What do LLMs mean for GnuPG?
Robert J. Hansen
rjh at sixdemonbag.org
Mon Mar 30 10:39:18 CEST 2026
> 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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