Do you know anyone doing all of that? Running a local model on off-grid power?

It’s guaranteed that one quick attempt at something sophisticated will fail. It’s almost guaranteed that anything sophisticated will fail, no matter how much preparation and practice you have. However for something straightforward and toilsome, AI tooling can often save you 50% of the grunt work. I use it to pull and collate updates from JIRA, gitlab, slack, and zoom about what happened to this set of 12 projects being worked on by those 25 people. It tabulates and summarizes and I dig into specifics from there. It’s not doing anything critical, I’m not passing on slop to anyone, and I’m not relying on it to take things to the finish line. It saves me some busywork and occasionally finds things I didn’t know about. Really, the tools are great for specific purposes once you understand them and dial them in. This gets lost when everyone is either hailing it as the Second Coming of Jesus or hating on it as the Antichrist.

Unsurprisingly, the reality is somewhere between.

The pasta manufacturer and the tomato farmer would like to have a word with your metaphor.

It is actually legitimately unclear what to expect of them these days. They can do some dazzling things, and fail miserably at others. The spectrum from “easy” to “hard” is not the same for our brains. And our brains mostly know when something is hard or we just can’t do it. Or at least we’ve had millennia to adapt to the way our brains are. They’re pretty idiosyncratic as well, and both marvelously clever and painfully stupid.

I’m anti anything mob. The fucking groupthink on certain issues is real.

I’m also anti people who make shit up and then try to sell it as a long strings of “inferences.”

And after having AI shoved down my throat at work for two years while my teammates get laid off, I’m pretty anti AI too. At most I have direct experience with it that teaches me it has some uses, like summarization.

You’re full of shit. You’ve been told. And you know it by now. But you’ll probably bleat on with more of the same because it’s all you know how to do. Proceed, I guess.

Hank Green has earned the right, with me anyway, to have his point of view heard. And frankly he has more credibility with me than the garden variety pitchfork-wielding anti-AI mob. I think Hank is a person who finds AI interesting and sees upsides as well as downsides. But the aforementioned mob is not interested in anything other than the emotional catharsis of railing against something they hate.

Now ask me if the mob is in the room with us, because it probably is.