I use LLMs and I think they should be nuked from orbit. [Speaking figuratively, NSA.]

Helpful, sure. Would humanity be better off without generative AI? Definitely.

> I think they should be nuked from orbit

This kind of hyperbloic stance amongst the broad public is sad concerning

> Compulsory education actually reduced US literacy levels after it was introduced

I can't find any data that supports this causal assertion, and I can find plenty that contradicts the premise that US literacy rates have reduced since compulsory education began.

Citation?

Before LLMs, a friend of mine lamented that all the juniors at his gig were really fast at producing buggy code. The greater lament was that his bosses loved it. And as a dev, you're getting paid to do what your bosses want.

LLMs can really help you get what your bosses want a lot faster.

As an older dev, myself, I'd already been bitching about the state of software quality before all of this. Companies just didn't give a shit. Sure, people within them did, but as a whole companies will do the bare minimum to not lose your business (because that's what's best for the bottom line). Can't really fault them for their nature.[1]

And then I step back and look at something like Linux or GNU. Perfect and bug-free? Certainly not. But they're damn fine pieces of software. Many open-source projects have historically been damn fine pieces of software. Because they don't care if they lose your "business". They just want to build something cool that they can be proud of.[2]

It's why so many of us agonize over the details of the things we produce and give away for free. It might not even net us another user, but we have pride in our craft and want to do the best we possibly can.

But that way of thinking is a money loser, at least in the short-term. And companies live in the short-term.

So what's going to stop software from just collapsing into a massive pile of crap?

I don't know. Maybe it just has to get so bad that people start going to the marginally-better competition. Isn't exactly a great consolation to me, that.

[1] Small companies are often idealistic and try to do the Right Thing, admittedly. But big ones who tend to be market leaders tend to not.

[2] Insert the entire GNU philosophy here because I just glossed over it completely and I don't want to get called out on it. :)

I drank a lot of coffee until I forgot to pack instant on a 3 day backpacking trip. Headache the whole time that I cured in 5 minutes by drinking a mt dew the minute we got back to civilization. Figured it wasn't worth it and weaned off.

Then it turned out my rate of getting migraines dropped off considerably. But I love coffee, so I tried decaf. Migraines returned to being more frequent. So that was that.

If I could get it without the side effects, I surely would. Right now I'm drinking a hot cup of delicious roasted barley tea. But it's not the same.

PSA: decaffeinated coffee contains about 1/3 as much caffeine as regular - so far from caffeine free.

It depends of course but typically it’s more like 3% the caffeine of regular coffee

That's not accurate. In an 8oz cup of decaf there's 2–15 mg of caffeine. Regular coffee is about 91 mg for an 8oz cup

I was so impressed by this when I saw it. Big-ass cable. :) Great ferry trip.

I wonder how much is supply and demand. Hasn't the rate of reading been decreasing?

Yeah. As a college instructor, I now require zero textbooks that have a cost. There's lots of great material out there that instructors have put out for free use. School's expensive enough as it is.

If you don't have the money, you don't have the money. IMHO I'd rather have people without the means pirate books rather than go without. (Though the library is usually an option.)

But if you do have the means, drop the author some bucks for their work. And I can assure you, it's a lot of work. My tip jar doesn't get a lot of action, but when it does, I'm very appreciative. Here's someone who appreciated the work enough to drop me a few dollars for my labors when they didn't even have to.

I've read some of your stuff over the years and was appreciative of its accessibility.

https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/

The above is another example I appreciate: the authors charge for physical copies and complete documents but generally make the work content available for free. I've bought a physical copy in that case because I really valued the work.

Their notification says they're out of disk for Lemmy. For my part, I sent them $50 for more.

I agree with you that the social downtime is bad. People just won't use the service.

> I have absolutely no faith that whatever other device I switch to will still be supported in 10+ years.

I don't have that faith either, but it still irks me when good hardware has to get chucked for software reasons. And this goes double for when those software reasons are about stupid-ass DRM.

But in this particular instance I don't consider it to be that bad for me personally, since I don't rely on being able to access Amazon DRM books. But a lot of perfectly working devices are going to get landfilled for this.