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  In a world where LLMs are widely used, attribution of where something came from is harder to get. There's multiple examples of people doing things like uploading videos and saying "I don't own this, it was made by so-and-so", as if that legally protected them. My understanding is that it never did.

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  I feel like traditional ML was focused on things we didn't know how to do, like optimizing things represented by complex vector spaces, and things which were important, but hard to do at the desired scale, like cancer diagnosis. But it seems like modern "AI"is focused on replacing things we know quite well how to do with prompting LLMs or other models, and also using those models to do things that aren't clearly worth doing in the first place.

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  Looking at a job ad that literally says "You've stopped waiting for AI to mature and are already building with it, not as a productivity trick, but as a core part of how you think about problems." Maybe they think they are saying something like "We want someone who has regularly uses AI as a tool" but to me it comes off as "We want someone who has replaced part of their brain with API calls." No thanks.

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  A lot of my posts have been anti-LLM, and I still hold that position. But, I find myself wondering if I had transplanted some of my feelings about an apparent increase in the amount of speech that is disconnected from reality, appearing in media in general, that started before ChatGPT appeared. Part of me wonders whether I just got better at seeing that disconnectedness, and another part wonders to what extent precursors to LLMs contributed to the volume of that speech.

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  I've read discussions about the Rust standard library as compared to the Python one, and I am not sure if this is anything like an original thought, but I realized that those discussions map pretty well to discussions about operating system microkernels, vs "macrokernels". And thinking a bit further in both directions away and towards end users, one could compare RISC and CISC as well as how many features a particular program should have. Think Photoshop vs Paint.

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  It suddenly struck me that Microsoft owns a website where it is said you need an account to get a job (LinkedIn), and also owns a website where most software jobs have you use as part of your job (GitHub), as well as investing in a company that is claiming it will take your job away (OpenAI).

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  Billionaires being able to redirect water usage to away from drinking water to AI datacenters isn't a AI-specific, or water specific problem. If a different grift, say Bitcoin or NFTs were the reason for resources being diverted, that would still be an issue. If instead of water, the tech worked differently and it required a different resource, say stem cells, then that's still a problem.

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  Programming isn't copying from Stack Overflow, and it isn't pulling the lever on an LLM. Programming is spending hours trying to get something working one way, and perhaps even succeeding, then taking a break then suddenly realizing a much better way for it to work instead, then typing that out in mere minutes.