>why did they try so hard to hype it in anthropomorphic terms?
Marketing, pure and simple
People relate better to something that sounds humanesque (even though it is not) vs calling it what it is (in this case, a massively-backed (ie LLM-based) Markov Chain generator)
>How close are we to where a robot could get into a car from 2010 and drive me around?
A long way away
And here is why - driverless cars are a thing ... essentially making the car the "robot"
General-purpose robots are an amusing scifi trope, but have no practical benefit in reality
Purpose-built robots (even ones that can flex within that prupose to different applications) make far more sense (and have already been around for decades)
This is precisely why nVidia is providing GPU to AI companies, and not trying to be one themselves ... loads more money to be made selling shovels to prospectors than in being a prospector
The valid use cases for blockchain are relatively few
The use cases where it gets applied are far more than the valid ones
As for NFTs ... there never was (and never will be) a valid use case - it does not matter if you "own" a digital asset (like an image): a screenshot of it is good enough for 99.99999...% of people, so why pay for the "real" thing?
I was on the Fediverse for a while with my own Mastodon instance a few years ago[0]
Then a minor update broke it[1]
Have not been back since
Like you, I want to like it / use it ... but it simply takes too much mental space on top of the other social media / comm channels I use (professional and personal)
So ... they are moving to a more-accurate pricing model, and you are upset?
Some things cost less than others
AWS (and every other cloud provider I can think of) does this with their pricing - bandwidth (fully-internal, cross region, external...), compute (EC2, Lambda...), storage (S3, EBS, local NVMe...), and more
Sounds like you have now gotten a clearer mechanism to understanding usage, so you can maximize your utilization, and you want to have an opaque view instead
If I were to get a "coding assignment", I would tell them 'no'
So I would spend 0 minutes
And not just because I am not especially close to a 'coding' or 'developer' role in my IT career
But because they are all* a complete and utter waste of time
Unless you mean a whiteboarding session in an in-person interview, where you see approaches to problem solving, swags in the direction of an answer, refinement of the problem statement, etc - those I spend 15-20m on (out of the 45-60m interview session)
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* maybe there is a coding assignment that is not a waste of time, but I have never in my well over 20 years in IT seen it
>I've tried having them run a maze, but instead of giving them the whole maze up front, I have them move one step at a time, tell them which directions are open from that square and ask for the next move, etc.
Presuming these are 'typical' mazes (like you find in a garden or local corn field in late fall), why not have the bot run the known-correct solving algorithm (or its mirror)?