anhyz

> Search is so bad and LLM so good that it's faster and easier to re-implement than reuse.

This is a scary level of AI mania.

Even if you're being assisted by the best frontier model, there is no way that reimplementing a PDF engine from scratch is faster than just using the one that's already there. AI-driven coding still takes time and tokens. A web search takes maybe 60 seconds to search and find the existing implementations?

You could even tell the LLM to configure (or even fork) one of the existing implementations for you, and that would still be way faster than a from-scratch implementation.

Honestly he's a bit over the top, but the thing he gets right is that he's constantly hammering on the insane financial incentives that everyone in the AI industry has to keep the music going.

Despite the ridiculous amount of capital being spent, the AI industry is still essentially in its startup phase, incubated in the fake-it-till-you-make-it Silicon Valley startup culture. The entire economy has been taken along for the ride. Failure is not an option.

So when the big AI players make extraordinary claims with limited evidence, or when things don't quite add up (like the HuggingFace incident), yet everything somehow seems to lead to "AI is even more powerful than we thought!", I think it's sensible to be skeptical until proven otherwise.

Zitron consistently presents the skeptic case, and many cases the hypotheses he's putting out there seem more plausible than the "official" AI narrative. Simple as that.

The HuggingFace incident still doesn't make sense. If OpenAI took their own claims seriously about the strength of their models as it relates to hacking, then their running of hacking benchmarks on anything other than a physically air-gapped network should be considered criminal negligence, full stop.

Some people like _making_ things, and some people like making _things_.

I'm sure if we just cut taxes a little more, our modern-day robber barons will choose to use their money to fix things on their own instead of building doomsday bunkers and buying superyachts.

Digital gods can't take away your ability to struggle purely for the enjoyment of it.

Think of all the things we consider fun or worthwhile that are purely unnecessary struggles. Ever play sports? Build a side project just for the fun of it? Video games? Music? Art?