@preinheimer yeah. I've played around with these things to see what the hype is about and a few things stick out to me. First, it's obvious they're giving away the product to get people hooked and paying for it with VC money. But even so, a CC Max plan is almost required to get something useful and it's already too stupidly expensive. Are people going to pay for these when it's 10x the current cost? At $2k/mo per seat the calculus changes.

Second, these tools just aren't very good. Full stop. They generate mediocre results. Full stop. Seriously, people need to internalize this: the output is not good. That people think that it is kind of amazes me, and also makes me think that most output from humans isn't very good, either. So we're not getting some great leap forward in quality; we're just getting something around or perhaps slightly better than the median, which is already bad.

Third, I don't think they actually save all that much time. Yeah, it's kind of nifty to toss the tedious and boring parts at a machine, but they require so much hand-holding to get something merely acceptable that it just feels like shifting the burden from source generation to using imprecise human languages to make a machine do the text generation. I have seen some colleagues do cool things with them, but at a huge cost in terms of effort. If the tools require that much effort, they're not good.

For the first time in my professional career, I feel like someone is trying to sell my labor back to me instead of paying me for it.

Is there some element of these things that's going to stick around? Sure. But not in their current form, and the hype...oh goodness, it feels like the 1990s all over again.

@mcnees everything this guy proposes sounds like its coming out of the mouth of a 12 year old. He's surrounded by so many sycophants who are so terrified of challenging any of this nonsense that he's grown incapable of understanding the sheer absurdity of it all.

@jwz @inthehands this is the way.

@inthehands as a veteran, I find the appropriation of military motifs by civil law enforcement extremely offensive, but also incredibly dangerous.

A particularly egregious example, that I wish people would address more often, is the use of the word "civilians" to describe people that are not whatever strain of police is using the term. "Civilians" refers to people within the general civil populace, as opposed to the military. The police (in all their various forms) are members of the civil society, and as such, civilians themselves.

Words have meaning, and those meanings matter. When we allow these subtle shifts in language, we normalize the militarization of police forces nationwide, but more than that, we reinforce the self-image of the police as separate from the rest of civil society. And history shows that when people view themselves as apart from civil society, they often see themselves unbeholden to the norms and ethics that govern civil society.

One can draw a pretty straight line from that to these guys cosplaying soldier, wearing full tactical gear, riding on MRAPs and HMMWVs, assault rifles on their shoulders like the movies, belt-fed automatic weapons mounted on turrets in the background for Kristi Noem's photo-ops. We, collectively, should have never let anyone get away with normalizing this from the second it started. Yet how many articles does one read in the press where no one ever bothers challenging a cop when they refer to the people that they've supposedly sworn to protect and serve as "civilians", as if they, themselves, are not?