So basically, no one knows the correct spelling or where it came from, but in true redditor fashion everyone insists it’s the more intellectual option and everyone who disagrees is an idiot.
This reminds me of the story of Narcissus. The tragedy is that he cannot love anyone who loves him, because he cannot love himself. When he rejects the advances of the young man Ameinias, he is punished by Nemesis who proclaims that Narcissus “would never be able to be loved by the one he fell in love with.” The irony is that this was already his curse; after his punishment, he fails to recognize his own face in a pool of water, and falls in love with his wounded self, who cannot love him back.
It’s just the wrong analogy. Harnesses, for the most part, extend an agent’s capabilities and better ground them in the real world through tools and the ability to check external sources, rather than restricting them.
Think about how much scrolling through UIs, settings menus, and different interfaces we have for every app that are all designed differently. Is this really peak technology, or something that is just the best we’ve been able to do without “smart” agents that can manipulate these programs themselves?
Reactionary emotional advice does no good, it just makes people want to hold their positions more defensively. If you care enough to say something, care enough to say it with reasons that might shift someone’s perspective.
To say that students don’t benefit from getting good grades using LLMs is incredibly naive. Learning is only about the third or fourth most important “benefit” for students, after getting a degree, getting good grades, and making connections.
Prayer does work, through the mechanism of putting your thoughts in perspective and context and sharing them outside yourself. Whether or not people understand the reason “why” it works doesn’t matter.
It’s always funny to me to see people in tech, who have largely been employed to put other people out of work for the last 50 years, change their stance on tech as soon as it starts to affect them.
Right now, you’d use skyscanner directly for finding flights. Maybe Expedia for hotels. What if instead of needing to know about what app to use for every different type of thing you wanted to book, and dealing with their own separate UIs and dark patterns to upsell you, you just ask ChatGPT to curate a list for you, and then tell it to book once you’ve chosen?
In 20 years, we may not be writing UIs for apps anymore. We may just be writing tools for AI agents to consume.
Anyone who’s trying to make money through stuff like this (versus just experimenting) is using one of the many paid captcha-solving APIs, which cost a cent or two per solved captcha.
What is good code now is only good code because of the bad programming languages we’ve had to accept for the last hundred years because we’re tied to incremental improvements. We’re tied to static brittle types. But look at natural systems - they all use dynamic “languages.” When you get a cut, your flesh doesn’t throw an exception because it’s connected to the wrong “thing.”
Maybe AI will redefine what good code means, because it’s better able to handle ambiguity.
It’s a useless skill to keep sharp. It will never again be important. It’s like the electrical engineering professors who insisted we needed to understand how the circuitry worked in order to be good programmers. We didn’t.