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+++
title = "LLMs are everything that it wrong in the world of computing"
author = ["Michał Sapka"]
date = 2024-12-23T21:53:00+01:00
categories = ["blog"]
draft = false
weight = 2001
image_dir = "blog/images"
image_max_width = 600
Abstract = "On why I am loosing hope in software"
Listening = "For help me - Calm Nights"
Listening_Url = "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7A2YmgCOImc"
+++
For decades corporations have been doing anything in their power to make computers _worse_.
Software used to much faster, much leaner than it is now.
Hardware performance is progresing by leaps and bounds, but somehow the software is slower.
Yes, programs we run (cough, web applications, cough) are more complex, but the complexity increase is smaller than the compute improvements.
Software used to also be substantially better written.
When sending patches to clients was a risk by itself, releasing barely working software was akin to shooting yourself in the foot.
Now bug are expected.
Again - I am comparing simpler software to what we have now, but the complexity increase is smaller than increase in budgets and team sizes.
Software also used to be:
- much more open
- purchasable
- not requiring internet
- not as streamlined
- not designed by psychologists to be addictive
- not designed to be a constant stream of revenue
- swiftly improving
- possible to be created by teens in their bedrooms
- simple (as in having a limited use case)
- small
- running on different hardware architectures (yes, there used to be more than 3 systems)
I am often accused of romanticizing past, but I am far from that.
Software of the golden age had lots of problems, it was far from perfect.
I am critical of the path we took - as it was aimed not at _better software_, but at _better return of investment_.
We could have had much better working computers, but here we are.
Everything is barely working but dollar pours.
Some call it enshittification, others distribution.
All I know is this is not going to stop.
It is never enough.
This brings me to ChatGPT, LLMs and all that crap.
I have to admit, that the way it works is extremely cool.
Some vector math is able to fool us into thinking we are interacting with a human being?
How cool!
I'd love bo be amazed by it, but if you we look at it critically, it a is terrible peace of software.
It is slow, expensive, and non-deterministic.
If I released a code to production with has _some chance_ to work or not, I would need to fix it.
If the same software yielded different returns _by design_, I'd need to rewrite it.
I am fully convinced that LLMs are not a path forward at best, and a huge step backward at worst.
A lot of people are looking at this tech with scared eyes, but there's no chance LLM will be better than they are.
However, as in the above examples, better doesn't always win.
I am afraid that too much money was invested in this dead-end technology for it to fall.
The entire computing world is the hands of a few gigantic companies, and each of them has fully risked their future on it.
Google, Microsoft, Amazon, NVIDIA, AMD, Apple - by the end of 2024 there is no big computer company left that is not "AI first".
Will they let their investments go to waste?
Google search is useless; Windows is a clown show; Facebook/Twitter are not be touched by humans.
Yet they own _billions_ of dollars.
They are able to throw piles of dollars in the data center furnace and wait.
The fact that they also benefit from those dollars doesn't make it any harder.
I know people who already can't work without asking ChatGPT and they lived through better times.
But I also know teens who never had a fast computer; for whom slow a web app is the only status-quo they have experienced.
For them the current crap software is simply _software_.
I am really afraid that the next generations may never know deterministic software.
Companies can simply continue to add "AI" features (since AI is now a synonym for GenAI), and raise the kids with it.
Will the kids care that it sucks?
Will they even know?
Will they give a rat's ass that the GenAI has only two goals: first, to become abstraction over all interactions with computer; second - to make people obsolete?
I think the first one is the goal, while the other is what GenAI dealers sell to investors.
Microsoft and Google want to be between everything we do with out computers; that was their strategy for a long time.
It's a self-propelling nightmare: the worse the vision, the bigger is the money river, which fuels making computers unusable.
We have already lost so many alternatives - Google is trying to fix itself with GenAI after it destroyed itself with ads, after it destroyed all competition.
The web was already great.
Microsoft Windows ate all other x86 OSes except of Unix - and we had dozens of great ones.
Apple iOS or Google Android are mandatory - but this was not the case a few short years ago.
Progress is not linear and _better_ doesn't always win.
In most cases whatever gives more return to the investors does.
And no other technology has more investor risk attached to it than LLMs.
AI has a lot of usecases, but it is thrown away to make way for GenAI.
This steamroller may break computers, the economy, and the environment.
But there is nothing we can about it, as none of us is a billionaire.
All we can do is to dance how it pleases them.
Unless something **big** happens.
With infinite pockets, the giants can just [burn the money](https://indiadispatch.com/2024/12/22/big-techs-292-billion-ai-spending-spree-meets-the-revenue-desert/) - literally.
---
I will keep this site althole-free, and I will personally run software that has zero LLM.
I don't use copilot, I had only a dozen chats with GPT.
I will try to continue keeping LLM subjects here to a minimum.
This is my life and this is where I have any control.
This is the only rebellion I am capable of.
---
In unrelated news - SystemD now tries to convince people that having file-based logs is deprecated.
And in few short years we will have Linux "administrators" who don't know how to use grep(1).
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