So as opposed to bilking the ultra-wealthy to invest in a bunk idea, at worst this seems to be enticing them to pay for an at-worst expensive and possibly useless service. On that scale, it's downright ethical.

I'd even argue that in this case, on desktop, you could have a whole side panel with play by plays, while on mobile you could make the small UI elements larger, without losing any of the charm of either one.

Doing retail office deployments of custom code on employee computers is a weird niche, and you find whatever works and hope you can maintain it somehow. Cygwin was awesome though, saved me a ton of time and the client a lot of money for the moment. (The client later stipulated to all future franchisees that they had to buy only Macs, lol)

I never want to deal with that again ;)

[edit] fwiw, Termux on Android is similarly a fun pseudo-environment. It's a nice and helpful toy.

Yes, if the LLMs didn't amplify whatever people already thought and feed it back to them as sycophantic praise, and instead scolded them into realizing they were doing something dumb, then maybe we would be having a totally different conversation.

But then the conversation might be about an LLM scolding someone into committing suicide instead of helping them commit suicide.

Both might be just as bad.

Heck, it even explains my own attraction to overfit sports betting algorithms. No one is immune.

What's dangerous is when something like that replaces independent thought and becomes societally pervasive. That's an "oracle" the likes of which ancient civilizations warned that believing would lead to tragedy (or at a minimum, accidentally boning your own mother).

I'm an atheist, but raised Jewish. I read the Torah as a series of specific warnings and prohibitions against every type of shamanism, magic, witchcraft, prognostication, and deification of systems which predict (as well as systems which attempt to turn language into machinery, and worship the machine they've built ... see also, "Sound of Silence" by Paul Simon and "The Future" by Leonard Cohen, which both express this theme well). The framework requiring proof and disavowing illusion or the belief that all is illusory is notably different from a Buddhist perspective, for example.

We as a culture, right now, are not handling well the rise of a golden idol or an oracle in our midst. The right response is to try to trace the output back to ground truth and figure out why your model made a prediction... or else to build a model from ground truth and see how it performs against the oracle. We are doing neither. We're diving headlong into our own confirmation biases.

[Edit] I just wanted to add, because I got off track, that your conclusion about what's going on with human curiosity in cases where prediction is not the issue seems right to me. Barring some edge cases like predicting an eclipse and using it to slaughter your enemies, I think a lot of us do simply want to understand how things work, because figuring them out is enormously gratifying and is the work of lifetimes of incredible people who came before us. Using that knowledge or those techniques to predict things is technology, not science, and while I'm a fan of both, the former is only ever a practical test of the latter. Moreover, the sense of accomplishment of randomly walking your way to a profitable model is ephemeral and in a way earthbound, limited to the plane of one's own brief existence. Even if it were platonically perfect, a model is only saying how something behaves, not how it works. That's nothing compared to the joy of figuring out even the most trivial or axiomatic thing about how a cell or a compound or a physical structure or anything works, about how the universe actually works. And I think our better angels tell us to seek those answers, because our own life is fleeting, and predicting behavior is, like wealth, something you can't take with you. And not something you'll be remembered for anyway.

I'm also a fan of going the other direction: I've had a sideline working on code to evolve genetic algorithms for the past 20 years, and while the goal of that is to be predictive and profitable, it's often the underlying real-world dynamics my little mutants surface which are the most interesting and applicable in the long run. So I'm not saying there isn't a place for throwing everything at the wall until you see what sticks and then deriving a hypothesis from that (whether your interest is to predict the future, or merely academic, to explain the past). What I am saying is similar to you: We should not treat any model as an oracle. But I'm also saying that models can be built or they can be evolved, and if we only evolve them without understanding how they work, we are missing a crucial ingredient to knowing how well we should rank them. Overfitting and sample bias and data leakage are not problems when you want an equation to calculate airflow over a wing. If you began with an evolved equation which derived the results and didn't start from the base reality, you couldn't trust that equation to be airworthy even if it were right 99.99% of the time against the data it was trained on.

Winning a debate is about convincing the audience, and I found that an unconvincing statement, apart from it being an obnoxious rhetorical tactic.

But it did make me think of The Big Lebowski. "You're out of your depth, Donnie!"

I'd only add that if it's not intentional satire, it's an even more profound example of the unintentional variety.