i do not want to get into the business of posting LLM takes but very briefly:
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(continued from ^)
Google search doesn't work as well anymore because the results are full of LLM-generated articles? I hear about CEOs putting pressure on their teams to produce more faster because they've been told that AI will increase productivity?
it feels sad. even though I find LLMs useful sometimes, with all of the societal impacts it often feels like it isn't actually improving my life.
(2/?)
@b0rk I think that the way we perceive the Internet is still in a state of flux and 20 years from now we'll look at now the way we look at the early 2000s web2.0 the way at the time we looked at the early '90s geocities era when we looked weird at the earlier Usenet era and so on: a rather quaint but ultimately doomed to be obsoleted way to use this technology. In any case, there's a strong generational component, see the origins of the "Eternal September" meme.
At this point I feel it's all unescapably converging towards the amorphous yet omnipresent hose of semi-worthless data that's the backdrop of most cyberpunk media. But who knows?
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i do not want to get into the business of posting LLM takes but very briefly:
It feels clear to me that some people* are getting value out of using LLMs for programming. Basically see https://simonwillison.net/'s whole blog. If I think about it purely on the basis of "in a vacuum, can this help me write programs", it seems like an exciting technology.
BUT...
(1/?)
(* it also feels clear that some people are NOT getting value out of LLMs, hoping to avoid flamewars about that please)
@b0rk Even the enthusiasts seem to be getting the LLM blues https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/15/deep-blue/
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(continued from ^)
Google search doesn't work as well anymore because the results are full of LLM-generated articles? I hear about CEOs putting pressure on their teams to produce more faster because they've been told that AI will increase productivity?
it feels sad. even though I find LLMs useful sometimes, with all of the societal impacts it often feels like it isn't actually improving my life.
(2/?)
@b0rk use "web_ on far right. It's hidden. Use Kagi. Include swear words.
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@mensrea @philsherry if people start an AI flamewar I will delete this thread. I don't agree what Phil said but let's handle it by ignoring it please.
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@mensrea @philsherry if people start an AI flamewar I will delete this thread. I don't agree what Phil said but let's handle it by ignoring it please.
Knowing people, a flame war is likely unavoidable. But please do not delete this thread on behalf of all people like me who are genuinely interested in your take on it.
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@philsherry thank you!!
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@b0rk Even the enthusiasts seem to be getting the LLM blues https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/15/deep-blue/
@b0rk The origin of writing https://dustycloud.org/blog/a-letter-from-2016-to-2026/ is my bitterness that a decade ago, we heard a lot of promises that "don't worry, we'll automate away the boring stuff, you can focus on being creative!" and now people seem resigned to "well, all that creative stuff, I don't do it anymore"
Honestly, for me, not doing the creative stuff is giving up on the things that bring me the most happiness in life. And we know that what LLMs are bad at right now is anything that is genuinely new... they're very good at doing things that have been done before.
So, celebrate those who continue to be creative, I think. Because ultimately, even the vibecoders / vibeartists rely on their work to advance things.
But it's depressing to me to see the promises of what life would be like vs what it's now like.
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(continued from ^)
Google search doesn't work as well anymore because the results are full of LLM-generated articles? I hear about CEOs putting pressure on their teams to produce more faster because they've been told that AI will increase productivity?
it feels sad. even though I find LLMs useful sometimes, with all of the societal impacts it often feels like it isn't actually improving my life.
(2/?)
@b0rk To me, 'sad' is the right word. We (as the software industry) have been promised so many wildly different productivity boosts, one (read: I) would assume we'd have become somewhat immune. But no, after 4th generation languages, RUP, CASE tools, Lo/No Code, Blockchain, Microservice for everything, we still fall for such promises.
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@b0rk To me, 'sad' is the right word. We (as the software industry) have been promised so many wildly different productivity boosts, one (read: I) would assume we'd have become somewhat immune. But no, after 4th generation languages, RUP, CASE tools, Lo/No Code, Blockchain, Microservice for everything, we still fall for such promises.
