all this was obvious the moment napster became popular. and for more than a decade anyone who explained what was happening was ridiculed, especially in tech circles.
spotify in particular cemented a payment structure that disadvantages any “serious” music versus endless repeat pop songs, while also being completely corrupted by conflict of interest from record labels with an ownership stake. now they manufacture their own muzak and steer your playlist to it, draining the last bits of revenue possibility away from these “middle class musicians.”
youtube streamed music for free for years, paying no artists, and it was one of its core growth engines. completely asymmetrical outcome.
the whole thing denigrated musicians, and music itself. hordes of early online young tech professionals making great money at their office jobs poo pooing the concerns of an entire industry which previously enabled some of the most sophisticated artistic endeavors our culture ever attempted.
just dumb. a complete victory of lowbrow values.
baffling someone is writing this article in 2025. at every fork in the road, the path was taken that would give less revenue to the musicians. and ~no one in tech felt it was a problem.
talking about it like there is a revelation or an emerging phenomenon here mystifies, while rubbing salt in the wound.
I'd be curious about the total carbon emissions, all in, to produce this because it seems like an excellent carbon sink. And especially when compared to steel.
I would like to take this moment to point out that in NY it is ~illegal for me to hire an unpaid intern and train them by for example saying:
- this is codex, here is a bunch of tickets
- enter each ticket into codex, then review each change and understand what it did. if you think what it did is good, open a PR
- twice a day we will meet and i will review all the codex PRs with you and explain what is and isn't working
etc.
This would not save me time. It would be paying it forward. And I cannot do this.
Wait a minute. It's going to be possible to create my own curses with some kind of monetization attached? And not only frontend in future? Would be amazing.
LLMs in data pipelines enable all sorts of “before impossible” stuff. For example, this creates an event calendar for you based on emails you have received:
(that’s mine, and is due a bugfix/update this week. message me if you want to try it with your own emails)
I have a couple more LLM-powered apps in the works, like next few weeks, that aren’t chat or code. I wouldn’t call them transformative, but they meet your other criteria, I think.
What part of this can't be done by a novice programmer who knows a little pattern matching and has enough patience to write down a hundred patterns to match?
Long tail, coping with typos, and understanding negation.
If natural language was as easy as "enough patience to write down a hundred patterns to match", we'd have had useful natural language interfaces in the early 90s — or even late 80s, if it was really only "a hundred".
For narrow use cases we did have natural language interfaces in the 90s, yes. See e.g. IRC bots.
Or to take a local example, for more than 20 years my city has had a web service where you can type "When is the next bus from Street A to Road B", and you get a detailed response including any transfers between lines. They even had a voice recognition version decades ago that you could call, which worked well.
From GP post, I was replying specifically to
> LLMs in data pipelines enable all sorts of “before impossible” stuff.
> For example, this creates an event calendar for you based on emails you have received
That exact thing has been a feature of Gmail for over a decade. Remember the 2018 GCal spam?
> For narrow use cases we did have natural language interfaces in the 90s, yes. See e.g. IRC bots.
"Narrow" being the key word. Thing is, even in the 2010s, we were doing sentiment analysis by counting the number of positive words and negative words, because it doesn't go past "narrow".
Likewise, "A to B" is great… when it's narrow. I grew up on "Southbrook Road" — not the one in London, not the one in Southampton, not the one in Exeter, …
And then there's where I went to university. Ond mae hynny'n twyllo braidd, oherwydd y Gymraeg. But not cheating very much, because of bilingual rules and because of the large number of people with multi-lingual email content. Cinco de mayo etc.
I also grew up with text adventures, which don't work if you miss the expected keyword, or mis-spell it too hard. (And auto-correction has its own problems, as anyone who really wants to search for "adsorption" not "absorption" will tell you).
> That exact thing has been a feature of Gmail for over a decade. Remember the 2018 GCal spam?
Siri has something similar. It misses a lot and makes up a lot. Sometimes it sets the title to be the date and makes up a date.
These are examples of not doing things successfully with just a hundred hard-coded rules.
this is such a fantastic comment because it makes a charitable attempt to explain how data driven decisions go off the rails.
and it matters because this seems to be an omnipresent phenomenon.
everything everywhere seems driven by this unless someone with decision making power is executing a specific and conscious strategy that pushes back against it.
reply