Re: What do LLMs mean for GnuPG?

"Robert J. Hansen via Gnupg-users" <[email protected]> Mon, 30 Mar 2026 04:39:18 -0400
Newsgroups	gmane.comp.encryption.gpg.user
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
> Alarmingly, attempts to replicate the study in later years found that 
> LLM-assisted programming appears to be *addictive*:  the researchers 
> could not find enough developers willing to program without LLM 
> assistance to have solid data, even when they offered to pay $50 an hour.

Almost a year ago I had a major health crisis that left me unable to 
move, literally unable to even roll over in bed. I had partial use of 
one arm and that was it. (Details are on my website at 
https://sixdemonbag.org/?p=27 , but they're not relevant here.)

After weeks in the hospital I was transferred to a rehabilitative care 
facility for another multi-week stay. My roommate was an elderly man. 
His mind was completely gone from dementia. He'd spend sixteen hours a 
day holding three-part conversations between himself, his future 
deceased self, and the self that had already gone on to heaven. It 
started off as a terrifying display of what dementia does to a mind and 
became a terrifying threat to my own mental health.

The software of humanity is a separate thing from the hardware. Children 
raised as feral very rarely learn how to walk upright, use the toilet, 
or function as a member of a family unit. Having missed the 
developmental window for that software to be uploaded, those 
capabilities are forever foreclosed to them.

This software also deteriorates over time. It needs consistent 
reinforcement for normal functioning. Long-term solitary confinement 
results in permanent psychological injury.

I was getting very few visitors, no conversations from nurses, nothing, 
and sixteen hours a day of narrative nonsense from a guy who could not 
be distinguished from an LLM.

Six weeks of that and I was a psychological basket case. I don't want to 
go into detail about how my mind went off the map, but -- I was in a 
scary place.

So yes, when I hear people talk about how their workplace now demands 
the use of LLMs, I want to know "has anyone ever demonstrated the 
psychological, neurological, and psychiatric safety of spending forty 
hours a week interacting with LLMs?"

I have not been able to find any consensus on the safety of long-term 
LLM interaction.

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