Sometime in the last two years, the number of people consider themselves to be programmers has at least doubled. We have a giant contingent of people who have never gone through the hell of actually developing a skill but are now “developers” in much the same way that typing “make me a song like ______” now makes you a musician. No theory, no chords, no building of callouses, just load up our AutoPlagio and dance the night away!
And these sudden Developers and such are all very upset at having their legitimacy questioned by a bunch of… of… NERDS.
Listen, everything that they are doing by scorching the planet and turning the tap water brown, could be achieved on CPU or much smaller GPUs on local machines - it’s a question of focused, tight training. What they’re doing instead is literally attempting to build gigantic models that take in absolutely everything (burning real books in the process because fuck history we got money to make) and attempting to sell the idea that this brute force, one-thing-does-it-all approach, which requires us to give up everything else that is good in the world, is the only way forward, and yes, we must build the roko basilisk now.
It’s a big, big grift.