Antarctica Starts Here.

Yes, I know that's not what Shakespeare meant. Not like that's ever stopped anybody in marketing or people with too much money and hungry for more.

Okay. You've been inundated in what the industry is calling AI technology for months on end. I don't need to introduce it because the only way you could have avoided it is to have been in the middle of nowhere for the last year ¹ or so. I would ordinarily have said "in a coma" but the way word gets around it would surprise me not a bit if folks would be talking about this, that, or the other AI thing at the bedsides of coma patients, to say nothing of the televisions that are always turned on in hospitals these days.

Yeah, that went a bit off to one side for a minute. Keep that in mind, I'll bring that up later.

When LLM technology finally got effective marketing going for it ("artificial intelligence") it was inevitable that two major markets would make heavy use of them: Click farms and scammers (whether or not the former is a subset of the latter is out of scope for this article). Just as spammers implemented "I'm not a spammer - honest!" measures almost immediately and everybody else struggled to catch up. If it can be abused, it will be abused as soon as possible. Nowadays you can't swing a dead cat inside your search results without hitting at least one site that's all AI slop and zero useful information. Self publishing has gone from a somewhat questionable (in both quality and subject matter) industry to a potentially lethal race to the bottom because, no matter what, publishers are making money regardless. More and more students are using LLMs rather than their brains to do their homework (which defeats the whole purpose, which is to say, practice what you've learned so that you understand it better) and driving their instructors nuts. What isn't being mentioned much is those students listening to their instructors talk with each other about using LLMs to come up with problem sets, homework assignments, and exams and thinkging, "Hey, my teacher uses ChatGPT to come up with homework assignments, why can't I use it to do those homework assignments?"

As for business... LLM technology is getting shoved into everything with a CPU in it, or nearly so. Samsung started with Bixby, which everybody went out of their way to disable as soon as possible because it was as helpful as Skippy and twice as annoying. Microsoft stuffed Copilot into Notepad for fuck's sake. It's almost like they thought Vigor was a good idea and decided to run with it. Or maybe it was because companies that own a lot of physical compute capacity wanted to get more money for it existing, and found another solution to a problem that doesn't really exist. I was talking with a friend the other day, and both of us seem to recall a paper published back in 2017.ev or so that discussed various ways of getting more money for hosted processing power.

It's hard for skilled folks to find jobs these days. There have been multiple waves of layoffs in recent memory but hiring has been significantly lesser in magnitude. Multiple CEOs have been going on the record saying that they have LLMs writing large amounts of code and have gotten rid of organics to cut costs. Copilot (at the very least) was trained on lots of open source code on Github, and I think it's a safe bet that other constructs were also so there is at least something substantial to back this up. I've heard talk that this is being done to justify pounding the salaries of coders down to a fraction of what they are; I don't think that's the intended purpose of it but it might happen as a second order effect. It won't do anything about bringing down the costs of living in those places. Supposedly this is supposed to usher in a wave of unbridled innovation, the market will go wild, the line will go up for ever and ever, and everybody that matters will get rich.

Something isn't making sense, though. Lots of folks got laid off and are having trouble finding jobs ² and there is a nontrivial number of people who've been out of work for over two years. That means that a lot of folks who are ostensibly the intended customer base of those companies, are living on fixed incomes in effect - living off of savings while they hunt for employment. To put it another way, they're not spending lots of money on those nifty-keen-like-wow LLM powered services. They're not starting their own companies, either, because that takes money; money that pays your rent. ³ Where are those customers supposed to come from? How long are folks supposed to be able to live in those places which have gotten so expensive even when you have a job? Is this all a shell game where companies give the same money to other companies in a vast network of closed, tight loops? Even B2B only goes so far before you need users outside of the business space. Remember, if that line Must Go Up, B2B won't keep that happening.

Things don't exist in a vacuum. Things are connected to other things, which are connected to stll other things. Cause and effect, and second order effect, and third order effect. If you only think no farther ahead than the next fiscal quarter, if you're more concerned about your exit strategy and negotiating your golden parachute... okay, let's put it this way: The purpose of a company is to make money. A gross oversimplification, but let's go with it. Very few people being able to spend lots of money, not starting companies, and probably not using those services are not going to give your nifty-keen-like-wow LLM powered application money. Companies that don't get customer money don't stay in business. They go out of business if they don't get forced out of business from not having customers. Assuming, of course, that they can't pull a few strings and get themselves bailed out.

I think that, all of that said you can see what I'm concerned about. Another house of cards coming down, a lot of people losing everything through no fault of their own, and a small number of people harvesting more for their hoards.

I suppose that as a cyborg I'm being a bit of a reactionary writing this. I might be. Something that I think is important, and you are welcome to disagree with me if you want, is the efforts of organic, living beings, imperfect as they may be. Those blemishes are the important bit. Mistakes, happy and otherwise, which cause you to change what you're doing and go in a different direction. Trusting the process and not the plan. ⁴ Stumbling over things in mid-step and saying to yourself "You know what? Fuck it. I'm going to try something that makes no sense." Coming up with new ideas in the middle of working with other ones. The false starts, the do-overs, the taking your time so that you can see what happens.

That bit earlier in this post where I briefly talked about veering off in a different direction for a bit? That happens sometimes. When you freestyle a post of this size (or maybe a bit bigger) that happens occasionally. Usually that gets caught and deleted (or at least smoothed over) in later passes over the text. Something that gets drummed into you in school, and which is very useful in college, is that after you've spent some time working on something you're writing, set it aside for a day or so, come back to it, and read through it. You'll find things to change, stuff to delete, things that should be moved from one place to another, places where you forgot something. I didn't go back and rework that part deliberately, because it shows imperfection. The organic touch, if you will. Sure, Windbringer and Leandra helped me write this, but they didn't write the text. They manage and search my archives of knowledge, look for references for specific things, and both back up and version control everything, but they didn't write it. I did.

That is one of the reasons I'm not a prolific blogger anymore. While I do try to post at least once every month I don't like to write when I don't have something worth saying (which I define, because it's my website). I could write analysis of stuff going on in the world, but there is no shortage of what passes for talking heads on the Net doing that very same thing and most of them do it for money, anyway. This is a hobby that I partake of because it makes me happy, not because I'm trying to build a brand or get advertising revenue (though I do like the occasional Amazon credit, it helps me build cool stuff once in a while) or anything like that. And to that end that's why I don't use LLM tools when I write posts. I do this for fun, because I enjoy it, because I like sharing things that interest me with everyone, and using LLM tools would turn this blog into just Another Goddamn Thing I Have To Do, another chore that goes faster if I automate parts of it, more IT housekeeping... I'll pass.

What I'm trying to say is this: It's quality, not quantity. Blood, sweat, and tears, not plugging a three line prompt into a web site and getting a few thousand words to copy and paste into a content ⁵ management system. Brilliance and experiments and passing fancies and imps of the perverse and fuckups and good ideas at the time. Bad puns and links to things you might not have known exist. Not clout chasing and making people jealous of your trip to Rome where you crammed three weeks into one just so you could have material for a dozen Instagram posts throughout the year. A willingness to try and fail, to make mistakes and look like a dork.

Being an imperfect being that does things because you want to, and not someone who pumps out vapid text because you have to.

I wish to extend hearts-felt thanks to my beta readers who gave me feedback and suggestions when I got stuck about halfway through writing this article. You know who you are.