> thermocline of trust

Great reference! Agree, it's a "last straw" situation -- you can foist all these indignities upon your "captive" user base, right up until you can't.

> dumb and weak

Like, "losers and suckers"?

I haven't seen this articulation before, and I'm going to remember this one!

In return, I'll share my own reasoning:

Human Life is finite, and there is a real opportunity cost to learning (say) to copy Picasso's style -- you could've been doing something else in that same Time.

However, if you're training a model on the entire career output of dozens of artists, it only needs more electricity + GPUs to do this.

And, transposing this back to the Human realm, there's no way one person can put in that kind of wide effort to learn how to copy dozens of artists' styles in one lifetime.

I really like the way you put it too -- it's a bit more succinct.

This entire thread is amazing!

It's like a kaleidoscope: Human words --> LLM Training --> chatbot-isms --> lovely parody catch-phrases (and this thread will get ingested soon, and be used to train...)

I didn't see anyone else link Keiji Matsuda's "Hyper-Reality", so here it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs

Yeah, Scratch helped bootstrap so many folks, but that was a generation ago -- I can't imagine exhorting children to learn to code with Scratch (or any other Visual Programming Language) in good faith today.

If you're trying to get away from the burden of syntax or other onerous aspects of coding, well then just use an AI coding assistant. OTOH, if you (for some reason) want to learn a textual programming language, then write code in that language yourself.

> “If you're trying to get away from the burden of syntax or other onerous aspects of coding…”

Coding is a solution waiting for a problem kids don’t have yet. The answer is always “try a game”. But llm and logic can help children engage with the actual problems they have and what is flying around their little imaginations. Syntax and other code _constraints_ should not be the cost of entry.

Yup, Dilbert's "easiest round of layoffs ever".

I have done the same for many years now, and I feel like it's going to be an annoying false positive for people like us.

I remember when the "hacker vs. cracker" distinction went away because Hollywood co-opted the former and it became de facto "hacker == bad guy"

Insightful, and scary! Imitating an imitation machine... even if no one is trying to intentionally do so, McLuhan's "we become what we behold" is inescapable.

Under-rated take, thanks for stating this!

Not everyone can plough $$$$ into hardware right now (more power to those who can), so choosing to rent is an A-Ok strategy.

It's ok if you can send your code and data to the provider. Some of us can't.

We're discussing home use.

You can. You just don't want to. Huge difference.

> We're discussing home use.

You may be, but the topic of discussion is whether anyone is using a local model as their main coding tool.

for corporate use it's a mistake not to use a frontier model.

Well plenty of people work from home.

For corporate use, if the corporation would break the law sending anything to the open internet or to the US, then you can't use any model that's not hosted in house. And there are many such cases.