Their part in it was stupidity, yes. Literally too stupid to formulate a criminal intent.

It isn't even that they gobbled it down at the time so much as they still believe it, despite extensive, conclusive evidence (including dozens of peer reviewed studies) that it was so much BS.

Educational standards have been declining for a long time. It hasn't just recently gotten bad because of Corona. Both math and English instruction have declined to the point that people like you are making excuses for remedial instruction in college.

The sabotage is intentional even if those doing it don't think they are engaging in sabotage. This is painfully obvious if you interact with the K12 education system.

Parents these days have to more to repair the damage done by professionals.

The history of the claim that vaccines cause autism is extremely well documented - as a deliberate fraud.

Unfortunately there are really only two practical ways to get into farming these days.

Some of us are. I did my BS in computer science. Spent 15 years in IT working mostly with Linux servers.

I now run a large farm. My background is actually a really good fit for farming. In fact I think farming would be a good fit for quite a few Linux enthusiasts and makers.

It can in some cases, depending on various factors like the codebase it's working with, the nature of the feature and how well you describe it.

You will often need to refine the prompts, or prompt it further to address bugs or things it decided to implement in a strange way. It also tends to work better with code bases that are smaller or more modular, and with code that was developed using an ai assistant rather than existing code bases.

You're right about it being like junior developers, it's good for getting mundane things done but does often need a lot of guidance.

A current generation LLM is not perfect and cannot replace a skilled employee, at best it can assist a skilled employee to do their work more efficiently.
If you understand this and have appropriate use cases, then it can absolutely be useful.

If you're trying to use it for something it's not suited for then it's going to be useless or even detrimental.

We still have running tractors from the 1940s and 50s. John Deere two-cylinder "putt putt" tractors.

If there was a golden age of tractors, it's hard to pin it down. Yes the 4020 was and is a great tractor, but it's not a tractor you'd want to run all day every day. It's loud and the cab was never comfortable. The Deere 50-series tractors from the 1980s were pretty good, and the cabs were comfortable and quiet. In the 90s there were some good ones too but ideas on what looked good were really weird in that decade. Our current tractors are all 15-20 years old with about the right amount of electronics for my taste. However the engines from this era have a mixed reputation for longevity on some models.

So it's a mixed bag. Computer-controlled engines sure start nice, even in the winter. But a fully mechanical engine can be rebuilt several times.

You can replace most of your developers once you have a mature product, just shift it into maintenance mode.

Because you had a specific goal in mind, knew what you were doing, knew about the different heatmap implementations available and gave precise instructions. You could probably have written this by hand yourself and it just would have taken a bit longer to do.

Problems come up when you have people who don't know what they're doing giving vague instructions to the LLM, and then blindly trusting the output. For instance if you said "draw a heatmap of $DATA" who knows what it would have come back with? it may well have tried to use the deprecated google api because there are likely a lot of examples online and in the LLM's training data.

LLMs are great when they're used to augment people who are already skilled in the art, and can generally help them save time doing a lot of the repetitive stuff. They're not some magic wand allowing someone with zero experience to achieve great results.

People are often wrong too...
The problem is that we are used to machines being used to do things that machines are good at - eg for predefined math calculations a computer is expected to reliably and quickly get the correct answer every time.

The problems being targeted by LLMs are not so well defined, so errors can be made wether its done by a human or an LLM. But people are used to the traditional problems solved by computers and expect everything to be the same.

Instead of assuming an LLM is a reliable machine that follows a rigid process and produces reliable output every time, treat it like a human employee and subject its results to the same processes - ie review, quality control etc. Of course then you won't get the massive cost savings that you imagined by replacing employees with machines.

Good use of LLM will typically augment existing skilled employees, not replace them.

Real intelligence also gets things wrong, people are also subject to bias, and will try to cover their ass once they realise they've fucked up etc.
Thats why people's work gets quality controlled and reviewed etc, and anything machine generated should be subjected to similar processes.

Like many of us he's enamored with the fictional tech from Star Trek that portrays talking to an intelligent computer and seems like a great idea on screen at least. So futuristic. Computer, please reconfigure my warp core for more power. Done. Best idea ever.

That and touch panels everywhere! Works so well on a star ship, why not put them in our cars?

Never mind that copilot, like all LLMs, confidently lies. And "super smart" really means it reads rubbish posted on the internet and pretends it is accurate and truth. There's no way it can be super smart because it was trained on all our data! At best it's average smart. And we want copilot actually in control of our computers? No thank you. I find it mind blowing he would think giving copilot agents physical control over a PC is a good idea.

Anyway, Star Trek has a lot to answer for!

In a sense his puzzlement is justified; when the tech demo works an LLM is probably the most obvious candidate for 'just this side of sci-fi'; and, while may of the capabilities offered are actually somewhat hollow (realistically, most of the 'take these 3 bullet points and create a document that looks like I cared/take that document that looks like my colleague cared and give me 3 bullet points' are really just enticements to even more dysfunctional communication) some of them are fairly hard to see duplicating by conventional means.

However, I suspect that his perspective is fundamentally unhelpful in understanding the skepticism: when you are building stuff it's easy to get caught up in the cool novelty and lose sight of both the pain points(especially when you are deep C-Level; rather than the actual engineer fighting chatGPT's tendency to em-dash despite all attempts to control it); and overestimate how well your new-hotness stacks up against both existing alternatives and how forgiving people will or won't be about its deficiencies.

Something like Windows trying to 'conversational'/'agentic' OS settings, for instance, probably looks pretty cool if you are an optimism focused ML dude: "hey, it's not perfect but it's a natural language interface to adjusting settings that confuse users!"; but it looks like absolute garbage from an outside perspective both because it's badly unreliable; and humans tend not to respond well to clearly unreliable 'people'(if it can't even find dark mode; why waste my time with it?); and because it looks a lot like abdication of a technically simpler, less exciting, job in favor of chasing the new hotness.

"Settings are impenetrable to a nontechnical user" is a UI/UX problem(along with a certain amount of lower level 'maybe if bluetooth was less fucked people wouldn't care where the settings were because it would just work); so throwing an LLM at the problem is basically throwing up your hands and calling it unsolvable by your UI/UX people; which is the an abject concession of failure; not a mark of progress.

I think it may be that that he really isn't understanding: MS has spent years squandering the perception that they would at least try to provide an OS that allowed you to do your stuff; in favor of faffing with various attempts to be your cool app buddy and relentless upsell pal; so every further move in that direction is basically confirmation that no fucks are given about just trying to keep the fundamentals in good order rather than getting distracted by shiny things.

Sigh. Nevermind. Nothing to see here. Move along Stupid Google keyboard fails yet again.