@b0rk Oh nooooo… Now I sound like a grumpy old person. Maybe—just maybe—because I turned into one. 🤪
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@b0rk The origin of writing https://dustycloud.org/blog/a-letter-from-2016-to-2026/ is my bitterness that a decade ago, we heard a lot of promises that "don't worry, we'll automate away the boring stuff, you can focus on being creative!" and now people seem resigned to "well, all that creative stuff, I don't do it anymore"
Honestly, for me, not doing the creative stuff is giving up on the things that bring me the most happiness in life. And we know that what LLMs are bad at right now is anything that is genuinely new... they're very good at doing things that have been done before.
So, celebrate those who continue to be creative, I think. Because ultimately, even the vibecoders / vibeartists rely on their work to advance things.
But it's depressing to me to see the promises of what life would be like vs what it's now like.
On that note @b0rk, I'd include your work in the category of creative stuff worth celebrating. I hope you keep at it!
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(continued from ^)
Google search doesn't work as well anymore because the results are full of LLM-generated articles? I hear about CEOs putting pressure on their teams to produce more faster because they've been told that AI will increase productivity?
it feels sad. even though I find LLMs useful sometimes, with all of the societal impacts it often feels like it isn't actually improving my life.
(2/?)
@b0rk Anecdata from a freelance dev here: currently on a project for a ~$10 billion revenue company. Not a week goes by without a mail from some layer of management encouraging people to "use more AI". Entire teams are forced to come up with "user facing AI features", with no regard to what those teams are doing. There are mandatory AI sessions on the regular. New hires spend more time talking to copilot than to the rest of my team.
Things are changing very rapidly...
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i do not want to get into the business of posting LLM takes but very briefly:
It feels clear to me that some people* are getting value out of using LLMs for programming. Basically see https://simonwillison.net/'s whole blog. If I think about it purely on the basis of "in a vacuum, can this help me write programs", it seems like an exciting technology.
BUT...
(1/?)
(* it also feels clear that some people are NOT getting value out of LLMs, hoping to avoid flamewars about that please)
@b0rk I think there is a jagged edge - on one side are tasks that benefit from LLMs (new standalone codebases, particularly in dynamic languages, creating written drafts, planning), and a group of people for whom they are useful (people working alone, the very senior who know exactly how to evaluate outputs), and on the other side are places they fall apart, and we (the industry as a whole) don’t spend nearly enough time examining the differences because of the hype
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On that note @b0rk, I'd include your work in the category of creative stuff worth celebrating. I hope you keep at it!
@cwebber aw thank you! definitely when I think "what am I doing about AI" it's "idk keep writing stuff"
like i added some examples to the dig man page recently, and that is a small thing but not nothing
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On that note @b0rk, I'd include your work in the category of creative stuff worth celebrating. I hope you keep at it!
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@b0rk About searching getting increasingly worse, there's another side of this I've thought was interesting.
A non-negligible amount of people no longer ask their technical questions on public forums, they ask their favorite chatbot. These questions, and their answers, are not publicly displayed for other people sharing similar struggles to search for.
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@b0rk About searching getting increasingly worse, there's another side of this I've thought was interesting.
A non-negligible amount of people no longer ask their technical questions on public forums, they ask their favorite chatbot. These questions, and their answers, are not publicly displayed for other people sharing similar struggles to search for.
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(continued from ^)
Google search doesn't work as well anymore because the results are full of LLM-generated articles? I hear about CEOs putting pressure on their teams to produce more faster because they've been told that AI will increase productivity?
it feels sad. even though I find LLMs useful sometimes, with all of the societal impacts it often feels like it isn't actually improving my life.
(2/?)
@b0rk see also the struggles LWN are having. Click through rates are down, their original material is lower down google search than LLM plagarised version of their own articles, plus they are getting effectively DDoS'd by scrapers.
It's outright warfare on actual human authored websites. -
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(continued from ^)
Google search doesn't work as well anymore because the results are full of LLM-generated articles? I hear about CEOs putting pressure on their teams to produce more faster because they've been told that AI will increase productivity?
it feels sad. even though I find LLMs useful sometimes, with all of the societal impacts it often feels like it isn't actually improving my life.
(2/?)
@b0rk I don't think that's entirely true. Although I'm very LLM skeptical, Google search enshitified before LLMs came about. They only sped a process that was already going on.
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@b0rk About searching getting increasingly worse, there's another side of this I've thought was interesting.
A non-negligible amount of people no longer ask their technical questions on public forums, they ask their favorite chatbot. These questions, and their answers, are not publicly displayed for other people sharing similar struggles to search for.
