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that tangent about VS Code reminded me of the worst thing Microsoft has ever published: devblogs.microsoft.com/azure-sql/la... a guide on pirating Harry Potter (mis-tagged as CC0) to have a computer write terribly dull fanfiction about how great Azure SQL is. it's just Whatever.

afterthought 4 — apparently the author of the *cough* anonymous quote meant it the opposite way, so i have hastily edited in a disclaimer to that effect bsky.app/profile/simo...

One of my friends - very clever guy even though terrifyingly normal (fintech programmer, hobby seems to be buying expensive things), who I used to really respect as a good programmer has pivoted to saying "I don't understand why anyone would program without chatgpt" and like, im so confused

I agree with basically everything in this article. I tried using some of these tools out of curiosity once, and because I was trying to do something very weird I wasn’t sure how to do. It sent me down a like 10 hour rabbit hole trying increasingly more elaborate workarounds which didn’t work…

which is also funny because just before reading this blog i learned about T. Kinkade, an american artist (that wasnt a very good person) but made very popular cozy art, but couldn´t still manage to sell more personal and weirder works, because the public was interested in the cozy "whatever" pics

fucking incredibly well put.

really hit the nail on the head with this one. loved the carpentry tool analogy. i am waiting for the day that these companies crash and burn, hopefully sooner rather than later to minimise as much as possible the cruft of these Whatever generators polluting the internet.

To be clear this isn't a moral judgement on those folks and it seems pretty unfair for those who have invested the time and effort only for the same industry's narrative to switch to calling them suckers for trying.

I was thinking the same thing honestly; some days at work I will see things other programmers write and just think “I understand how people think you can be replaced by an LLM”

I admire the way you can articulate the vague feelings of LLM-slop-related dread I have but am not quite cerebral enough to verbalize. I really enjoy your writing. Even now, when my brain struggles to focus on longer-form text, I find your posts so gripping. I’m so glad you continue to do it. 🩷

And all that's not to say you're wrong in the broader point. In particular, it feels like making an LLM actually useful involves struggling against proprietors' attempts to make it Whatever instead. I'm genuinely looking forward to when I can run my own local LLM with RAG and without the Whatever.

Big fan of the way this is articulated. Let's keep doing things!

I love your writing :) I've noticed that the Whatever all ties in together - AI pushers don't mind the weirdness of AI art or the blandness of its text, because all that matters to them is the "content". It doesn't matter to them what it is - just that it's there.

This reads like people have been sleeping through mountains of shit being thrown at them (content, news, user-hostile services...) for decades, and then suddenly woke up and blame the most recent hype. Most of Internet is crap. Most of media is crap. This does need to stop you (or me) from creating

looking forward to giving this a proper read once i’m not eepy

Loved reading your essay

really appreciating the extremely long reply that looks like it was written by an AI, referring to you by name like they're observing you from the moon, talking about how useful AI is, because it can do things like. uh. explain what terms mean. which is something search engines could never do before

The comparisons of LLMs (in the context of programming) to tools (in the context of various industries) that actually provide value and utility and allow people to reliably and efficiently do more is kind of mind blowing to me. Lots of desperation to justify the use of this shit technology.

"I think the core of what pisses me off is that selling this magic machine requires selling the idea that doing things is worthless. Because if doing something has some value, then it must be somehow better than pushing a button and receiving Whatever for essentially no cost."

This so perfectly puts in to words what I haven't been able to for a long time now. Thank you so much for writing it.

great post. I agree with nearly everything.

Thanks! In the meantime I finished the article which was a joy to read despite the painful topic.

This is so well written, and accurately captures much of how I feel about these Whatever technologies and the industries that peddle them. Well done. And the “spinning whirling mass of blades” analogy made me laugh aloud and wake my spouse 😆

I really like the description you've given here, the fact that it defaults to lying is just so useless. I particularly like "Whatever is something", and that whole paragraph. ime I've found it useful for really short easy-to-check code (< 2 lines), but I like autocomplete. I can get disliking that.

what scares me the most is that LLMs are the worst possible way to externalise knowledge. i don’t like admitting it, but i’m dependant on search engines to find information i would’ve had memorised otherwise if they didn’t exist. being dependent on a smarmy lying chatbot sounds terrifying

true, though it feels like you hinted at it in that paragraph. and yeah fully agree, computers are rigorous, if one needs something else that's what dice and humans are for ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

I have a theory that it's exactly the point. I think you and I are into computers because of the preciseness of the results and what they can do. But keep in mind that there are millions of people who hate computers: because it's "cold" or "soulless"

cure cancer, or Whatever

activating the unused 85% of my brain to manifest this man into a different career

I thought it was weird but shrugged it off, then I see him in the office the day after and he’s got chatgpt open on a second screen. i don’t rightly think he would’ve made that mistake before, and the despair i felt in that moment really just overwhelmed me.

One of the reasons people sneer at those not using the LLMs may be because people like me are out there actively trying to construct social mores that say it's unacceptable behavior and so they feel threatened by those not on the side of permanently switching your brain off

Feel the last section hard. Seems like a bunch of people just don't want to make things, and like, why make them at that point? Do you just want the "prestige" of having made a thing? Wild to me

Absolutely brilliant piece! I savoured every delicious word of it 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼. And your definitions of the likes of CrapGPT, e.g. "bizarre polite lying daydream machine" 😂 brava 😙👌

legitimately how do I nominate a blog post for a Peabody Award? This is the most concise takedown of all of the things I have been feeling over the past five years

Lovely, lovely, lovely article reading it feels like screaming in rage with you i'll link to it on my website, i think everyone who cares about things and stuff should read it

They used to have this non-functional code as their main screenshot: bsky.app/profile/drac... They still have duplicate unit tests on their “Generate unit tests” page: docs.github.com/en/copilot/t... tenbluelinks.org might be useful for getting rid of the Google Search AI summary, HTH!

Every word of this. Including the wasted promise of a less monopolised decentralised payment economy. Basically, we can’t just have nice things because of mass stupidity, ignorance, apathy, and greed.

-why this AI is harmful to artists (like HIM for example), nevermind low-quality slop, and he just replies with "It's just eye-candy!" and the sheer mindlessness and flippancy just stuns me into speechlessness, which he interprets as winning the argument and goes back to consuming the content.

(I realized that anxiety over browsers not saving scroll position competently led to me not reading long-form content online - even when I would finish it in one sitting. I figured it was worth mentioning because I doubt I'm the only one struggling with reading in this manner.)

this is real good, really crystallized the underpinning plague of guys who don't really give a shit about anything but insist on monopolizing all modes of communication out of some vague self-promotional drive that exists beyond these fads and will survive any critique or reaction particular to them

Thanks for writing this! As a student it's been so alienating seeing my fellow students unironically regurgitating slop during group projects and it's starting to turn me off of group projects in general. It's so refreshing to see someone put my feelings into words better than I ever could 💖

Yeah my main emotions interacting with the internet are getting annoyed and depressed incredibly quickly