves at a disadvantage for moral reasons. That's not what's happening.
@dalias @xgranade denying the usefulness of LLMs seems a bit wrongheaded at this point. I've been an engineer a decade now, at this point I don't really encounter things I can't build myself anymore, but LLMs let me build them far more quickly. 1000x more quickly? Absolutely not. But measurably quickly. I use this added time to increase my personal leisure as well as finally get some civic hacking done I've had on the to-do for years.
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@xgranade My dude is torching his own credibility to use an LLM to check for typos.
TYPOS.
@cthos I think that's less an indictment of Doctorow and more one of the never-LLM crowd, who have clearly become dogmatic Puritans
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@xgranade @aud yeah I should clarify I'm not saying he's not still a role model or that I don't also still respect him, I'm just saying in this case he very much said some white man in tech shit. Like, he used the word "neoliberal". That's a lapse in judgement when you're trying to defend your autocorrect.
@dave what's wrong with the term neolib? Is there a better catchall term for the prevailing social construct of basically every western democracy?
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No, opposing LLMs isn't "purity culture." I've seen this now from quite a few different people, and I disagree vehemently. It is good, actually, to have moral principles and hold to them, even when people with more money than you find said principles annoying.
@xgranade here's my question: the IDF uses Microsoft cloud solutions in service of their genocide, fascists are on Teams, and apparently Bill Gates was getting antibiotics from Epstein. Using Windows is using the tools of fascist pedophiles.
Unjustifiable. Anyone that uses Windows is Wrong. Right?
Is that a purity test? Am I as justified in criticizing anyone on earth that uses Windows as everyone here is for going goblin mode on LLMs and anyone using them?
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@dalias @xgranade denying the usefulness of LLMs seems a bit wrongheaded at this point. I've been an engineer a decade now, at this point I don't really encounter things I can't build myself anymore, but LLMs let me build them far more quickly. 1000x more quickly? Absolutely not. But measurably quickly. I use this added time to increase my personal leisure as well as finally get some civic hacking done I've had on the to-do for years.
@komali_2 @dalias I'm curious what you're trying to achieve here. Do you think I don't have the experience needed to claim that LLMs are useless? Do you expect that your one anecdote from someone I've never met or heard of before and have no reason to trust — an anecdote that flies in the face of all available theory and empirical evidence, no less — will sway me into thinking that ah, yes!, the fascist lying machines built by union busters are good, actually?
Why would you expect that?
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@komali_2 @dalias I'm curious what you're trying to achieve here. Do you think I don't have the experience needed to claim that LLMs are useless? Do you expect that your one anecdote from someone I've never met or heard of before and have no reason to trust — an anecdote that flies in the face of all available theory and empirical evidence, no less — will sway me into thinking that ah, yes!, the fascist lying machines built by union busters are good, actually?
Why would you expect that?
@xgranade fascists built a lot of things that I've used against them. Riot shields and gas masks, for example. I don't understand why we shouldn't use existent tools to further leftist goals just because someone despicable invented them.
Evidence shows that insane claims True Believers make are obviously false, but I've not seen evidence that LLMs are "useless." I've plenty of experience too. We don't know each other, I guess there's no reason you should care, but what's the point of talking?
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@xgranade here's my question: the IDF uses Microsoft cloud solutions in service of their genocide, fascists are on Teams, and apparently Bill Gates was getting antibiotics from Epstein. Using Windows is using the tools of fascist pedophiles.
Unjustifiable. Anyone that uses Windows is Wrong. Right?
Is that a purity test? Am I as justified in criticizing anyone on earth that uses Windows as everyone here is for going goblin mode on LLMs and anyone using them?
@komali_2 Funny how that concern arises precisely when it's needed to justify using LLMs, then convieiently disappears once it's no longer needed.
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@xgranade fascists built a lot of things that I've used against them. Riot shields and gas masks, for example. I don't understand why we shouldn't use existent tools to further leftist goals just because someone despicable invented them.
Evidence shows that insane claims True Believers make are obviously false, but I've not seen evidence that LLMs are "useless." I've plenty of experience too. We don't know each other, I guess there's no reason you should care, but what's the point of talking?
@komali_2 You came in with a wild and unsubstantiated claim, now you're playing all hurt when I called you on it.
Go troll someone else with your AI boosterism.
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@xgranade fascists built a lot of things that I've used against them. Riot shields and gas masks, for example. I don't understand why we shouldn't use existent tools to further leftist goals just because someone despicable invented them.
Evidence shows that insane claims True Believers make are obviously false, but I've not seen evidence that LLMs are "useless." I've plenty of experience too. We don't know each other, I guess there's no reason you should care, but what's the point of talking?
@xgranade I'm not trying to argue they're a categorical good, I just don't see how it's a bad thing to leverage them to quickly spin up a site turning publicly available data on pedestrian involved traffic incidents into some boomer-friendly charts that I can show to a local minister when I meet with her. I can build that myself, but with LLMs I can build it and five other things in the same time. So like, how's that bad?
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@xgranade fascists built a lot of things that I've used against them. Riot shields and gas masks, for example. I don't understand why we shouldn't use existent tools to further leftist goals just because someone despicable invented them.
Evidence shows that insane claims True Believers make are obviously false, but I've not seen evidence that LLMs are "useless." I've plenty of experience too. We don't know each other, I guess there's no reason you should care, but what's the point of talking?
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@komali_2 @xgranade
Of course any such potential usage is a minefield of issues, but this has me thinking.Because if (keyword being *if*) there were such a usage, that might give some credence to Cory's call the seize the tech, so that we might employ it without dependence on the hostile entities which control it.
Is it wrong to say we really ought to have our own versions of these tools, just in case? Maybe they really will turn out to be useless. But we surely cannot have exhausted all possibilities already, especially with our limited access to these tools.
If a usecase like that is found, we better be able to control it. An anti-stylometry tool we don't fully control would be an absolute disaster... I've heard of attacks embedded in the weights.
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@xgranade It could only be "purity culture" if we were denying ourselves something useful to put ourselves at a disadvantage for moral reasons. That's not what's happening.
@dalias Doctorow seems to feel that this is what he would be doing; he finds the LLM useful. And some programmers I follow and respect feel that way about their LLM-based coding agents (using the big rented models, not a local one like Doctorow), that they'd be denying themselves something useful and putting themselves at a disadvantage for moral reasons.
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@dalias Doctorow seems to feel that this is what he would be doing; he finds the LLM useful. And some programmers I follow and respect feel that way about their LLM-based coding agents (using the big rented models, not a local one like Doctorow), that they'd be denying themselves something useful and putting themselves at a disadvantage for moral reasons.
@dalias To be clear, I'm not convinced by the proponents of LLM-based coding agents. I find the idea of having a statistical text generator pump out volumes of code from ambiguous natural language distasteful. And I sure wouldn't want that approach to be used for something like musl, where you clearly work on it deliberately, carefully, with no line of code wasted.
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@xgranade My dude is torching his own credibility to use an LLM to check for typos.
TYPOS.
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