actually, i’m gonna make a second comment from a more personal perspective because my main gripe with it (you know, other than the blatant abuse of the copyright system, the cult-like atmosphere of the companies pushing it, and the rush to build datacenters on cheap land which uses up local resources in the process) is that it has shown that i was much more alone in my previous jobs than i thought.

i work with tech people, and i like them have my own home server with a bunch of stuff on it. i like to tinker with it, write little scripts that do useful and fun things, build things just to explore programming languages, etc. the people around me didn’t really understand, they were all in on smart homes and stylish dashboards, and i’ve never been about that but at least they’re solving problems so i’m interested in how they do things. then i got laid off.

when you don’t have a job, time moves at a different pace. you can absorb news on more of a macro scale. and reading tech news left me so confused. all these people around me were letting the language models spit out crap code. they gave up on what i thought was the most interesting part of the job, actually solving the problem in elegant and efficient ways, and instead are just dictating. people are using ai to read emails that someone else used ai to write, they’re burning thousands of kWh to iterate through a hundred different broken implementations of the same thing rather than thinking about the problem.

as i said in another thread, it’s like being in the cycling club because you love cycling, having to leave because of an injury, and when you get back everyone has switched to cars because they’re faster.