It's worth learning to harvest with a scythe because it's cheap, good exercise, and has no mechanical parts to fail.
The issue isn't whether it's worth learning something in a personal development sense, it's whether it's worth going into massive student loan debt to pursue a career path that was once seen as a ticket to a comfy office job. LLMs probably won't replace top performing software engineers. Will they replace the mediocre cog-in-the-machine coders that most people become? In 5 years? 10 years? 20 years? That's what has college students worrying about whether it's "worth it".
This is a good way to get outside and do challenges like jogging every single street in your town. I figured that OSM was basically complete, but info was severely lacking for my area. It’s really easy to make local maps MUCH better.
The silver lining is that it's currently easy to recognize LLM blog posts and the "authors" never realize how bad they sound. This "author" probably removed em dashes and thought he was all set. These slop posts will be worse when LLMs are better at sounding human.
As someone who’s only used Emacs for around 5 years, Emacs is awesome even if you haven’t been using it since 1987. I used to get intimidated by the fact that every single Emacs user has been using it for decades. System Crafters was fantastic for getting a handle on things. It’s one of the coolest programs ever.
That said, I’m usually in vim. Emacs is a neverending rabbit hole of a hobby that begs to be tinkered with forever. I find it easier to just do useful stuff in vim and I’m always trying to add a new efficient keybinding or function to my Emacs config.
Fellow LLM doomer here. Don’t forget how many people uncritically accept LLM responses as true, unknowingly read LLM-generated articles, or listen a Youtubers reading LLM scripts as if it’s real thought/opinion. I saw an obviously LLM-generated Steam review for some reason today. It will be 100x worse when even people hyper aware of it can no longer tell what’s real.
Whoever controls the model weights will just get to control information, data, and opinions of the masses going forward I guess. This is going to be my generation’s Fox News one day.
If I was an end user of a working product (AI or not), I wouldn't care.
At work generating and fixing loads of slop is less rewarding work than doing old coding, troubleshooting, article writing, whatever. The internet is full of fake blogs full of fake information. Youtube is full of fake videos and people reading LLM scripts. It feels impossible to share or appreciate small projects because it's so much harder to tell if any effort or thought went into something at all now. My parents can't tell what's real on social media. I'm less sure in my career path because I might spend my time learning skills that become useless in 5 years. I have conversations on the internet or Jira where people respond with LLM output (half the time saying "Claude says..." half the time not.) Kids are cheating their way through school. I'm probably getting dumber by using it.
There's plenty of reasons to be "anti-AI". It's not just a tool that's making programming more convenient.
I asked an LLM (Gemini) about a calculated field in my taxes that was wrong but I couldn’t figure out why and every time it tried to tell me something like “It’s a common glitch for tax software to calculate like this.”
When I did figure out what was wrong and asked if that made sense, it told me I was absolutely right though.
I think people are lucky the IRS fired all their employees this day and age so this work isn’t getting checked as much.
Once every single thing connected to the internet (iPhone + 10 years?). Tech products, software, video games, etc. were new and exciting ways to solve problems. Now every single thing is a way to monetize, steal your data, or lock you into a platform to do those things later.
To fill the gap left by all the sites being blocked, the company intends to offer access to a library of religious content, including AI-generated Bible videos.
Truly a serious and spiritual company. Maybe you can chat with AI Jesus instead of going to PornHub.
Since last year Amazon doesn’t let you download your books as files from the web anymore. You have to sync purchases to a (presumably supported) Kindle device. I have a jailbroken Kindle and was shocked at the added hoops to read a legally purchased book.
Obviously the solution is to stop supporting Amazon. Some authors unfortunately only sell ebooks there.
This could just be a skill or wrong use case thing, but do you only use spreadsheets for pure number-crunching? I've played terminal spreadsheets, mostly sc-im, but I often have some longform text field (like 'Notes') that becomes more fiddly to deal with than a GUI.
Visidata is the only terminal program I've found that handles large text fields in tabular data nicely the way you can drill down into a table row, then Ctrl+O to edit a field in your editor, but it's not a spreadsheet.
I have AI automation metrics that are tracked. We have automation that automates the AI usage whether you want it or not so our metrics are 100% for everyone. Presumably this makes the stock go up somehow.
I know this is nothing new, but it's insane that we need policies like "When talking to us you have to use human words, not copy pasted LLM output" and "You must understand the code you're committing."
When I was young, I used to think I'd be open minded to changing times and never be curmudgeonly, but I get into one "conversation" where someone responds with ChatGPT, and I am officially a curmudgeon.
Alternatively, join my meetings on time. You click End Call, then Join. It takes 3 seconds.
You get Outlook reminders 15 minutes in advance. Webex/Teams notifications 5 minutes in advance. I’m sure you can make your watch vibrate or something.
People at my office join every meeting 5 minutes late because no one expects meetings to start on time anymore. So I guess we’re following this advice in all but the nominally scheduled time. Drives me nuts.
Last I used Visidata, it didn't play nice with fields like %sort (they'd disappear if you re-saved the file) and if you had two fields with the same name in one record they'd get combined into a single field like "Name[2]:" when you re-saved. It might've also killed comments? I'm certainly not surprised it only has basic recfile support, because who use recfiles, but I'd be careful using VD with them for anything but viewing.
You probably won't get hacked and have your domain taken down for distributing malware. But you also probably won't be randomly banned by Google/Proton. Neither feels like "full, unbannable control of my email" to me. If anything, I'm more concerned about my little old domain getting hijacked than getting banned from a hosted email account.
The issue isn't whether it's worth learning something in a personal development sense, it's whether it's worth going into massive student loan debt to pursue a career path that was once seen as a ticket to a comfy office job. LLMs probably won't replace top performing software engineers. Will they replace the mediocre cog-in-the-machine coders that most people become? In 5 years? 10 years? 20 years? That's what has college students worrying about whether it's "worth it".