The point is, literally nobody reacts to subway malfunctions with, “and we call this progress???” as if returning to previous modes of transport is somehow the right answer to problems with far less drastic solutions than throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

LLMs are a new technology that people are still figuring out how to use effectively. Part of that process is becoming reliant upon “the new way of doing things” to prove that one can rely on it. Clearly, there’s more work to be done. (My dayjob includes working on this same reliability problem.)

One can argue the wisdom of being an early adopter in any new technology. Some thirty years ago, I was told I was insane for going all-in on Linux. The times change. The sanctimoniousness of the peanut gallery hasn’t. The lunatics betting the farm on all that wacky open source stuff three decades ago turned out to have been largely right, despite the numerous failed ventures involved in getting to here.

This is just how the new technology cycle works. With every new tech, a whole lot of people discover all of the ways it doesn’t work before somebody figures out the way to make it work more reliably than any alternative.

Funny how nobody seems to use this argument every time there’s a problem with the NYC subway.

The option going unused doesn’t invalidate the need for the option to be there, moron.

Some people make it pretty clear that the only thing they understand is forced behaviors. Almost like what they’re really after is eradication of individual choices on favor of top-down uniformity.

I’m pretty sure there’s a name for that kind of centrally held power…

That’s an improvement over humans. Humans violate ethical constraints due to KPI pressures far more often.

Translation: “Please help us justify our choices to our board. They want to know why we YOLO’d billions into making our users hate us.”

Watch Jurrasic Park instead. So you can be reminded that just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

What do you do if you want to leave tech?

You don’t. Every aspect of modern society needs some amount of tech. But the tech we need doesn’t automatically need to be the adware-laden, spyware-as-a-service enshittified garbage that BigTech foists on us in the name of ever-increasing quarterly profits.

We all have a choice. If you can make tech, you can choose to make tech for humans, not corporations. There are numerous apps that we would all love a simple, cleanly implemented version maintained by a small team of individuals dedicated to creating a useful application that solves real-world problems without ripping anybody off or filling our viewscreens with pointless ads.

There’s a simple equation anybody can follow. Make something useful that someone else finds value in, sell it for a reasonable price. That’s it. That’s all any of us need to do in tech. Grab the off-the-shelf hardware, the open-source software, make something useful, and sell it for a modest profit that the makers can live a modest life on.

We all can choose to be less greedy any time we want. We can choose to work for less greedy people. We can choose to maximize for human impact, or for quality, or for longevity. We do not need to keep choosing maximum profit at the expense of our own ecological well-being.