[Discuss] LLMs and AI

[Randall Rose]

On Thu, Jan 29, 2026, at 10:05 PM, Kent Borg wrote:
> These things will make us intellectually lazy unless we are extremely 
> careful, latter-day Luddites are going to get their revenge as they will 
> still be able to think.

Matthew Stoller sometimes says that if you don't read books, you can't think -- for instance, here:
https://x.com/matthewstoller/status/1251551897225396228


On Thu, Jan 29, 2026, at 10:05 PM, Kent Borg wrote:
> On 1/29/26 12:28 PM, markw at mohawksoft.com wrote:
>> Anyone want to discuss?
>
> We are in a *very* interesting time.
>
>
> These things can't "think", but what they can do anyway can still be 
> very impressive.
>
> These things are very dangerous; lonely, vulnerable, suggestible people 
> are being destroyed.
>
> These things are turning the economics of the web upside down; web sites 
> with good content are losing ad revenue, new crappy web pages made by 
> LLMs are flooding the web.
>
> These things got better by training on more and more data, but they have 
> run out of data, worse, coming models are going to be poisoned by 
> training on their own terrible output.
>
> These things will make us intellectually lazy unless we are extremely 
> careful, latter-day Luddites are going to get their revenge as they will 
> still be able to think.
>
> These things are very well suited to programming, particularly in Rust, 
> because the compiler is to strict about so much.
>
> These things don't scale, the "transformer" innovation that made them 
> possible does not scale.
>
> These things got me fired, in fact, I am pretty sure ChatGPT devised how 
> to decide who to dump when my employer did a massive layoff.
>
> There things are turning the labor market upside down, junior level 
> positions are are being eliminated, the pipeline for creating senior 
> positions is broken.
>
>
> And, there will be a crash, the hype is not justified. There is no way 
> it could be.
>
>
> -kb, the Kent who has learned a lot about these things, and is full of 
> opinions, more everyday.
>
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