Well, that's one economic outcome, and one I would welcome, I'm not quite so confident in humanity's ability to successfully navigate that, but it would be wonderful.

I'm highly doubtful we will achieve significant space exploration. The physics have been stubbornly unforgiving on this with no workarounds in sight. We *can* do some stuff within the solar system, though the payoff is questionable. Interstellar has even more unforgiving physics and even more uncertainty. With a *massive* expenditure of energy we might be able to get a probe to Proxima Centauri and data back within 15 years to have a better idea if it's even worth a hypothetical human expedition.

Frankly, we have no particular inkling of what it will take to get to AGI. Might be 6 months, might be decades. The current most popular approaches seem to hit the fundamental limits predicted by most technical people in the field, in spite of the snake oil business folks that have descended upon that subject area.

I've no idea what you picture as having made teachers obsolete, especially in the 80s. No, the TV cart was not a suitable replacement for a teacher.

I wager his narrative is that you have it generate some code, you fling the code at the problem blindly, then it behaves badly and you describe how it behaves badly and then it spits out new code and you fling it blindly and eventually, maybe, it will work.

Or maybe more charitably, you have a project in a supremely boilerplate heavy ecosystem. Some of these projects manage to make you enter a lot of verbosity in at least duplicate and LLMs can reasonably take a lot of that tedium out. In which case you don't look at the boilerplatey stuff as much.

A handheld touchscreen device is a whole other ballpark than a car stereo. The car stereo issue was enough to drive steering wheel controls, for example.

I was around for the paper maps era. We did not actively hold map in hands while also driving. Either your passenger did it or you parked and plotted your way to where you were going. It would have been utterly ridiculous to try reading a paper map while just driving.

At least around my area, the test may be more lax than it used to be, but the test *never* said "here, adjust your radio while driving, take this map and futz with it so I can see if you can still drive fine". Most of what I've seen dropped are things like proving you can parallel park. I never was made to get on the freeway for a test (that would have been a pretty far drive from the DMV office to get to the nearest one out in the sticks), and besides freeway is some of the absolute easiest driving. On the flip side, there's a lot more requirements and restrictions on learning drivers than back in my day. In my day it was "here's a learning permit for a few months, ok we assume if you can pass a trivial written and practical test it's all good for all sorts of driving all the time at 16. Now it's "you need to document a *ton* of supervised driving and then get a lot of restrictions. Teen accident rates have been greatly improved.

There's a difference between slapping a stick that is in one of a few very set positions to another of of the few very fixed positions without even looking and having to fumble around with a handheld device that also has to be looked at while you are futzing about with it.

Besides, most drivers can't handle stick, or more accurately they can't handle clutch.

He said "put the phone in a holder". You aren't holding the giant touchscreen.

I'll agree it kind of sucks, but at least you aren't using your hands to juggle a device while you really need them to steer.

I own a tiny indie studio in Chicagoland and my peers own the some of the huge studios in Chicagoland.

Cinespace is dead right now. It has ONE show active. The other studios are so dead that they're secretly hosting bar mitzvahs and pickleball tournaments for $1500 a day just to pay property taxes.

My studio is surprisingly busy but I'm cheap and cater to non-union folks with otherwise full time jobs.

Perhaps useful, but perhaps a bit wasteful compared to saying "developer can submit code they are trying to port to the LLM on-demand".

The step of proactively submitting 9 million lines of code and getting a bunch of text that has mostly has avery high chance of never being referenced smells of management doing something to look impressive at significant cost to highlight how "in tune" they are with the AI hype in the face of a broader reluctant organization that wants to keep them from doing anything that might carry a whiff of actual risk.

The thing is that it actually isn't important whether what they got out of the LLM was accurate, it was enough text for some manager to take credit for generating a huge specification that purports to describe the business logic of all their code. That's some fine job meeting some big KPIs there.

It could be that the specification is wildly inaccurate and utterly useless, but on the other hand at least it's in good company with almost every single "English Specification" I have ever seen made by a human.

I presume the thought is to force human review of business critical logic.

In terms of the relative value, it might be helpful, but probably would have just as well been subjecting snippets of original code as needed to the LLM to help clarify.

I wager that the human doing the final implementation will have both the original source and the 'plain english' specification. I wouldn't be too shocked if they tend to look at the original source more than the specification.

So I'm not thinking this is necessarily a terrible idea, though it might not be that useful and might be more a business guy who thinks he understands what developers find hard patting himself hard on the back for this 'amazing' time saving idea.

If the length of the output is about the same as the length of the prompt, ok I could see it helping to restructure ugly mess into more acceptable prose.

But if using LLM as a text extender... Ugh...

*Maybe* someone likes their fiction to fill up more of their time, but I'm particularly exposed to people trying to take purely informational text and bury that in a sea of slop because it seems "polished" or something instead of just getting to the point.

But they also have USB-A? And also there are adapters that you can make USB-C ports from USB-A ports if you really want the USB-C version.

Sure, low-spec USB-C ports can be sufficient, but it's fair to say it causes a lot of confusion, and a USB-C adapter in USB-A is just as good as low-spec USB-C and a bit more obvious to set expectations lower.

I suppose in his defense, it didn't sound like complaining, just stating the very blatantly obvious to anyone in the industry.

They are cumbersome projects, and he didn't seem to express that they ever had any misconceptions about it, or even that it is very wrong. When speaking to investors it may be very apt to explain that those "sweet deals" should be perceived with some caution, because the investors are very oblivious and otherwise may start complaining when they see the follow-on expenses hit.

Please please please don't be using LLM to generate text for a book you expect people to actually read. All LLMs do to such work is make it mind numbingly more verbose and draining. Every time I see someone use LLM to make "nice text" particularly trying to entertain it's just a whole stream of garbage that could have been more artfully conveyed in a sentence or two.

I personally can't relate to it helping write quality code, of about 5 functions I tried to use it for over the past little bit, it has gotten every single one of them wrong in some way, though admittedly in one case the wrong answer contained within it a clue about the existence and nature of a step in implementations that was omitted in the standards documentation. Maybe it's more helpful in other domains of programming, but in mine it's been pretty useless. Most tricky was when I tried to use it to describe how to implement a particular security practice, and it was both wrong (it hallucinated an API call that didn't exist) but also the code given incorrectly used it in a way that would have been a security vulenerability had it actually existed.

Well, I put that one to an LLM and:
Waffle Wednesday

So there we go, one of your criteria has been met.