It is terrible for a first draft if you’re aiming for something that reads like a human being’s actual thoughts. Don’t let an LLM think for you and create the first draft of “your” thoughts. At most, if you absolutely must, use it as a spell checker. But write your words yourself.

No one wants to know what ChatGPT thinks. We might want to know what you think… But only if it’s actually you doing the thinking.

It’s already happening. Software instability is becoming a major problem.

Honest answer? Not much… yet. As the stupidity of “tokenmaxxing” and replacing developers with hallucinations-and-plagiarism engines really comes into focus, I expect developer hiring to ramp back up.

He probably is. Maybe if Republicans stopped cheating, lying, and behaving like abysmal, horrid monsters at every conceivable turn and using every dirty trick in the book, Democrats wouldn’t have decided that they need to fight fire with fire.

I’m not condoning this, but it is an utterly predictable outcome after decades of Democrats trying to take the high road while Republicans turn taking the low road into an art form.

Meanwhile, in the real world, my company has locked down usage of Anthropic’s top-tier models, because costs were out of control. Even the low-end models are usage-capped, and developers are starting to write code by hand again.

And we’re busily setting up local models we control ourselves on our network edge. We’ll probably end up with a modest budget for frontier models (until the model providers collapse), but most of the coding will be done by local models and developers themselves.

And that seems to be the way the entire industry is going, unless Anthropic starts subsidizing tokens with investor money again.

In conclusion: Get fucked, Dario.

Well, most of those can either run natively on Linux or have web-based clients.

• Teams works fine in a browser as long as you don’t mind some slight differences in the UI. There is also a well-maintained Electron app.
• Excel and other Office apps already work fine in the browser on Linux.
• OneDrive has unofficial clients on Linux, but you might as well just commit to accessing those files in a browser as well.
• SharePoint is already browser-based and integrated with OneDrive.

That said, CAD is definitely going to be an issue. In general, I wouldn’t recommend trying to switch all the way to Linux in a Windows-only office ecosystem. A better option if you can get permission is to dual-boot, or to run Windows in a virtual machine.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, not if by “information” you mean semantic content that a mind can process. What they have are vector fields (essentially just numbers) with statistically more or less likely relationships.

If I say, “take me out to the ballgame” to an LLM, the tokens representing the words in the next verse of the song are statistically “close” in the vector database, so it’s likely to generate them. But that doesn’t mean it actually knows the lyrics… or even has those lyrics recorded in a regular database anywhere.

That’s why they hallucinate. The model determines that the next token is something nonsensical, but it has no way of understanding that it has made a mistake. In a sense, it actually hasn’t made a mistake. It’s done exactly what it’s designed to do. It’s just that in the case of hallucinations, its output isn’t useful.

They’re information, but not the same information that was used to create them.

Just a reminder that it’s illegal for Trump to unilaterally impose these tariffs without congressional approval. Again. Again.

The important thing to remember is that it actually has zero access to information, because that’s not how LLMs work.

At their core, they’re vector databases, and they’re trying to probabilistically come up with the next most likely token in a stream of tokens found in the DB. You can manipulate the stream by injecting text such as the content of existing files (which becomes more tokens) into the stream, but it never actually understands any of it.

That’s why hallucinations are inherently unavoidable. It’s really all just hallucinations. It’s just that you can sometimes get useful text from their hallucinations if they happen to comport with reality.

Jesus Tapdancing Christ…

1000%. Functionally unlimited lifespan in which to explore the universe, in a super-intelligent ship that contains the sum of civilizational knowledge? Hell yeah, sign me up!

Isn’t this the breach that was widely reported on in March? And they’re just now disclosing the scale of the exposure?

Ugh. If this makes my Linux systems less stable, I don’t even know what the fuck I’m going to do. I won’t go back to Windows, I’m not buying Macs (which have their own software problems anyway), and my hardware probably won’t work with any BSD variant.

We’re sad because a lot of people have bought into overly-hyped bullshit factories made by assholes who claim they can replace us.

They can’t, but our employers are currently too uninformed (or addicted to the bullshit, or desperate to prop up their stock prices) to realize that the bullshit factories aren’t capable of replacing us.

That’s causing a lot of turmoil in the form of unnecessary layoffs and rehires, worsening software quality, and general job insecurity.

You should read His Dark Materials or The Old Kingdom. Both series are much, much more thoughtfully put together. Their plotting and characterization really put HP to shame.

No, I’ve decided not to use a tool that isn’t fit for purpose. Studies have consistently shown that people think they’re much more productive on LLMs than they actually are, and the side effects of cognitive debt and skill loss aren’t worth the often imaginary productivity gains.

Combine that with the awful financials of OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, and Google’s Gemini, and you’ve got the makings of a really nasty situation.

Say I come to depend on Claude Code for all my coding, and build an entire workflow around it. I get used to spending thousands of dollars a month for access, and tell myself it’s worth it for the imaginary productivity gains (although what’s actually happening is that I’m just producing a shit-ton of garbage code no one has any hope of understanding).

Then Anthropic reaches the point where they run out of investor money to spend, and fold because even charging developers like me thousands of dollars doesn’t even begin to cover their costs, and I’m one of their rare customers who are loyal, versus the bulk of developers who use up their free allotments of tokens and then model-hop.

Now what? My workflow is broken, I’ve forgotten how to code, and nothing I’ve produced recently is human-readable.

No thanks. I’m not an old man yelling at clouds, I’m a software developer who can recognize a problem when I see one.

What we want is software that behaves predictably. Since LLMs don’t do that, we don’t want them or their “agents.”

For fuck’s sake.

I had someone ask me recently if a picture of Thomas Aquinas was AI-generated. It was a 15th-century painting.