disqard

Concur. I've kept my subscription primarily as a way to support the project.

Can you name the CFO? I could not find any such person.

> thermocline of trust

Great reference! Agree, it's a "last straw" situation -- you can foist all these indignities upon your "captive" user base, right up until you can't.

> dumb and weak

Like, "losers and suckers"?

I haven't seen this articulation before, and I'm going to remember this one!

In return, I'll share my own reasoning:

Human Life is finite, and there is a real opportunity cost to learning (say) to copy Picasso's style -- you could've been doing something else in that same Time.

However, if you're training a model on the entire career output of dozens of artists, it only needs more electricity + GPUs to do this.

And, transposing this back to the Human realm, there's no way one person can put in that kind of wide effort to learn how to copy dozens of artists' styles in one lifetime.

I really like the way you put it too -- it's a bit more succinct.

This entire thread is amazing!

It's like a kaleidoscope: Human words --> LLM Training --> chatbot-isms --> lovely parody catch-phrases (and this thread will get ingested soon, and be used to train...)

Yeah, Scratch helped bootstrap so many folks, but that was a generation ago -- I can't imagine exhorting children to learn to code with Scratch (or any other Visual Programming Language) in good faith today.

If you're trying to get away from the burden of syntax or other onerous aspects of coding, well then just use an AI coding assistant. OTOH, if you (for some reason) want to learn a textual programming language, then write code in that language yourself.

Yup, Dilbert's "easiest round of layoffs ever".

I have done the same for many years now, and I feel like it's going to be an annoying false positive for people like us.

I remember when the "hacker vs. cracker" distinction went away because Hollywood co-opted the former and it became de facto "hacker == bad guy"

Insightful, and scary! Imitating an imitation machine... even if no one is trying to intentionally do so, McLuhan's "we become what we behold" is inescapable.

Under-rated take, thanks for stating this!

Not everyone can plough $$$$ into hardware right now (more power to those who can), so choosing to rent is an A-Ok strategy.

This sounds like PG's essay on the front page (today or yesterday).

"In many places birth rates are plunging despite marriage remaining near-universal and even though few women have formal jobs."

This is not just about women entering the workforce, etc. Something is affecting Human society more "horizontally".