As for the comparisons - some are partly comparable to the current situation, but there's some differences as well. Sure books and online content enabled others to join, thereby reducing the "moat" for those who built careers on esoteric knowledge. But it didn't make things _that_ easy - it still required years of invested time to become a good developer. Also, it happened very gradually and while the developer pie was growing, and the range of tech growing, so developers who kept on top of technology (like OP did) could still be valuable. Of course, no one knows fully how it will play out this time around; maybe the pie will get even bigger, maybe there's still room for lots of developers and the only difference is that the tedious work is done. Sure, then it is comparable. But let's be honest, this has a very real chance of being different (humans inventing AI surely is something special!) and could result in skill-sets collapsing in value at record time. And perhaps worse, without opening new doors. Sure, new types of jobs may appear but they may be so different that they are essentially completely different careers. It is not like in the past you just needed to learn a new programming language.

I think you really hit the jackpot because you got a full career out of it, saw an amazing evolution etc. So you can hopefully enjoy the ride now being more as a spectator without the fear of being personally affected by job displacement. Enjoy the retirement!

Firstly, the math isn't even close. A human being consumes maybe 15 MWh of food energy from years 0 to 20. Modern frontier models take on the order of 100,000 MWh to train. It's a 10,000x difference. Furthermore, the human is actively doing 'inference' (living, acting, producing) during those 20 years of training and is also doings lots of non-brain stuff. Besides the energy math, it's comparing apples-to-oranges. A human brain doesn't start out as a blank slate; it has billions of years of evolutionary priors for language and spatial reasoning that LLMs have to teach themselves from scratch, so this could explain why a human can do some things cheaper. Also, the learning material available to a human is inherently created to be easily ingested by a human brain, whereas a blank LLM needs to build the capacity to process that data. Altman seems to hint at a comparison to the whole human evolution, but that seems unfair in the other direction, because humans and human evolution had to make discoveries from scratch and trial and error whereas LLMs get to ingest the final "good stuff". But either way you slice it, it's just not a good comparison, though not an 'inhuman' or immoral one.

In general, every attempt at explanation of LLM's that appeal to "[just] predicting next token" is thought terminating and automatically invalid as explanation. Why? Because it is confusing the objective function with the result. It adds exactly zero over saying "I know how a chess engine works, it just predicts the next move and has been trained to predict the next move" or "A talking human just predicts the next word, as it was trained to do". It says zero about how this is done internally in the model. You could have a physical black box predicting the next token, and inside you could have simple frequentist tables or you could have a human brain or you could have an LLM. In all cases you could say the box is predicting the next token and if any training was involved you could say it was trained to predict the next token.

I also had a Seitek Eco charger that could charge "normal" alkalines. But you had to be careful not to discharge them too deep. It seemed kind of pointless over rechargebles though the capacity of NiCD/NiMH was way lower back then (I remember when NiMH AA batteries at 700 mAh were considered really high!). And perhaps it some devices it was great they held 1.5 V.

At one point I hadn’t kept it charged, the battery went completely flat, and after that it would no longer charge at all. When I called the company, they said the battery was now too deeply discharged and required an “intelligent” charger to revive it. They sent a charger with a slot for the bare battery; some LEDs blinked in various patterns for a while, and eventually normal charging resumed.

I’ve always wondered what that charger actually did, that the built-in charger was not capable of. Was it performing some kind of analysis to decide whether the battery was safe to recover (e.g. after deep discharge), or was it simply applying some initial charge ignoring the battery’s protection circuitry (and at what risk)?

As I recall there's all kinds of hacks in the design to keep them cheap. For instance, letting the fly-back transformer for producing the high voltages needed operate at the same frequency as the horizontal scan rate (~15 kHz) so that mechanism essentially serves double duty. The same was even seen in microcomputers where the same crystal needed for TV was also used for the microprocessor - meaning that e.g. a "European" Commodore 64 with PAL was actually a few percent slower than an American C64 with NTSC. And other crazy things like that.

Just wanted to add one thing, not as a correction but just because I learned it recently and find it fascinating. PAL televisions (the color TV standard in Europe) actually do store one full horizontal scanline at a time, before any of it is drawn on the screen. This is due to a clever encoding used in this format where the TV actually needs to average two successive scan lines (phase-shifted compared to each other) to draw them. Supposedly this cancels out some forms of distortion. It is quite fascinating this was even possible with analogue technology. The line is stored in a delay line for 64 microseconds. See e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsk4WWtRx6M

So why is this interesting to know? It gives you a better picture of where your money goes, what your bur rate is, how much of your spend is on mandatory stuff (food, rent/mortage etc.) and how much is on things you could potentially cut if need be. It makes it possible to know how far you are from various levels (/lifestyles) of financial independence. I have a pretty good idea that I could make it to retirement even if I permanently lost my job and I know what that lifestyle would roughly be like.

This also makes it possible to do proper budgeting by setting aside realistic amounts even for irregular expenses, so you're essentially 'saving up' for the irregular expenses. Done right, your "expenses" (money set aside in budget) are exactly the same month after month even though your actual money outflows in some months may be much higher. This is both true for the irregular expenses like travel, but also for semi-regular expenses that may come due only annually or every three months (mortgage etc.).

For me personally, it made me feel much more comfortable about spending larger amounts on travel etc. because I've already saved up the money via budgeting and I've never seen it as savings that goes away. Savings are per definition the difference in monthly income vs month set aside in budget. I make sure to be a bit conservative, so I actually also build a buffer on the savings account, usable for truly extraordinary expenses.

But your current situation sounds healthy - and if you have amble cushion, and you're confident it will continue that way and you have no desire to change it yourself, the above is of course less relevant.