On not debating the usefulness of LLMs
Debating the usefulness of LLMs is kind of futile because people rarely appreciate the difference between personal usefulness, perceived productivity, project productivity, project ROI, sustainability, and overall business value.
An LLM tool can excel at the first two but be a disaster on the rest.
What’s more, this isn’t unique to “AI” fans. The reason why the software industry is such an utter fucking disaster is that next to nobody actually tracks anything meaningful about project outcomes and the few times somebody does large scale empirical overviews of the field, they discover that software projects are overwhelmingly unsuccessful, over-budget, late, and full of defects.
We can’t even have meaningful discussions about regular software dev, so how on earth are we supposed to debate the new shiny that’s being built and marketed by an industry that has a history of outright fraud and some of the most dodgy research studies this side of the tobacco industry?
Links
- “Robin Rendle — I love invokers and you should too”. I really really would like Invokers to get implemented broadly ASAP because it’s a great idea.
- “Robin Rendle — :has roundup”
- “The Allure of Local-First Sync Engines - Jim Nielsen’s Blog”. I need to brush the dust off my design for a file-oriented local-first sync engine for the OPFS API. Back then I couldn’t figure out a pathway to pay for the work, but maybe that’s changed? (Tho, funding’s an issue, as always.)
- “It’s A Training Problem - Funranium Labs”
- “Entertainment expert claims “nobody’s watching Apple TV Plus”, suggesting numbers are much lower than rivals”. Here’s a radical suggestion: maybe a good way to boost subscriber numbers would be to let more people subscribe. (Apple TV+ isn’t available here in Iceland, for example)
- “Radio noise | A Working Library”
- “Building engineering”
- “A few thoughts on the Apple DOJ antitrust case, from someone who isn’t riding his first rodeo | Ian Betteridge”
- “Adactio: Links—a view source web”
- “The long and winding road to implement the AI Act – Euractiv”
- “Why legacy code rewrites are the hardest job in software: A guide to decide whether to rewrite vs. renovate legacy codebase”
- “The negotiation cycle. — Ethan Marcotte”. “Our tools keep getting updated, processes become more complex, and the simple act of just doing work seems to get redefined overnight.”"
- “It’s not about the 30 percent – tyler.io”
- “The Foo Fighters’ AIDS denialism should be on the record | by Schwartz Media”
- “On popover accessibility: what the browser does and doesn’t do”. I really, really appreciate articles like these
- “Apple sued by Biden administration over alleged iPhone ‘monopoly power’”. I’m guessing Gruber will find some way to blame this on the EU.
- “The creator economy trap: why building on someone else’s platform is a dead end — Joan Westenberg”
- “What if the doors to the creative industry are all closed?”. They used to say in comics that every time a new talent found their way into the industry, the powers-that-be would board it that way up so others wouldn’t follow. Looks like other creative industries are heading down the same path.
- “John Romero doesn’t believe in prototypes - daverupert.com”
Cat photos
Met this friend while on my mental health walk.
