The younger Paladino, who has served as a spokesman and adviser for his mother, initially told Streetsblog that the car “came with a temporary plate,” but he later denied knowledge of the fraudulent tag. He declined to provide further details about how he acquired the tag or car, an Aston Martin.

“I don’t know anything about a fraudulent temporary license plate,” he said. “I have more than one car, all of which are properly licensed.”

Hmm, somebody is auditioning for a job in the Trump administration…

I’ve contributed to free software projects in some capacity or other since the 80s. I’ve done my bit. I don’t owe anyone anything.

But yeah you’re right: if AI turns every Tom, Dick and Harry like me away from computers, it’ll kill free software. Yeah it’s sad, but like I said, fuck computers. I don’t really give a turkey.

I use AI at work. Not “vibe coding” or anything: I use it locally on a DGX Spark machine to answer simple technical questions and spew out boilerplate. I admit it’s really useful, and I work quite a bit faster.

But here’s the thing:

There’s no effort required to do anything anymore. It makes all achievements bland.

It means my 40 years of experience are pretty much worthless, when anybody can ask an LLM what it took me decades to master.

We go through the motions at work: someone makes a PR and asks for code review. Someone else reviews the code and then it’s merged.

But here’s what really happens: more often than not, the guy requesting a PR asked AI to make the code. The guy reviewing the code asks AI to review the code. And if those two talk to one another, in the background, they pass each other’s questions to their individual LLMs.

And you can tell nobody really understands what the LLMs have done when you start asking them detailed questions about the code: they start blurting out nonsense, vague explanations of what they “did”, before eventually admitting that they don’t fully understand it and they asked AI to do it.

In other words, the (shoddy) work is done by machines, and the human workers are just proxies. It’s a simulacrum of humans working together. It’s really bizarre, it’s utterly absurd and it’s insulting to those of us still trying to do the work ourselves. I don’t want to review machine-made code, especially when some guy asks me to do it without telling me he didn’t do the work himself. Fuck that!

And the worst is, I’m the first to recognize that I can’t continue to work at the pre-AI pace I used to work, even though I am a fast human worker: I’m completely outclassed by the machines. They create bad code but they do it fast, and most of my colleagues are completely happy with good-enough shit they don’t understand.

Hell, one even asked me the other day why I keep bitching about the code being commented and readable when nobody reads it anymore, and AI can read the code and produce summaries. That’s… bleak.

And it’s so easy it’s like cocaine: you know AI is bad for code quality, but you can’t help doing it, because it’s quick and lazy.

I’m not built for this. I hate it with a passion. It feels like being a great horse-drawn buggy driver in the age of automobiles: I know my skills have been obsoleted and I’m about to be completely washed out. I could transition and start driving cars - and to an extent, I have already. But I just don’t wanna. Driving cars is not fun, it’s not exciting, it’s not challenging, it’s boring and it’s utterly depressing.

So I don’t code for myself anymore. What’s the point… I could do it pre-AI stylee, but then I’d be very slow, and I’d have to refuse contributions - because all contributions are AI slop, or very nearly so nowadays. And eventually I’d be tempted to use AI in my projects anyway, and I have too much pride in the quality of my code to do that - not to mention, I have to use the damn technology enough during work hours as it is.

I’ve informed my boss that I would like to transition to another position in the company. I love my company, I love the folks I work with, and I used to love what I do. But AI ruined everything in the space of less than 2 years. Now I fucking hate dragging my ass to the office every morning, and I relish the days when I have to spend time in the workshop machining parts, away from fucking computers.

Luckily, I’m senior enough and respected enough that I can request a radical change in role without being thrown out for being unreasonable. And my boss understands why I hate AI. But at my age, it’s not gonna be fun to change job completely once more. I was really hoping to retire quietly doing what I do now.

Anyway, long story short, and to answer your question: it’s not a matter of trusted devs or the tools they use: I want nothing to do with computers anymore. If it was up to me, I’d be machining parts in a blue overalls all day every day until I retire. Fuck computers.

I’ve abandoned all my open-source projects too. I’ve gotten a lot of PRs lately, and each time I look, it’s bad AI-generated code that I never want to merge.

That and I don’t even see the point of maintaining finely-crafted handmade code in that sea of mediocre fast-paced slop. It’s just not fun and I’m not interested anymore.