I've built large human data entry operations. Variable throughput, monotony, hiring and perf management and firing, management, quality management. All of these things are large investments of human effort and money.

If I can achieve the same quality level (or in some use cases, even slightly degraded output) with software scaling characteristics and costs... I see zero reasons outside regulatory compliance reasons to have people do it.

"four three uh let's see sorry my vision is bad six eight..."

Easy versions of problems are easy. But reality is messy.

And no, neither I nor anybody else is expecting a 50B parameter model to find every instance. But finding 90% or 95% or 99% is pretty good, and sufficiently good for many use cases.

The use case for this is that many enterprise customers want SaaS products to strip PII from ingested content, and there's no non-model way to do it.

Think, ingesting call transcripts where those calls may include credit card numbers or private data. The call transcripts are very useful for various things, but for obvious reasons we don't want to ingest the PII.

This is a big claim with no justification.

Cars have dynamic traction control, internal temperature control, etc. You may get frost bite on your bicycle, but almost certainly not in your car. Having four wide wheels makes the vehicle radically more stable.

Add seat belts, air bags, etc. cars have far more safety features than a bike can.

Of course, cars go faster and going faster increases lethality at the limit. No argument there, far more people die in cars in general. But specifically concerning weather, cars allow people to do many things that a bicycle cannot.

Not to mention general comfort. Being in a bike in a snow storm is very unpleasant!

In other words, I'm reading this as effectively a full admission that the claims are true but the company is saying not their responsibility.

Very, very bad.

It strikes me that if you developed your skill set around using AI more effectively, you could have both developed a deep understanding and gotten what you wanted, and done it in less time and at higher quality than you could have done solo.

That said, the fact that you can use AI in an unskilled way to produce something kinda cool... is itself kinda cool! It means there's an on-ramp to using AI! People with no skills can get started, same day, and make stuff. And over time, can learn to make even better stuff! That's pretty cool to me.

I dunno. There's ways to use LLMs that produces writing that is substantially not-your-ideas. But there's also definitely ways to use it to express things that the model would not have otherwise outputted without your unique input.

I don't disagree with a lot of what you're saying but I also have a different frame.

Even if we take your claim that LLMs don't make people better writers as true (which I think there's plenty to argue with), that's not the point at all.

What I'm saying is people are communicating better. For most ideas, writing is just a transport vessel for ideas. And people now have tools to communicate better than they would have been.

Most people aren't trying to become good writers. That's true before, and true now.

On the other hand, this argument probably isn't worth having. If your frame is that LLMs are expensive toys that ruin everything -- well, that's quite an aggressive posture to start with and is both unlikely to bear a useful conversation or a particularly delightful future for you.

There are skilled writers. Very skilled, unique writers. And I'm both exceedingly impressed by them as well as keenly aware that they are a rare breed.

But there's so many people with interesting ideas locked in their heads that aren't skilled writers. I have a deep suspicion that many great ideas have gone unshared because the thinker couldn't quite figure out how to express it.

In that way, perhaps we now have a monotexture of writing, but also perhaps more interesting ideas being shared.

Of course, I love a good, unique voice. It's a pleasure to parse patio11's straussian technocratic musings. Or pg's as-simple-as-possible form.

And I hope we don't lose those. But somehow I suspect we may see more of them as creative thinkers find new ways to express themselves. I hope!

It's definitely the case that some people have a much larger magnitude of experience or persistence of experience. And for some, it's at levels that do make functioning in society quite difficult or impossible.

And yet, I think the point you are quite rightly making is that many people who are decidedly low on the spectrum are now adopting the identity of autism as a way to explain why life is hard.

I don't know why people feel inclined to adopt the label. I don't care that they do, they can call themselves whatever they want. But I do wonder if there are more productive ways of perceiving yourself, if you are indeed very much capable of functioning in society.

But it shouldn't be illegal or somehow indicative of criminality.

Same thing with self custody of crypto.

Not them disqualifying you, but you actively saying, "Hey, not sure we are the right solution for you. Seems like you're trying to achieve X, but we're really better fit if you're trying to achieve Y."

This is in lieu of trying to convince them that you're a good fit for X, or that they should actually really be wanting to achieve Y.

Quick disqualification is sort of a counter-intuitive idea for a lot of throughput maximizing engineers. Shouldn't we want to optimize every lead?

Perhaps, but I think the better frame is optimizing productive seller-minutes. And time spent on deals that should die (and probably will die, eventually) is definitely not optimized.

1. On one hand, walled gardens like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc, are most of the internet and they decidedly use React (or similar) frameworks. So from that perspective, the statement is sorta trivially true.

2. There may well be a horde of websites that are pure HTML rendering. But, those sites are not largely being developed by developers – they are being generated by platforms (like Squarespace, etc.) so are out of the scope of "sites and apps built by developers"

All this is stated without data, of course.

A burden, a liability, a drag. But not debt.

For this specific thing (LLM-assisted coding), we are still in nerd territory where there are tremendous gains to be had from keeping up and tinkering.

There's a lot of billions dollars being invested to give devs who don't want to do this the right tools. We aren't quite there yet, largely because the frontier is moving so fast.

I made my original comment because it was so far from my experience, and I assumed it was because I am using a totally different set of tools.

If somebody really doesn't want to be left behind, the solution is to do the unreasonable: read hacker news everyday and tinker.

Personally, I enjoy that labor. But it's certainly not for everybody.

Using, like, gpt-4o is extremely not useful for programming. But using Claude Code in your actual repo is insanely useful.

Gotta use the right tool + model.

By examining the types of tasks you will be consistently faced with, you can ask yourself, "Do I actually want to do that?"