I have been battling Large Language Models (LLM1) for the past
couple of weeks and have struggled to think about what it means and
how to deal with its fallout.
Because the fight has come from many fronts, I've come to articulate
this in terms of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Sound track: Metallica's The Four Horsemen, preferably
downloaded from Napster around 2000, but now I guess you get
it on YouTube.
War: bot armies
Let's start with War. We've been battling bot armies for control of
our GitLab server for a while. Bots crawl virtually infinite
endpoints on our Git repositories (as opposed to downloading an
archive or shallow clone), including our fork of Firefox, Tor Browser,
a massive repository.
At first, we've tried various methods: robots.txt, blocking user
agents, and finally blocking entire networks. I wrote
asncounter. It worked for a while.
But now, blocking entire networks doesn't work: they come back some
other way, typically through shady proxy networks, which is kind
of ironic considering we're essentially running the largest proxy
network of the world.
Out of desperation, we've forced users to use cookies when
visiting our site. We haven't deployed Anubis yet, as we worry
that bots have broken Anubis anyways and that it does not really
defend against a well-funded attacker, something which Pretix
warned against in 2025 already.
(We have a whole discussion regarding those tools here.)
But even that, predictably, has failed. I suspect what we consider
bots are now really agents. They run full web browsers, JavaScript
included, so a feeble cookie is no match for the massive bot armies.
Side note on LLM "order of battle"
We often underestimate the size of that army. The cloud was huge even
before LLMs, serving about two thirds of the web. Even larger swaths of
clients like government and corporate databases have all moved to the
cloud, in shared, but private infrastructure with massive spare
capacity that is readily available to anyone who pays.
LLMs have made the problem worse by dramatically expanding the
capacity of the "cloud". We now have data centers that defy
imagination with millions of cores, petabytes of memory, exabytes
of storage.
I thought that 25 gigabit residential internet in Switzerland
could bring balance, but this is nothing compared to the scale of
those data centers.
Those companies can launch thousands, if not millions of fully
functional web browsers at our servers. Computing power or bandwidth
are not a limitation for them, our primitive infrastructure is. No one
but hyperscalers can deal with this kind of load, and I suspect that
they are also struggling, as even Google is deploying extreme
mechanisms in reCAPTCHA.
This is the largest attack on the internet since the Morris
worm but while Robert Tappan Morris went to jail on a felony,
LLM companies are celebrated as innovators and will soon be too big to
fail.2
Which brings us to the second horsemen, famine.
Famine: shortages
All that computing power doesn't come out of thin air: it needs
massive amounts of hardware, power, and cooling.
Earlier this year, I've heard from a colleague that their Dell
supplier refused to even provide a quote before August. Dell!
In February, Western Digital's hard drive production for 2026 was
already sold out. Hard drives essentially doubled in price within
a year, and some have now tripled. A server quote we had in
November has now quadrupled, going from 10 thousand to FORTY
thousand dollars for a single server.
But regular folks are facing real-life shortages as well, as
city-size data centers are being built at neck-breaking speed,
stealing fresh water and energy from human beings to feed the war
machine.
We've been scared of losing our jobs, but it seems that Apocalypse has
yet to fully materialize. Regardless for engineers, the market feels
tighter than it was a couple years ago, and everyone feels on edge
that they will just have to learn to operate LLMs to keep their jobs.
Update: it turns out I was clearly too optimistic. Cisco is laying
off 4,000 or 5% of its staff in a jolly announcement celebrating
a record $15.8 billion revenue, and Meta will lay off 8,000 or
10% of its workforce, in horrifying conditions. See also the
jobloss.ai tracker which counts 125,000 jobs lost since January
2025, as of May 2026.
Which brings us, of course, to Death.
Death: security and copyright
Our third horseman is one I did not expect a couple of months
ago. Back at FOSDEM, curl's maintainer Daniel Stenberg famously
complained about the poor quality of LLM-generated reports but
then, a few months later, everyone is scrambling to deal with floods
of good reports.
In the past two weeks, this culminated in a significant number of
critical security issues across multiple projects. Chained
together, remote code execution vulnerabilities in Nginx and
Apache and two local privilege escalations in the Linux kernel
(dirtyfrag and fragnesia) essentially gave anyone root access to any unpatched server to the web.
As I write this, another vulnerability dropped, which gives read
access to any file to a local user, compromising TLS and SSH private
keys.
All those vulnerabilities were released without any significant
coordination while people scrambled to mitigate.
Many people including Linus Torvalds are now considering issues
discovered through LLMs to be essentially public. This puts some
debates about disclosure processes in perspective, to say the
least.
But this is not merely the death of the traditional coordinated disclosure
process, the C programming language, or the Linux kernel: remember
that those bots are trained on a large corpus of copyrighted
material. Facebook has trained their models on pirated books and
Nvidia has done deals with Anna's Archive to secure access to
large swaths of copyrighted material. The US Congress seems to think
LLM outputs are not copyrightable, like any other machine outputs.
With many people now vibe coding their way out of learning or
remembering how computers work, is this the Death of Copyright?
And that, of course, brings us to the final horseman: Pestilence.
Pestilence: slop
There is a growing meme that programming is essentially over as we
know it. That you can simply vibe-code applications from scratch and
it's pretty good.
Maybe that's true.
