- I've never heard or experienced NES cartridges rusting -- but I've had to blow on them, and I've had plenty of CDs scratched (typically when storing them without a case).

- Yes, Windows had significantly more blue screens; however, the cause of lost work was always failure to Ctrl+S (not a blue screen).

- Memory was certainly limited (and in DOS there mostly was no multi-tasking), but only fanatical players would run into the issue described. And you were aware that many games required a memory extender.

- Even now, games are massively hacked e.g. GTA V Online.

- My original PC had a TURBO button, but I never had to use it.

It is truly a security nightmare that so many people are have given agents root access to their entire computers, in addition to presumably very private personal information.

Should the industry go this way, there very possibly will be some reckoning later with a misaligned model.

That said, there are certainly less risky ways to use LLMs positively in development!

It isn't personalized, so many sections aren't of much interest.

To gain a bit of convenience, they are voluntarily sending their emails, credit card statements, calendars, location history, etc. to third parties and giving bots admin-level access to their computers.

This would have been unimaginable decades ago, and it is still dangerous (both individually and collectively ...).

The problem here -- and why universities even do research at all -- is that industry's support of basic science is not very stable. At least when I was in school, industry research generally was more applied and engineering-focused.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFdTLLlby9E

Many people additionally have little patience for research when the engineering is moving so quickly. Even many interpretability researchers give up far too soon if research doesn't yield immediately gratifying results.

At the time of release, yes. They had to ensure the software worked before printing CDs and floppies. Nowadays they release buggy versions that users essentially test for them.

Beyond references, the point of the literature review is to ensure you have read the literature and understand it well enough to accurately summarize it. If you present a literature review, it's likely assumed you did all of this. So at the very least you should be upfront about how an LLM assisted you.

LLM agents are basically the same, except now everyone is doing it. They copy-paste-run lots of code without meaningfully reviewing it.

My fear is that some colleagues are getting more skilled at prompting but less skilled at coding and writing. And the prompting skills may not generalize much outside of certain LLMs.