This happened to me and I tried to recover the last licensed version I had used but mixed up my shortcuts or something and, after the 100th time I saw the nagware screen, I gave up and uninstalled and went with something simple and free: Notepad++.
I used to be at Amazon on the B2B retail side and at the tail end we got automated A.I. spamming our TT's with completely wrong summaries. Some great "progress." Internal search had similar "improvements" that tipped the balance of 'good enough' toward 'non-functional.'
The problem I see with A.I. research is that its spearheaded by individuals who think that intelligence is a total order. In all my experience, intelligence and creativity are partial orders at best; there is no uniquely "smartest" person, there are a variety of people who are better at different things in different ways.
Have you tried creating your own programming language? How about solving unsolved frontier problems in mathematics? Ever written a book that won a Pulitzer prize? How many languages do you know?
As someone who was born ambitious I find this technology tepid at best.
Oh for sure, I've gone as far as trying to get people to change their votes to avoid what we're currently putting up with. But you can't argue that each party paves the way for the other's abuses. Consider the average age of congress and the amount of power the executive branch now holds.
That's not quite a valid point considering the article's conclusion: sowing dissent in the sciences allows companies to more easily package and sell carcinogens like asbestos, lead paint, and tobacco products.
I understand his diction is a bit impenetrable but I believe the intention is to promote literacy and specificity, not just to be a smarty-pants.
I understand your point however no one forced Microsoft to buy GitHub and use it as a Trojan horse for A.I. And for that matter, they have all the power in the world to put gates around their repo's and the repo's comment threads.
Right? Within 30 minutes of the first film you have a military tribunal discussing the dissolution of the senate. People who are triggered by politics in Star Wars have very low media literacy. (Sorry.)
Indeed I was playing with a local model and thought I might work on a difficult project I've been putting off which is a new programming language. As I described the task, the model attempted to convince me this was a foolish endeavour that I wasn't equipped to do -- so naturally I included documentation from my most recent PL project as a counterpoint, then suggested starting from there. Llama responded (ironically) by claiming I was attempting copyright infringement.
Which is to say, in the long and short of it, an LLM is completely useless for anything so ambitious as to be intellectually challenging, because the median user has no use for such cases. If I were to pay a subscription fee for something more cutting edge, I would not only be giving up the copyright on the project but also any and all trade secrets, which would end up feeding the next version of GPT or Claude or what have you.
At least while I'm unemployed and underinsured, I'm not in the business of giving away my remaining talents to multinational billion dollar corporations (and paying for the privilege). Instead I've signed up to be a volunteer developer for a non-profit.
My consolation prize against AGI optimists and Singularity doomerists is the film "Slumdog Millionaire." Our individual experiences feel worthless until the opportunities present themselves where they become invaluable. The exponential space of creative problem solving ensures that (some) winning combinations will always come out of left-field.
Humans are social creatures. The existence of a tool that can replace humans is not nearly so depressing as the realization that a loud and powerful group of people are zealous and joyful to use it to such ends. The assumption that people come first is rapidly becoming a logical fallacy in a world that seeks to optimize paperclips first.
Anyway, the pendulum will swing the other way eventually, but it's a rough ride hanging on until then.
Glad to see stimulating discussion here falling on both sides.