And of course, I'm horrified by bad decisions politicians and managers seem to make.
What predecessors are you talking about here? The internet is barely held together with duct tape and servers running only because of minute by minute injection of WD50 straight into the fan bearings. There is so much cruft everywhere that is being relied on daily in production systems that most people lost count by now on how much horrible code and setups they've seen in the life.
I spent over five years at AWS, and have worked at other major tech companies since. I continue to not know how the Internet keeps working -- it's basically always on fire, and held together only because of a lot of people who are actively firefighting.
This isn't new, a big chunk of systems you use everyday are based on probabilistic models and heuristics that work most of the time.
LLMs reach very broadly and make the trade off very apparent.