I think I've identified the core reason I instinctively dislike LLMs. I strongly value competence. This applies institutionally as well as societally, not just individually. In a competent society, things just work. Read more...

I've decided to become a software monk. What's a software monk? It is someone who renounces the accepted way of life, and instead withdraws to their own domain in order to practice a way of life in pursuit of a more meaningful existence. Read more...

I’ve come to the realisation that I’m going to have to separate programming for enjoyment of the craft and beauty of the code, which I will dub artisanal coding, and programming for profit, which I will dub industrial coding. Read more...

I am constantly exasperated at the assumption by the people around me, and online, that AI and the use of AI is progressive rather than regressive. Following from my earlier anti-AI post, I decided to buy and read this book in order to get a deeper dive on the topic by people who are involved in the industry, have a different profile to me, and who took the time to write up their thoughts in a book. Read more...

AI has become mainstream and is unavoidable. ChatGPT, Claude, Bard, Gemini, CoPilot, AI summaries in search results, people submitting AI-generated posts to forums, AI in pull requests, interview questions answered by AI, etc. I'm not a fan. I actually enjoyed playing with DALL-E when it first came out and getting ChatGPT to rewrite letters as a Shakespearean sonnet or as Sherlock Holmes is pretty fun. I might even venture that I'm a better than average prompter. However, I'm still opposed to AI, and my opposition falls into two broad areas. Read more...