A few examples

Audio book narration. Human narrators are paid a seemingly ridiculous amount of money to literally read a book out loud. We have the tech to replace them, it’s actually pretty dang good, and it is substantially cheaper to do with computers. It’s pretty accurate too. In the audio book industry though, if you take your book seriously you have a real person read it. The best one you can find that you like. Readers enjoy hearing good narrators and the total value one narrator can bring is very high mostly because the value scales well.

Another real world example that doesn’t scale well, call centers. Customers want humans, but execs have tried to replace them with automation in every way possible. The margins of a business get squeezed because the value of the human touch doesn’t scale well in this case.

Translation falls a bit in the middle. I’m sure ChatGPT is good enough for some people. If you are a restaurant and need to understand what you are ordering at the local authentic Italian restaurant it’ll do the job. If you have a bad food allergy? Maybe not, you are willing to pay for accuracy because that’s what a human brings

So the answer to the question posed in the article, can’t you just upload it to ChatGPT? Maybe yea maybe no

I know this isn't attainable for most of the world but sharing in case someone else is similarly frustrated. I ended up spending $500 on a trap w/ co2 tank and it has been a life changer. I don't even see mosquitos anymore. Refilling the co2 is quite annoying and expensive ($20 every other week) and you have to clean out the 100s of bugs from the trap net but I can literally sit in my backyard all day again.

I wonder if a cheaper trap could be designed to give everyone little bubbles of safety.

I think you get me now but I'm just merely stating the stickiness and trendiness of these architecture decisions. Some other people mention this but just because a majority of the industry works on something doesn't mean it is the best.

I am a bit of the proof of this. I work on Angular at Google and have for a long time. It is kind of comical because I have worked on a few side projects outside of Google and I always use Angular, I know it too well.

I built a massive Angular webapp recently (2025) outside of Google and have had multiple people approach me about migrating it to React. They come at me like this is some old thing that needs to be refactored to unlock the modern times. It's just curious, there are large groups of people that don't really even understand what they are doing, they are just chasing words and hype. Mind you, there are reasons to pick one framework over the other still... but let's at least debate that instead of just the names of frameworks. React has won the framework adoption race so I can't argue much there.

React wins because it has become a default choice and folks like what’s comfortable to their preferences

The resulting action should be you have proper disaster recovery, failover, etc.

Not sure I would trust these folks if this is the conclusion they are coming to from this experience. Any cloud provider can/will do this to you.

If you allow everyone to pick and choose what they want to do, we may actually end up (or already have ended up) with all of the talented people and cutting edge businesses chasing money here and only second tier folks working with and for the government.

I think a great example of this is with NASA. They are doing a big hiring blitz (someone posted about it recently here). They have a ton of openings but I have to imagine that the talented folks that work in the field are chasing the money that is paid by private companies right now. I personally believe NASA is an important thing that needs to exist and we need to figure out a way to make it happen. Maybe we need to just pay folks more to make them incentivized to work in government? Maybe even more so if you working for the armed forces because you lose a lot of people based upon the sheer fact that your life is more at risk.

It would definitely be worth some research. I don't think free market concepts align well with working in the armed forces and there could be some arguments that we need to tip the scales to make it work better. For some things like the usual government services that aren't vital for our existence, I think we can all accept the longer wait at the DMV or the two decades to get a Real ID implemented. I don't think we can accept not defending our own country from an adversarial invasion so we need to make that importance reflected somewhere.

That's the price of one meal at a restaurant...

Groups are also really great. I have a lot of hobbies and you can join local groups where people trade stuff or just chat about things related to the topic. I have met some really cool people in real life from facebook groups. Into overlanding in your region? There is a group for that. Into rare Trichocereus or trading rare fig cuttings? There are groups for those. It feels much more personal than reddit because it's connected to a profile that actually has real information/photos associated with it.

Occasionally I end up scrolling videos on fb which appear to just be extensions of reels on Instagram. Doesn't appear to be any different, literally crossover comments even. OP is probably seeing the chum because facebook is going off of nothing.

Anyway, facebook is not cooked :)

I don’t agree with it or believe it’s smart but it’s the world we live in

Really satisfying to click the buttons and see the super bright lights as a young kid. The games like mirror were easy yet technical which had us all competing for high scores. Definitely well thought out

Everyone appreciated it didn’t involve cleanup of any little plastic pieces like the original litebright

As for the other points, are the LLMs wrong sometimes, yes. But so are humans so it's not really a novel thing to point out. The question is, are they more correct than humans? I have seen they can be more accurate, less biased, etc... and we are driving toward higher accuracy and other ways to make them right.

And the fix later attitude is not great toward everything and I was referring to the accuracy issues that people often point out as why AI is hype. The things you mention are side effects and those should be controlled because the cat is out of the bag. You can spend your time yelling at the clouds or try to do something to make it better. I assure you, capitalism is a tough enemy. This is no different than another type of combustable engine that was created that has negative consequences on the environment in different ways.

I'm not disagreeing with you... mostly just saying: the hype is warranted

I do believe that the product leadership is shoehorning it into every nook and cranny of the world right now and there are reasons to be annoyed by that but there are also countless incredible use cases that are mind blowing, that you can use it every day for.

I need to write about some absolutely life changing scenarios, including: got me thousands of dollars after it drafted a legal letter quoting laws I knew nothing about, saved me countless hours troubleshooting an RV electrical problem, found bugs in code that I wrote that were missed by everyone around me, my wife was impressed with my seemingly custom week long meal plan that fit her short term no soy/dairy allergy diet, helped me solve an issue with my house that a trained professional completely missed the mark on, completely designed and wrote code for a halloween robot decoration I had been trying to build for years, saves my wife hundreds of hours as an audio book narrator summarize characters for her audio books so she doesn't have to read the entire book before she narrates the voices.

I'm worried about some of the problems LLMs will create for humanity in the future but those are problems we can solve in the future too. Today it's quite amazing to have these tools at our disposal and as we add them in smart ways to systems that exist today, things will only get better.

Call me glass half full... but maybe it's because I don't live in Seattle