Embracing the dark side – An Aristotelian analysis of large language models

\nTL;DR: Linux nerd → DevOps wrangler → indie gamedev. 🐧 → ☁️ → 🎮\n\n\n","description":"","image":""},{"id":"quest-log","title":"🗺️ The Quest Log","html":"\n2025 – now · 🎮 Founder, Land of Enchantment Games \nMy indie gamedev studio, based in New Mexico.\nAlso cooking 🍳: my side projects\n\nmerecatholicity.com (Git): my eclectic ecumenical project. It includes a self-published book, Mere Catholicity (public domain, typeset in LaTeX for PDF, paperback and Logos), a library of the Fathers, councils and classics re-typeset from public-domain sources, and merecat 🐈, an AI research librarian that answers from the library with citations. I built it serverless: a PureScript, lit-js and Tailwind front end over a custom headless API backend on Cloudflare Workers, with D1 (SQLite), R2 (S3-compatible storage) and Durable Objects for real-time chat. A GitHub Actions CI/CD system ships both the application and its Terraform infrastructure, with approval gates before production, staged rollouts and nightly tests against production. For the community side I borrowed the best bits of the old internet: 4chan-style auth, Snapchat-style DMs, Signal-style end-to-end encryption, and Facebook-style profiles and walls.\nstasislinux.org (Git): my own Linux distro, the natural follow-through of my years as a package maintainer on KISS Linux with Dylan Araps.\nbackseat-driver: my tutor for keeping AI-era programmers' fundamentals sharp. Free for personal use; commercial licenses in the store for businesses.\n.emacs.d: my Emacs config. It starts in about 0.2s, with everything deferred through use-package. It prefers built-ins (eglot, flymake), runs on vertico/corfu/tree-sitter, and binds the same SLIME-style keys in every language.\n\n2020 – 2025 · ☁️ DevOps @ Upgrade, Inc. · Immaculata Studios, LLC · Skvare, LLC \nHerded Kubernetes, Terraform (5k+ lines of homegrown modules), AWS, CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, and a Postfix server that sent a million emails a month without landing in spam. Rode the industry's evolution from LAMP-stack monoliths to IaC-driven cloud microservices, right up to the arrival of AI automation, which is when I turned to solo gamedev.\n2017 – 2020 · 🐧 Open Source Hermit \nSpent 10+ hours a day learning Linux from the kernel up. Maintained packages for KISS Linux, wrote docs for Funtoo, and built Themelios (a NixOS ZFS-on-root installer) and Spartan Emacs. Got commits merged upstream (e.g. libcap). 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Last updated October 10, 2026.\n","description":"","image":""}],"collections":{"blog":{"title":"Blog","description":"Posts by Adam Schaefers.","image":"","intro":"","perPage":10,"entries":[{"slug":"2026-10-21-embracing-the-dark-side","date":"2026-10-21","dateLabel":"October 21, 2026","title":"Embracing the dark side","excerpt":"\nAn Aristotelian analysis of large language models.","html":"\nIn March I made a video telling you to "tell your AI-pushing boss to get\nwrecked."1\n\n\n\nWhen Aristotle broke with his own teacher, he called it a duty, "for the sake\nof maintaining the truth even to destroy what touches us closely."2\nWhat touches me closely is six essays and a video against leaning on AI to\ncode, all with my name on them.\n\n\n\nAI is new, but the questions it raises are old, so I've gone back to Aristotle\nand Aquinas. One question won't leave me alone. How does a thing that can't\nthink beat me at my own job?\n\n\n\nWhere I stood - it imitates, it doesn't think, and that's already\nenough to wreck us.\n\nSo-called Machines of Loving Grace - a CEO's techno-religion, and why I\nwouldn't live in it.\nProgress without a creed - the race, the clock, church and the\ntrivium.\n\nNobody knows tradeoffs like a programmer - I'd been treating a\ntradeoff like a sin.\nWhat I got wrong - it got good, fast.\nAGI doesn't matter - a machine can't have a mind, and it doesn't\nneed one to be dangerous.\nCan it improve itself? - it can grow in degree, never in kind.\nEven Linus - how to use the tool with integrity.\nThe right fear - the pragmatist's choice, and what's worth\nbeing afraid of.\nDon't forget how to code - use it or lose it.\n\n\n1 \nThe fall of the software engineer, the rise of the software artisan, Enchant Games\njournal, March 7, 2026, where the video is.\n\n2 \nAristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I.6, parting from Plato's Forms,\n"while both are dear, piety requires us to honour truth above our friends."\n\n\n\nWhere I stood\n\n\nIn March, I saw a philosophical problem. The machine can't have a thought of\nits own. It doesn't reason. It imitates reasoning.\n\n\n\nAnd look who it's imitating for. Aristotle called man "the most imitative of\nliving creatures," the one who "through imitation learns his earliest\nlessons."3 It's a gift, and it's how we learn anything at all.\n\n\n\nSo put the most imitative creature on earth in front of a machine that does\nnothing but imitate. Who copies whom? We copy the copy.\n\n\n\nRené Girard added what Aristotle left out.4 We don't only copy each\nother's ways. We copy each other's wants. So we're easy to fool, and easier\nstill to steer.\n\n\n\nMost of the time, the imitation passes for the real thing. We've tolerated mediocre software for\ndecades. It works, ship it.\n\n\n\nThe machine is bad enough to bury us in technical debt, and sharp enough that\nit might someday refactor its own mess, long after we've forgotten how. Borrow\nnow, pay later, betting the bill never comes. We trade understanding for speed. We used to be\npaid to code. Now we pay to code.\n\n\n\nAI isn't going to become human. Humans are going to become NPCs.\n\n\n\nMaybe it tops out here, and from now on it only gets more efficient. It doesn't\nmatter. People who copy instead of think, code nobody understands, and a\nmonthly bill to a lab for the privilege. That's a hellscape, and what we have\nnow is already enough to build it.\n\n\n3 \nAristotle, Poetics 4, trans. S. H. Butcher (MIT Internet Classics Archive).\n\n4 \nRené Girard (1923-2015), the literary critic and Catholic convert\nwhose mimetic theory holds that past our bodily needs we learn what to want by\ncopying somebody else. He first laid it out in Deceit, Desire and the Novel\n(1961).\n\n\n\n\nSo-called Machines of Loving Grace\n\n\nNot everybody sees a hellscape. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, wrote\nMachines of Loving Grace to sell the opposite.5\nHis usual subject is the risks, and his company\nresearches how to reduce them. This essay is the other half, his sketch of "what\na world with powerful AI might look like if