but all of this stuff is still relatively new and I’m sure it’ll get better with time

What is the exact point of taking this attitude? Anybody who cares to look knows exactly what’s wrong with this stuff. It’s an astonishingly, and I mean “astonishing” as in “actually beyond ordinary human comprehension” as in “literally awe-inspiring”, wasteful means (whether your energy source is fossil fuels or solar!) of doing - at the absolute outside best - extraordinarily basic shit. Every single day the window of useful applications and potential improvements narrows incredibly rapidly, and the people who are fundamentally steering the whole programme are proven liars and scam artists, and proven beyond any shadow of a doubt at that?

Who cares if it’s relatively new, or if there’s room for mild-mannered optimism? What practical teeth does that argument have? What purpose does it actually serve beyond satisfying a basically shallow political impulse to moderate perceivedly heightened emotive responses to these incredibly stark facts?

The only actually reasonable response to this farrago is full-throated opposition to every element of the whole show which is either a lie or covering for a lie, which is virtually every single element. If all that you’re left with is “hey, transformers are pretty cool, and I look forward to seeing how they contribute in their own partial way to our collective technical means of saving the planet, and incidentally anti-trust legislation should put people like Altman behind bars for the rest of their lives” then so be it! That’s a far more even-handed and fundamentally sensible response than blithely insisting that the occasional trinket has room for improvement - in fact if you’re liberal-minded it’s the essential output of any sensible thoughts on how to maintain a democratic society.

syntax completion has existed since 1957, and templating (or macros that implement templates) has been in editors long enough I don’t think anyone remembers when they got added (but here’s TECO (1962) anyway. the implementations of these things that run inside your editor are lightweight, predictable, and don’t increase carbon emissions by 30%, and it’s really weird that you’re in this thread cosplaying as a programmer but somehow don’t know basic shit about how code’s written, actually??? why is that, I wonder.

yes, computing systems use energy

come the fuck off it. so much of computer science involves studying algorithmic efficiency, something you just tried to talk past. it’s how we know that the regular expressions and push-down automata we implement in editors to do fast efficient syntax completion are a better fucking idea than using some shit that does the same thing less reliably and consumes so much fucking energy doing it that it increases greenhouse emissions by 30 fucking percent

yes, computing systems use energy. If our energy grid is overly reliant on the burning of fossil fuels that release harmful emissions, that doesn’t mean we need to stop the advancement of our computers. It means we need to stop using so much fossil fuels in our grid.

Now where have I heard something like this before? I'm trying to think of something, but I just can't quite seem to remember...

this stuff is still relatively new and I’m sure it’ll get better with time

We'll engrave it on LLMs' tombstone, right next to blockchain and its "it's still early".

@LargeMarge @self you seem very keen to find a problem for your beloved solution. Did you used to be a Blockchainer?