[semiquaver]

He’s hitched his wagon to a thesis and views everything through that lens come hell or high water.

  > he does not consider, even to disagree with it, the possibility that the industry is paying for Anthropic’s product for non-psychosis reasons, such as finding it useful)

This is my main problem with Zitron. He is so obviously the epitome of motivated reasoning. He seems constitutionally incapable of admitting the possibility that companies derive usefulness and productivity from LLMs. For anyone capable of doing on the ground reporting this would be trivially obvious (at least when it comes to coding). So he ends up just cheerleading on the “AI bad” side whether the cheers make any sense or not.

  > “Nobody wants to talk about the fact that AI isn’t actually doing very much,” he complained, before going on to complain about people saying that agents are able to do tasks independently with oversight. “What tasks, exactly? Who knows!” he wrote.
  >
  > Ed, thousands of people know and it is your journalistic responsibility to be one of them!

He’s intentionally incurious and doesn’t understand the idea of a general-purpose technology. This would be like looking at the rise of programming and computers in the 80s and 90s and asking “what are computer programs doing? I don’t see any concrete benefits right now, must be a scam”

[JPLeRouzic]

> This would be like looking at the rise of programming and computers in the 80s and 90s and asking “what are computer programs doing? I don’t see any concrete benefits right now, must be a scam”

There were many people around me that said that in the 80s.

[Lerc]

I have often been criticised as way too optimistic for thinking some new thing might become commonplace. The topics change but the arguments seem to be the same.

It's limited, if it were any good, then the prevailing industry would suppress it. (Video Recorders) to be fair industries did try to suppress it.

There's literally centuries of doing things the old way. It doesn't matter if it's faster if half of your implements can't even be used with it. (Microwave ovens)

The same measuring a new paradigm by the goals of an earlier paradigm, over and over. Encountered with computers, mobile phones, the web, wikipedia, Streaming video.

It's all just "That thing can't fly, it doesn't have feathers" shifted to a new domain.