Why outsource my learning to Al? The whole point is the joy of the process. I could easily take a photo of a scene (since the inception of photography) instead of learning to paint it, but I would gain no skills through that. People still paint. I'm just tired, boss... I yearn for a past when we didn't have to end every conversation with a disclaimer about Al taking over.

Yeah depends what/why you wanna do.

As a kid I wanted to make games when I got older, I always saw learning to program as a means to that end.

It wasn’t until I was deep into my career that I started developing all these preferences and ego and suddenly caring about the craft of the craft - specializing in work I never imagined spending so much time and energy on, career aspects I never meant to work into my personal identity.

Part of me feels a huge sense of relief with LLMs and image gen - because finally I don’t have to be the maniac anymore! The machine can be the machine again, I don’t have to sit at an IDE for 13 hours grinding out tedium.

Now I can make games, now I can do art.

In that sense it’s a lot like the early arts and literature movements - a renaissance - where the printing press, canvas, international finance, and the enabling of the rapid production of ideas paid off tremendously in the following decades and centuries.

We’ll get great films, games, stories, and research because of this stuff. And then great innovation - stuff we could not do without it at unimaginable scales.