Comment by dartos

I’d consider myself one of those nerds. I’ve been in love with programming since I was 9 (20+ years ago now)

I was mystified by LLMs a couple years ago. But after really understanding how they work and running into their limitations, a lot of that sheen was lost.

There’s not a ton of interesting technology happening with LLM, more a ton of interesting math. (Math, especially linalg, is not the part of computer science I, personally, fell in love with.)

The outputs of LLMs, unlike programming languages, is pretty random and trial and error based. There’s never any real skill or expertise being built by playing with these tools. My control over the output isn’t as direct or understandable as with programming.

There’s no joy of discovery, only joy of getting the slot machine to give me what I want once in a while.

I’ve regained a lot of that wonder, recently, by doing graphics programming and learning lisp. Going against industry trends in my recreational programming has helped the field feel fresh to me.

Regardless, I don’t think the extreme minority of people who are truly nerdily passionate about tech are the “a lot of people” OC or I was talking about.