Comment by dofm

> If you actually require intelligence to get a hard job done, you should just use a frontier model.

Or, you know, your own intelligence.

What I do not understand as an engineer is how our community has gone from believing in open source for controlling destiny, security, etc., from avoiding unnecessary corporate capture (think of all the rants about Swift!), from believing in heterogeneity and portability, to just saying, look, if you're not using the product of one of two loss-making AI unicorns to do all of your work, you're just being a contrarian weirdo who is doing it for performative reasons.

I guess if that is your definition of contrarian — that everyone else is doing it so why aren't we? — then I am.

But in my experience it's not so different to "why aren't you on social media?" — which was an argument from insecurity and the desperate need to fit in.

I personally believe in independent thinking. I have things I want to learn about how all this actually works, I have questions about my own life and future, and I'm not going to simply chuck them away because you or anyone else thinks it's just being contrarian and we shouldn't question the direction everyone is taking. So I am learning the tech with a stack I control, while continuing to do the job I do.

You can do what you want. You're probably right, and I'll be quite happily wrong and continue in my wrongness even though, based on how you characterise it, this kind of independent thinking appears to unsettle you.