The same thing is happening in software, I see the ladder pulled up and don't feel vulnerable as senior staff. If anything, we face a massive and increasing competency crisis in computing because there is a cult dumb enough to believe acceleration and doomer cases for LLMs.
The GPT ones are strange. The $25 fable one to me is subjectively better than the others. The $100 fable one is too literal and robotic.
The jevons paradox is you need auteurs to curate vignettes or effects and cut or mask them in etc. That's not really different philosophically when software entered art in other ways. I could see errors/glitches lowering in time but I doubt there will be much acceleration.
This is silly or just AI slop post? Because using a Go quote as an example of doing something right in the arena is laughable at best where it has the same problems, more magic, and worse observability.
The punchline seems to be something like the LMAX disruptor style which is genuinely good for some things, but if you have I/O loops like the illustration shows you can easily block that loop with some long running function.. so you have the same cognitive load as managing thread pools or async pools or disruptors..
It's chronoception effect, not placebo effect. Standard literature claims humans can readily visually perceive 60-90Hz, and perhaps somewhere 500-1000Hz for ghosting. Note that all this is somewhat tangential to the article which focuses on _input latency_, I think the author is driving the high refresh just to minimize _output latency_ as much as possible from the test.
Those two companies spend all their effort patting themselves on the back about "peer reviewed studies" and posturing immeasurables like security theatre and "trust and safety". It's really not hard to believe that Grok or Chinese models can show there is no moat.
Grok build already punched above its weight and is the nicest TUI, claude and codex are clearly vibecoded by web developers that don't understand systems (eating SSDs, spaghetti logic, extinguishing kernel watch limits, etc). I think Anthropic and OpenAI are both engaged in their own theatre, trying to define and redefine what game they are even playing, trying to shift to immeasurables like safety or security or exclusivity. There's definitely room at the top.
Sure, humans are attracted to laziness by default and at its best technology must be used to lower toil and suffering (unfortunately there are unintended consequences etc for philosophical debates).
The bigger issue with brain rot is attention spans. Social media has ruined attention spans.
I came into the US tech industry in 2011 from a CS program (programming on my own longer), which was basically a pipeline into Java or web dev at that time (the classes on other things like OS, compilers, and FPGA were a thing, but seen by most as a hurdle not a promising or practical career pathways).
Most of the people I dealt with for the decade following that (i.e. pre-LLM) had little clue how any part of computers worked, and I don't intend that to be particularly pejorative, it's just that it's been somewhat easy to carve out a niche doing something to do with programming while having little understanding of the small or big picture.. all heuristics and applying working patterns.. for a few decades.
You can still understand whatever you want, today, with added tools. It's just a choice to turn your brain on or off. I think LLMs are perfectly fine as a learning tool to interrogate a subject, do comparatives, and then formalize your understanding by reading the sources. At a macro level brain rot is real, but it cuts across all generations and it started long before LLMs.
This hasn't been true for quite a long time, because it's domain of other products for both.
i.e. MySQL/Maria's MM is one of the worse options compared to anything else.. like TiDB or Aurora on AWS for MySQL compat and Yugabyte or CockroachDB for Postgres compat (or Aurora on AWS or AlloyDB on GCP).
Versus letting a singular entity snoop everything? If you actually open a connection to the result what is the difference? The only way to fully deal with all that is an overlay or mixnets.
Maybe.. and "a few" was pulled out of thin air, but these machines were national treasures with immense R&D expense. Think rockets, heavy aircraft, and lithography.. not commodities or software. Having stuff in these categories is kind of "you have to be this tall to ride the ride"
The history is complicated and a side quest to the conversation here, but a free market did play out in the US and became fever pitched after AT&T was hand tied in the 1980s.
A free market means if you can do something better/cheaper/faster, or at least convince other people of the promise, you have a shot. The more that come (think of a gold rush), the potential returns diminish so it will eventually be hard to either acquire revenue/customers or funding for speculative approaches if they are capital intense.
Also, ironic to the conversation, the "best" machine vis a vis when and what, came out of the monopoly: the 5ESS. The Bell System was a reflection of a different culture and values system than what the US has today post leveraged buyout conglomerates and software company monopolies.
I think a national security argument is much more sound than an economic one, although costs are externalized in a way that isn't obvious, i.e. ecological disaster that shipping everything around the world and back (components, assemblies) is, and hollowing out a local supply chain takes virtually no time while the impact or limits of it are hidden until abrupt breakage (i.e. covid-era shortages on basic supplies, wars, or heavy handed statesmen dictating preferential access to silicon or whatever today). That is, every nation has to maintain some stake in not hollowing out completely while still participating in global commerce.
They carry $575m in debt, which is around 80-100 devs a year if they are paying something like 4.5% on it, ignoring tax write-offs on either case as well as equity comp. There is some calculus to all that, carrying some debt, doing buybacks, whatever other strategies to manage perceptions sure.