You - and Eric Raymond, who believes he’s an incarnation of the god Pan - are both using a meaning of the word that has only ever been used in a relatively tiny subculture. That meaning has no bearing on its broader use.

What did I get wrong exactly?

What I pointed out is that ideological objectors often try to claim that AI is actually technically useless.

The problem with that is that it makes their arguments seem less credible, and even misleads their own supporters into underestimating what they’re dealing with. It’s a literally self-defeating position.

By design, it’s impossible to understand what the Trinity actually is. Baffling with bullshit is a longstanding religious tradition.

Ah, I guess that helps explain why Studio Ghibli did an Earthsea movie.

There's also a lot of ideological opposition, which often tries to claim that the tech is useless etc.

> Am I missing out on the work involved in learning things I would be forced to otherwise, also yes.

Yes, but many of those things are things you might not really care about learning about. And if you want to learn about them, AI can be a big help, if you use it appropriately.

The "mixed bag" comes from the way people use it, mostly not from the tech itself.

"Ultrasound machines vibrate everything around them therefore make sound" does not imply "I vibrate everything around me therefore make ultrasound."

Avoiding tool use because you're afraid you won't be able to use the tool responsibly is not likely to be a winning strategy in the end. Learning to use the tool well is much more effective.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gKeQHfgZns

Beautiful burn.

When LLMs were first introduced, they didn't have much of a feedback loop. They wrote code, but they couldn't compile it. Not surprisingly, the code had bugs.

Now, they run with harnesses that allow them to compile the code, and react to the issues they observe. They can fix their own bugs and solve problems that they create, just like humans.

Give an agent access to the physical world, and it seems highly likely that they will be able to "invent" things based on feedback they receive while working towards goals.

Of course, there are some well-known limitations of LLMs, one of the biggest being that they're pretrained. So there may be some things where they're not as good. Just like how some humans aren't as good at certain tasks, depending on their genetics and/or how they've been trained.

I was pointing out two things: first, your understanding of LLM capabilities is very outdated; and second, that in this respect, you're behaving much like an LLM with a training cutoff.

That further touches on the idea that the differences between you and an LLM may not be as large as you imagine. In particular, "cobbling something together if it's in their training set" is pretty much what all humans do.

You could start by reading Marx, who laid a lot of the groundwork.

> Shaking your fists at "the elites" and regurgitating populist slop is not going to

I like the way you trailed off halfway through your knee-jerk reaction, underscoring just how much your response is an automated result of indoctrination.

The common factor: the capital class screwing over the working class.

It’s as if a runner were to give up running when beaten by a horse or a car. It suggests they may have had unexamined and perhaps somewhat strange reasons for doing the activity in the first place.

People have difficulty accepting just how significant their limitations actually are. We design our world to hide those limitations. As an example, it would be easy to make computer games that are unwinnable by humans because of our slow reaction times, low speed in general, and our cognitive limitations. But no-one makes such games, because few people would want to play them for very long.

The “terrible cost” in this specific case seems to be related to discovering that we were fooling ourselves about how good we were at software development.