Pretend? I don't have to pretend, I haven't seen any real improvement. I wouldn't let the models of today write code one bit more than the models of several years ago, because they still suck at it.
This is a false dichotomy, brother. People can, and do, pool their resources to give to those who have less. Most humans aren't so cold hearted that they are ok with others starving. So no, the options aren't just "trade for food" or "force people to give you food".
> People can, and do, pool their resources to give to those who have less.
Voluntarily, yes. If you want to make my list complete, you can add charity as a third option: if people judge that you're worth helping, they can voluntarily choose to help you.
But charity only works if the people doing it have things to give. Which means those things were produced. Somebody produced them. And the people who have them to give, through charity, got them one of the two ways I described. So it all still bottoms out to those two ways. Yes, some people can be helped out with charity. But you can't have an entire society all being helped with charity, because then nobody is producing anything that can be used to help them.
They can, in theory. But when the signal to noise ratio gets too low, it becomes prohibitively difficult to filter out the garbage. Thus I don't think it's true that more people creating things is a pure benefit. It may not even prove to be a benefit at all, on net.
> Websites are largely better, technically, than they were 10 years ago.
That is not remotely the case. All software, not just websites, is a lot worse than it was 10 years ago. Bloated, slow, buggy messes that resulted from the industry hiring a bunch of people who just wanted to do the bare minimum and make fat stacks, rather than hiring people who actually care about good engineering.
Sure, there's always been a subset of human endeavor which is just phoned-in slop. But AI makes the problem much worse, because it's basically all slop now. Moreover, I am an unabashed human supremacist. I find anything a human does to have some intrinsic value, even if it's not a high quality effort. So if it's the choice between human slop or AI slop, even if it were the same percentage of slop, I would rather have the human slop. At least that has some value due to being made by a human.
The point is that it's foolish to require inserting an iPad into the classroom purely for the sake of using an iPad. The goal (or proposed benefit) should be identified first, and then decide what the best tools to achieve that are.
You're entitled to your opinion. But "we should embrace the stuff big tech is doing" does not follow from "let's be welcoming to new entrants to the field". They are, of course, welcome to their opinions as well. But even if they and I disagree on things, that doesn't make them unwelcome. So no, I'm not going to embrace the slop Google is putting out based on a spurious concern over welcoming newcomers.
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