Remember that time grok told people not to use it for second opinions on their medical records? ...on second thought that might be an exception that proves the rule.
I don't know why this sentiment isn't more common. LLMs are basically two things:
1. chatbots
2. automation for the process of googling something and copy-pasting the first result.
The only people I know who use it for more than those two things ask them to perform tasks they can't do reliably, don't check the output, and then they're just wrong most of the time. If they had just used it as slightly different google search they'd have been fine.
Putting this into my rotation of excuses. "It wasn't my fault! They were hacking, also my fingers were slippery and the deterministic behavior of psuedorandom number generators guaranteed we would lose anyway."
I mean, yeah. There's enough nukes locked and loaded around the globe to end human civilization as we know it in minutes. Nobody's made a bomb that can fix socioeconomics.
this is absolutely true, but there's an additional nuance: yes, python is fantastic, yes, it's easy and forgiving, but there are other languages like that too.
...except there really aren't. other than ruby and maybe go, every other popular language sacrifices ease of use for things that simply do not matter for the overwhelming majority of programs. much of python's popularity doesn't come from being easy and forgiving, it's that everything else isn't. for normal programming why would we subject ourselves to anything but python unless we had no choice?
while I'm on the soapbox I'll give java a special mention: a couple years ago I'd have said java was easy even though it's tedious and annoying, but I've become reacquainted with it for a high school program (python wouldn't work for what they're doing and the school's comp sci class already uses java.)
I think the key thing not obvious to most data scientists is they're not using python because it meets their needs, it's because we've failed them. twice.
1. data scientists aren't programmers, so why do they need a programming language? the tools they should be using don't exist. they'd need programmers to make them, and all we have to offer is... more programming languages.
2. the giant problem at the heart of modern software: the most important feature of a modern programming language is being easy to read and write. this feature is conspicuously absent from most important languages.
they're trapped. they can't do what they need without a programming language but there are only a handful they can possibly use. the real reason python ended up with such good library support is they never really had a choice.
Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird is a creative writing exercise which didn't actually happen and isn't verifiably true to any degree. There were never any Finches, Ewells, Robinsons or Radleys, yet readers often find it quite powerful because they're perfectly aware the story's events have played out between real people many, many times. They don't need to be told the real names of people who have been in lynch mobs to know real people have been lynched.
Email servers aren't quite as heavy a subject, but we know these things happen.
I decided my life could not possibly go on until I knew what "elvisgogo" does, so I downloaded the tarball and poked around. it's a pretty ordinary numpy + pandas + matplotlib project that makes graphs from csv. one line jumped out at me:
str_0 = ['refractive_index','Na','Mg','Al','Si','K','Ca','Ba','Fe','Type']
the university of st. andrews has a laser named "elvis" that goes on a remote controlled submarine: https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~bds2/elvislaser.htm
I was hoping it'd be about go-go dancing to elvis music, but physics experiments on light in seawater is pretty cool too.