Yes. That was what I tried at the beginning of the craze. Stuff you can easily look up (but should usually not need to look up), LLMs can do (mostly), but in the engineering I do I often run into things you cannot look up. Total failure and sometimes hallucinations on top. Since then, I occasionally check back, but nothing has changed really. Simple, well-known things LLMs can usually do, things that require actual insight LLMs cannot do. No change there. The illusion has gotten a bit better, but that is it.

Ah, no. Not even remotely. You are pushing a fallacy here, the "fallacy of experience" (https://antsstyle.medium.com/the-logical-fallacy-of-experience-1367653709f0). For some simple examples that may be within your grasp: You do not have to do hard drugs to be able to know doing them is not a good experience. Your also do not have to participate in a pyramid scheme to understand it is a scam and there is nothing to be gained. You may want to look up "cognitive surrender", to find out that using LLMs is actually pretty dangerous to you. You may want to look up the negative experiences actually good coders make with LLMs.

That said, I have used LLMs "productively", namely in research showing how utterly limited it is. This research is initiated by me and done by students in thesis work. And just last week I got (again) a few nice examples of failures from current frontier (!) models. Will probably make a good paper eventually. For the time being, I will stay away from using LLMs, too dangerous and no actual benefit to my work. My work is mostly insight-based, something LLMs cannot do, even if they can by now fake it well enough to impress people that are not that smart.

Well, ignorance, optimism and naiveness stem from not understanding the real world. Lack of risk management in doing things that can go horribly wrong fall in the same class. In the case at hand, anybody that actually looks at what gets reported in the mainstream press should be aware that LLMs are neither reliable not trustworthy. Coming to that conclusion does not require specialist knowledge or high intelligence. You just need to see what is.

If "stupid" is not scientific enough for you, replace with "intellectually limited with regards to insight into the functioning of reality". "Stupid" is a useful short form for that, as you seem to acknowledge in your statement about marketing.

I do fully agree to that statement about marketing. A prime current AI example is all those bad and mediocre coders claiming AI is great and makes them so much more productive, not realizing that AI will make coders on their level redundant and unemployed.

You think (or rather your LLM thinks) banks are depending on the user login as a security barrier protecting their internal software? That is not the case. Banks assume a significant part of the devices users are using to log into the online banking are compromised and hence they assume attackers have access to everything they expose to customers. They have used that assumption for at least the last 20 years, probably much longer.

Hence, sounds plausible - is total bullshit. Typical LLM quality resulting from lack of insight in their training data and no native insight whatsoever.

Ah, sorry. I am forgetting you are probably thinking about an US bachelor's. Things are a bit different in Europe, even if named similar. My mistake.

What crappy ass bachelor's program is that? I do deep dives and I teach on bachelor level.

These days, I actually think FizzBuzz is not bad. I read about it long ago on the Coding Horror blog, wrote it in 4 different languages on the commandline in a few minutes, was unimpressed and forgot about it again. But later I got back to it and it actually has something going for it. Especially when a candidate starts to discuss different approaches and aspects, because the smart ones can see that it is utterly trivial, deliver a minimal (!) solution and will try to add value by discussing its aspects. Good to hear it still works and also works as detector for LLM users in cognitive surrender.

For color I would have to look up color escapes for an xterm. It probably understand some ANSI escapes, but I never tried. ;-)

Nope. You fail. This never meant AI and it does not mean AI now. You are a scam victim.

If we ever get AGI, this may (or may not) be different, but LLMs cannot get you that.

If you are self-aware enough to do that, that may work. But most people, including most C-levels are not. Instead they live in some fantasy world, which is the reason a major part of any good software project is finding out what the customer actually needs. And that can only be done by humans because it needs real insight.

Probably. I have no personal experience Bank of America them, but I talked to a senior IT security person working there a few years ago. Apparently their IT is a total mess because they did a lot of acquisitions way back and basically glued it all together.

I do know another bank with a barely functional IT, namely Deutsche Bank, since I still have a (little used) account there. They are not much better. We did run a successful man-in-the-middle attack on their app some 15 years back (legal as it was on my own account and device) and the network intercept did not only see everything, we were able to transfer $5 to a friend as well and they never noticed. The app just accepted a different certificate. Since then I never was even remotely tempted to install their app. And of course the download page for the app proudly proclaimed that security was their highest priority. Kind of what Microsoft has had to claim two times now after they crewed up security massively and then continued to screw it up. I do not even understand how you can be this exceptionally incompetent in this space.

As to whoever moderated this "troll": The thing all scammers totally love is scam-victims that have eaten up the FOMO and and try to rope others into getting scammed as well for free!

In the real world, nobody that does professional works is really saving much time using LLMs (no, slop creation does not count as "professional work"), with some people (the more perceptive ones) noticing they need to invest more. There are also no desperately needed skills that are LLM specific. Even if this works out as a major tool to use in the future (which I highly doubt and not only because that has never happened in any previous AI hype), there is time to get into it when that becomes clear, say in 5-10 years when we know all the stuff LLMs are (often subtly) bad at and where they need to be avoided.

... to even only seriously consider doing that? These people are operating on the level of totally deranged cultists.

Only that it cannot do the "sophisticated" part. What it can do is "versatile in the hands of an expert". But that expert is very much non-optional and the requirements are really high.

You seem to be unaware that lots of people going into academic STEM programs get washed out. Having a background in the are before does not help that much. The difference is that academic STEM programs do the deep dives and that is where the students get separated into two groups. The second group them probably changes to business school.

My view of reality seems to be much, much clearer than yours. And no, the "you do not know what the state of the art is" claim just marks you as the asshole here.