I wanted a typical dev/qa/prod with medium specced boxes.

I was denied for quota, with an esoteric process for review.

I'd just made a case for deploying to GCP over AWD so got a bit of egg on my face. Went over and had it done on AWS in a few minutes.

A couple days later, the Google product team contacted me. I told them what happened.

It got escalated, and I ended up on a call with like 5 or 6 people from Google, some very senior. I told them what happened.

They made very concerned sounding noises and told me how this was a product failure on their part, how they'd get it corrected, etc... and they'd fixed my account so I could now make the machines. Of course, I was already deployed to AWS at that point.

That company grew and ended up with a pretty big cloud spend eventually. Google totally missed it.

I was at a new startup a few years later and decided to deploy to GCP.

Denied for quota.

The original "secret elixir of eternal youth" from the crusades era is still available though, it's meant to be consumed as a medicinal tonic with a spoon. It comes in a cool small wooden bottle, I just scored and got three of them at my local Total Wine [3].

Edit: I just realized most probably aren't familiar with the history here. It's a fascinating story that starts with the crusades, involves the monks feeling both France and Spain, smuggling the recipe through prison, etc... [1] [2]

[1] https://www.chartreuse.fr/en/story/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartreuse_(liqueur)

[3] https://www.totalwine.com/spirits/liqueurscordialsschnapps/h...

[1] https://www.makerstations.io/openai-employee-statistics/

[2] https://www.wheresyoured.at/oai_docs/

Do you have a good source for this?

This article is written in the style that I find particularly tedious - long winded overly descriptive character portraits.

More of a novelette than an article.

I don't think it's an attention span thing for me, it's more that as I try to read it, all I can think of is how the author is purposefully adding to the word count to drive those ad impressions.

I have to try to sort through endless exposition and excruciating detail to try to learn something interesting, all the while being fed an endless diet of ads. And tracking cookies. And difficult tracking options. And pop-ups.

No wonder people just want to use AI to read and summarize things.

My AP English teacher would have flunked me for writing like this.

Someone logged in to my account from a state I'd never logged in from before and posted a bunch of spam for an hour.

X perma banned my account. They told me I was banned for life, and any account I ever tried to make in the future would be banned. I appealed, explained that my account had obviously been hacked. It was denied.

So, ok.

I went and canceled all of my business subscriptions to Super Grok, and removed any business relationship I have with them. I've been banned for life, after all.

After a couple months, I have to say, it's been a total positive development. I miss the elephant videos, but I absolutely don't miss the constant background anxiety from political outrage/engagement farming. I liked grok, got some laughs from unhinged mode, but don't really notice not having it anymore, lots of good options out there. Hell, I get 90% of what I want (better search experience, summaries) from Kagi.

It's wild to think that people are going to be relying on X for financial stuff now.

Hope their accounts don't get hacked.

Check out the New Luddite movement [1] [2]

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/08/business/ai-luddite-movement-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Luddism

Talented, experienced devs leaving the field out of disgust would be pretty disruptive.

Crumbling, faulty technical infrastructure with unmanageable heaps of AI slop that no one understands would definitely disrupt businesses.

Skill atrophy, and an entire generation of "developers" that have never actually written code will be disruptive when something breaks and no one knows how to fix it (this isn't a hypothetical, I'm seeing this phenomenon in a lot of large enterprise groups).

The total elimination of novel solutions, new ideas and new approaches to development and the resulting industry wide stagnation won't be disruptive, but will certainly be a drag.

The fundamental argument that I've personally made since the early days of this is that LLMs are not reasoning, in the way that word is commonly understood.

There are lots of reasons why that argument needs to evolve that could certainly appear to be "moving the goalposts", but let's take an example.

A lot of AIs were tripped up by the question "Should I walk or drive 50m to the carwash?" Several folks liked to use that as an example that illustrates that LLMs aren't reasoning, but as the models have been trained on that specific example, it's of course less useful. An AI can mostly nail it now.

So a different example is needed. A new demonstration of how these things fail at basic reasoning a child can do.

Did I move the goalposts? I don't think so. The fundamental argument stays the same. It's not hard to find lots of examples that trip up LLMs, because they are what they are: statistical inference machines. Nothing more and nothing less.

Useful, sure. But also commonly misapplied to areas for which they are inappropriate solutions.

For the same reason that you can't draw a 15 of Diamonds from a regular card deck.

Everything works like normal html + css, but you get all the benefits of reusability and encapsulated script logic.

Lit-html (the library, not the framework) gives this approach super rendering speed too.

There are a wide variety of things, including communication with providers, that OpenAI can do without being regulated by HIPAA. The provider, however would most likely be covered, so they would be under an obligation to not disclose any PHI.

As an example, consider a hypothetical "email my doc" app. This app could take health information from the patient and email it to all of their doctors without falling under HIPAA at all.

What you're probably thinking of is the HIPAA Privacy Rule (there's more to HIPAA than just that, the Security Rule is pretty involved). Under the Privacy Rule, CEs and BAs can not disclose PHI without a patient's consent, with a few exceptions.

If the patient is disclosing that information though, all bets are off (aside from state level regulations).

It doesn't apply to information the patient supplies directly.

As a patient, I can take out a street sign displaying my health records if I want. It's my data.

If I want to upload it to a strange AI or any other app, that's completely fine. HIPAA isn't involved, for either me or the company I upload to.

In fact, quite the opposite. CMS has been going to great pains over the past decade or so to create standards to help patients get access to their records and own them themselves.

Different states may have additional protections in this case, and I know there has been some discussion at the federal level about regulating these "wellness" apps.

As an interesting technical detail not many people know, HIPAA only applies to Covered Entities and Business Associates engaging in the electronic exchange of information using "standard transactions", and was intended to regulate insurance and billing transactions.

A doctor that keeps paper charts and bills cash directly to the patient wouldn't fall under HIPAA at all.

LLMs are fundamentally limited by their architecture to only return a token predicted by a statistical inference, essentially lossy decompression.

It's like arguing that taking an image, compressing it with JPEG and low quality, then decompressing it into something blurry with some random color values thrown in is creating new art.

No one is arguing that everything a human has created is good. No one is arguing that LLMs can't be useful.

Sutton is arguing that it can't be novel. Cherry picking a couple of words doesn't change his argument, which is very clear.

Should be interesting to see what happens to the programming profession when there isn't anyone around anymore who actually knows programming.

[1] https://youtu.be/kEbVTcncuX0?is=gEMe5zD9sXWD4ONy

Sure, politics colors many people's worldview and it's hard for them to put it in a box - that means we shouldn't try?

In a better world, we'd focus on critical thinking, being less sure of yourself, openness and active listening. We'd teach people to work to think objectively and to identify the differences between technical opinions, emotional and political ones.

We wouldn't say "well, this is hard, so let's just do whatever".

So, not sure that counts as "serious" in your estimation, but I would definitely argue that dynamically typed languages are superior for a large class of problems.

Also, just a tip: it's usually better to be less sure of yourself, and seek to understand other's reasoning. It'll get you a lot farther than trying to convince everyone of how right you are.

If you're not sure why an experienced developer would hold an opinion different than yours, why not just ask?