> Language has been the code behind all human thought, understanding, emotions, and innovation. It's what enables LLMs to work. LLMs don't _understand_ words, they connect them together usefully, which works because humans mapped useful composable words to useful composable concepts.

That is very interesting and well worded, I use Agents all day so I kind of wish to an extent that they would be almighty, and maybe they will be. But using them so much there is clearly a gap, they actually became worse at writing.

I think, unfortunately to some, LLMS are like perfect operators, great at math and coding, executing on whatever you want, but they do lack some "pseudo creative" ability we might not have a word for. Fable 5.1 genuinely writes poorly. Correctly, but poorly. And as you said, writing codes human thought, well maybe not all of it.

Is software really all that specialized? The relentless pace of centralization and conglomeration expresses otherwise. I feel like most shops are making glorified CRUD apps, and the industry-specific stuff is covered by an incumbent monopoly and one lone long-shot startup (that seeks an exit being bought by that monopoly).

It's literally and intentionally reductive, so I'm good with that, because these processes are reductive.

Have you ever read "Stranger in a Strange Land"?

The character of Jubal Harshaw is instructive. He's become very rich because he can just unhook his brain and produce a tear-jerking and profitable story in a few seconds as he lounges around his pool.

He gives his secretaries the gist of the story, they fill it out, they arrange for somebody to make the film.

The point of the character is that what he's doing takes no emotional effort or insight. He's writing Hallmark movies. Everybody who's working for him adds nothing to it.

And we have Hallmark/Lifetime movies already. People were making them for decades before the LLMs came along.

But if you could send an LLM back to 1950 and train it on the pre-existing literature, you couldn't have it generate The Shining, A Scanner Darkly, Piranesi, Perdido Street Station, The April Witch, or Starship Troopers.

-none of the research indicates a mechanism by which you can create a selfhood that gets banged around by time and has feelings about itself, but admittedly, that might change

-even if you could do such a thing, you can't then put the robot in a human body and let it nurse and get potty trained and sent to pre-school and bullied and wonder about its mortality as it starts to think about what its career might be, etc etc etc

We were already making slop, because we already had a big production machine that transforms any input into a "movie" or "a television show", and a lot of the inputs were garbage.

The movie "A Talking Cat?" exists and predates AI by about ten years.

The point is that we were already delegating this stuff to human beings who didn't care about it and weren't bringing their humanity to it. Nothing changes on that side of things except that they don't have jobs to show up to.

So, at least for now, this isn't very different from the previous way of doing things, except that it's cheap enough that some people are spending a few thousand dollars to say "make me a story about a sad orphan" and the machine rips off Charles Dickens and Horatio Alger to make a thing nobody wants to watch without paying a bunch of key grips and best boys and caterers.

Especially bizarre given that OP compares animation to mass production.

I don't think what you're proposing is feasible (unless I'm misunderstanding it?). We can lessen the blow and are already doing it through various welfare programs. But we cannot have creation without destruction.

This isn't ideological Milton Friedman free markets rahrah. I just can't imagine the alternative in practice: what if mainframe operators decided to opposed destruction, which would prevent mini and personal computers from becoming a reality?

How much "value" does this community provide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oW-Hp8-DAB0

Would you define everyone involved as "disliking" new technology? Or would you define them as having a "like" for old technology? I think the same question could be considered for communities which continue to enjoy hand programming.

All this talk about value and AI has provided exactly 0 so far :\

I'd argue that the public has been souring on those attitudes as well, but also have been locked into various social media ecosystems through network effects. Now, the same (or similar) people have come out demanding hundreds of billions of dollars to upend humanity, while displaying all the same attitudes, but emboldened by their previous financial successes. Unsurprisingly, people don't like this.

Was... writing code a purely mechanical act for you? For me, every single project (sometimes down to the smallest shell script) brings new insights from working directly with the code. From these insights spring new ideas and abstractions that can then be used to construct more complex projects. "Wait, we can reify this elusive concept" — leading to software with capabilities that were impossible to imagine before.

LLMs run the risk of eliminating these insights and freezing software development at its current level of complexity forever. Few good technical ideas come from management, and in this LLM-first world, that's all "programmers" really are anymore.

(And that's without even addressing the horrific externalities of LLM use, such as slopificaion of every public internet community and entrenchment of the oligarchy at the expense of workers.)

> Technology is for art

No.

Is a screwdriver for hammering nails? Is a hammer for screwing screws?

Do you have difficulty drawing a hard distinction there too?

You can put a toilet in an art gallery and call it art.

A toilet is not made for art.