I did the same with music, using an Innioasis iPod knockoff + buy MP3s from Amazon Music, cheaper than Spotify and I never have to worry about my music becoming unavailable. I also prefer the experience of single-use devices.

It's fine! The number of books you read is not a reflection on your quality as a person.

Reading absolutely has positive benefits, but really it's exactly what you said. It's just more interesting than other options out there. The tradeoff is yes, it can require some effort, but that's the same as any other effortful activity. You have to get past the cost, but there's a really nice reward on the other side.

And for what it's worth, there ARE television shows, movies, etc. that have more value than many books. ("The Wire" is a prime example, probably better than 70-80% of the books out there.) The point is just generally that more cognitively demanding avocations can have a higher cost-benefit ratio than cheaper ones like TV. On average, books fall more into this category than other media, but that's just on average.

Anyway this is a long way of saying that feeling bad about the media you consume is counterproductive. The message should be that there is potentially a more rewarding experience out there, but whether you pursue it or not is totally up to you and doesn't make you a good or bad person either way.

1. LLMs can do some truly impressive things, like taking natural language instructions and producing compiling, functional code as output. This experience is what turns some people into cheerleaders.

2. Other engineers see that in real production systems, LLMs lack sufficient background / domain knowledge to effectively iterate. They also still produce output, but it's verbose and essentially missing the point of a desired change.

3. LLMs also can be used by people who are not knowledgeable to "fake it," and produce huge amounts of output that is basically besides-the-point bullshit. This makes those same senior folks very, very resentful, because it wastes a huge amount of their time. This isn't really the fault of the tool, but it's a common way the tool gets used and so it gets tarnished by association.

4. There is a ridiculous amount of complexity in some of these tools and workflows people are trying to invent, some of which is of questionable value. So aside from the tools themselves people are skeptical of the people trying to become thought leaders in this space and the sort of wild hacks they're coming up with.

5. There are real macro questions about whether these tools can be made economical to justify whatever value they do produce, and broader questions about their net impact on society.

6. Last but not least, these tools poke at the edges of "intelligence," the crown jewel of our species and also a big source of status for many people in the engineering community. It's natural that we're a little sensitive about the prospect of anything that might devalue or democratize the concept.

That's my take for what it's worth. It's a complex phenomenon that touches all of these threads, so not only do you see a bunch of different opinions, but the same person might feel bullish about one aspect and bearish about another.

EDIT: Some later posts mentioned it, but philosophers and religions have contemplated this stuff for centuries. Nevertheless I do think it's an exacerbated problem in the modern world due to technology and scale.

EDIT: I think what made that code so good is that there was absolutely nothing unnecessary in the whole system. Every variable, every function, every class was absolutely necessary to deliver the required functionality or to ensure some technical constraint was respected. Everything in that system belonged, and nothing didn't.

The loyalest of lawyers...