Months? Scraping wasn’t a hard problem then. Classifying information is a different and more complex thing, which is what these models are very good at. Then again we had other means of classification before LLMs without having to go through chat bots.

Just record yourself doing it and post online. If the projects are indeed complex and you’ve found a way to be 20x more productive people will learn from it.

The problem is not having any evidence or basis on which to compare claims. Alchemists claimed for centuries to synthesize gold, if they only had video we could’ve ruled that out fast.

I have a 6 year old pair, battery last about 20 minutes tops.

Gacy is a good example of failure of the judicial system. He also came from a broken family and his father was violent and drunk. He was imprisoned but homosexual sex crimes weren’t taken seriously even against minors. This allowed him to leave prison with almost no time served. I wouldn’t blame the psychiatrists here.

We see that same pattern with Dahmer where the police literally released one of his victims into his custody and joked about the young teen being Dahmer’s “boyfriend”.

I’ve watched movies on and read about countless serial killers. Almost always they came from horrible families, with abuse, neglect, different types of punishment. Also it seems there never is any type of psychological follow up of them as kids when they started to act “weird”. So most are just forgotten people who were never looked at mentally. At least I the 70s, I don’t know today.

I think there a couple cases where that’s not true but rare exceptions.

Localization is more important than you might think.

My wife worked for a company that helped provide teaching content for schools throughout Brazil. They'd interview teachers all over the country and one of the complaints from teachers in isolated communities was that they had to use the same textbooks as other places in Brazil without any regard to their own situation.

They reported that many examples for starting math for kids featured things like "strawberries" or "apples", things the kids had never seen or maybe heard. So now they needed to abstract over what is a "fruit" and a "countable object" as well as whatever the example was trying to teach. Teachers reported less engagement and it was more work for them to adapt it to local relevance.

Try to teach kids about vegetables in the US midwest and use green beans and Bok Choy as an example, for instance. It doesn't make sense.

I don't know about that, though I'm not a linguist. Seems to me most people haven't been literate for that long and the printing press would've been "useless" as a tool to modify the language of populations with only 10-20% literacy well into the 19th century. So 100 or so years seems too short to observe that.

Also some of the most widely spoken languages today do feature a high degree of diglossia between spoken and written variety, to a point where the written language has been outpaced. We could call that evolving. Examples would Brazilian Portuguese and American English (some dialects specifically have changed English grammar).

Also, notoriously, Chinese written characters have been used for languages that evolve independently and are not mutually intelligible for millennia. Them being printed on paper instead of written doesn't make a difference.

What we do have today is a higher exposure and dominance of certain dialects, with some countries even mandating a certain type of speech historically, coupled with a higher degree of conectivity in society to a point where not being intelligible to other people very far away carries a much worse penalty. That tampers some of the evolution much more than printing press in my view.

You touched on the significant thing that separates most of the AI code discourse in the two extremes: some people just don't like programming and see it as a simple means to an end, while others love the process of actually crafting code.

Similar to the differences between an art collector and a painter. One wants the ends, the other desires the means.