So far, most of my attempts at resolving any complex problem with a
LLM have often failed with bizarre failures. Some worked surprisingly
well. Maybe, of course, I am holding it wrong.
I personally don't believe LLMs will ever be good enough to produce
and maintain software at scale. They're surprisingly good at finding
security flaws right now. But what I see is also a lot of
Bullshit, with a capital B. It's not lying: it does not "know"
anything, so it can't lie. It's misleadingly cohesive and
deliberate, but it lacks meaning, intent, will.
I have not been confronted with much slop, apart from the lobster
Jesus or the yellow man atrocities, and particularly not in my
work. But I see what it is doing to my profession: beyond
vibe-coding, people are now token-maxxing, and
land-grabbing their colleagues.
I don't like what LLMs do to our communities, or the fabric of
software we live with.
Software does not evolve in a void. It is a team effort, be it free
software or a corporate product. Generations of humans have carefully
built the scaffolding of technology required for modern networks and
software to operate, in a convoluted contraption that no single human
fully understands anymore.
The idea of simply giving up on that understanding entirely and
delegating it to an unproven model is not only chilling, it feels just
plain stupid. Not stupid as in Skynet, stupid as in "I can't get
inside the data center because the authentication system is
down". Except we're in a "the power plant doesn't reboot" or "their
LLM found an 0day in our slop" kind of stupid.
The fifth horsemen
Researching for this article, I looked up the four horsemen and found
out they original seems to have been:
- Famine
- War
- Death
- Conquest (??)
I was surprised. I grew up thinking about the horsemen being Famine,
War, Pestilence, and Death. So I went back to my original source
which actually claims the horsemen are:
Time has taken its toll on you, the lines that crack your face.
Famine, your body, it has torn through, withered in every place.
Pestilence for what you've had to endure, and what you have put others through
Death, deliverance for you, for sure, now there's nothing you can do
So I guess that makes no sense either, which, fair enough, I shouldn't
rely on Metallica for theological references. Especially since that
song was originally called Mechanix and was "about having sex at
a gas station".
Anyways.
The point is, there are actually five horsemen, and the fifth one is,
in my opinion, Conquest.
Those companies (and not "AI", mind you) are taking over the
world. I sense a strong connection with the "post-truth" world imposed
on us by fascists like Trump and Putin. It's not an accident, it's a
power grab part of the Californian Ideology3. Just like Airbnb
broke housing, Uber destroyed the transportation and Amazon is taking
over retail and server hosting, LLM companies are essentially trying
to take over if not everything, at least Cognition as a whole.
But the capitalization of those companies (OpenAI and Nvidia in particular)
are so far beyond reason that their inevitable collapse will likely
lead to a global financial collapse of biblical proportions.
Because they will inevitably fail like previous bubbles they are built
on. And when they fail, I hope it zips all the way back through the
blockchain scam, the ad surveillance system, and the dot com then git
me back my internet.
The Tower of Babel
While I'm off in the woods hallucinating (ha!) on biblical allegories,
I feel there's another sign that the apocalypse is coming.
The Tower of Babel myth says that humans tried to create a big
tower up to heaven and become god. God confounds their speech and
scatters the human race. End of utopia.
This is what is happening to our human translators now. LLMs being,
after all, Language Models, they are excellent at translation work. So
much that the only translators not replaced by LLMs right now are
interpreters, who translate vocally in real time. But
interpreters are worried about their jobs as well.
This concretely means we will lose the human capacity, as a
civilization, to translate between each other. It is still an open
question whether the remaining revision work will be enough for
translators to avoid deskilling, but other research has shown that LLM
use leads to cognitive decline, impacts critical thinking,
and generally, that deskilling is a common outcome.
Ultimately, I think this is where LLMs bring us. Towards collapse.
So this is a call to arms. Fight back!
Poison bots. Build local real-world communities.
Go low tech. Moore's law is dead, make use of it.
Patch your shit. Go weird.
Refuse slop. Train your brain. Refuse distillation.
The horsemen will collapse, but let's not go down with them.
Butlerian Jihad!
This article was written without the use of a large language model
and should not be used to train one.
Updates
A paragraph was added about the job apocalypse, which was of course
under-estimate.
Why Timnit Gebru was fired is extremely important and
interesting. The co-lead of the Ethical AI team at Google was fired
because they blew the whistle on "stochastic parrots" essentially
destroying the world as we know it:
The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most. [...]
The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a
statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral
assistant.
The warnings from the paper are eerily similar to my horsemen:
- predicted the hallucination (pestilence)
- bias amplification (war?)
- environmental cost (famine)
- un-auditable training corpus (death?)
- "centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the
small number of companies" (conquest)
See also Tim Wu's "The Master Switch" which says:
The industry learned how to secure the enactment of seemingly
innocuous and sensible regulations that nonetheless spelled doom
for any rival.
People claim the same about Anthropic.
-
I prefer "LLM" to Artificial Intelligence, as I don't consider
models to have "Intelligence" which goes far beyond the analytical
traits we train models for. Intelligence requires embodiment
and social interaction; machines lack the innate human skills of
empathy, feeling and care, which explains a lot of the evils
behind the current trends.↩
-
It should be noted that Morris also happened to be one of the
founder of Y Combinator where he is in good company with
other techno-fascists like Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, and so
on. Crime, after all, pays.↩
-
Probably a good time to watch All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.↩
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