I get your drift but... This sounds a bit like advocating "why not ditch all progamming languages and build some super language that makes no exploits possible". While we are at it, ditch the Von Neumann architecture. Or saying "why not ditch all natural languages in favor of Esperanto".
No, we don't need the "perfect language". But we definitely need to switch to better methods - which were available for decades already - more quickly. There are plenty of memory-safe languages. They have been available for decades. And here we are, a huge amount of servers affected by a memory bug, in especially badly written C. There are probably many more fundamental design bugs in PHP.
This is pedantic and nonsensical, IMHO. White is well defined as "the lightest color" [0]. There is nothing "whiter than white" in the objective sense. It's also a very common topic in introductions to philosophy in order to define how one makes an apology.
Carlo revelli explains in marvelous ways in "Reality is not what it seems" that all man made models of nature are wrong, but useful. Useful models get replaced by more-useful models. He starts out by explaining the once usefulness of the basic elements theory earth wind fire.
"negative price" is a bit misleading. It means you get a discount on monthly bill when consuming excess power (in fact preventing that grid voltage gets too high). It does not mean paying for producing excess. There's an easy outlet for excess so no need to scare people off installing/producing more energy.
Most time i spent in bug fixing or extending features was in code that tried to be clever and over engineered. e.g. "Let's use the visitor pattern with double dispatch to do dependency injection" vs "just adapt the methods and done".
To me the reasoning of understanding all the things you use in a rock solid way is hard to grasp.
You just typed some text and hit send. You trust that the combination of letters that form words and the combination of words that form sentences, arrive somewhere in a list of comments? But do you understand how those bytes (utf8 or utf16 or..) are transmitted (which endianness, how are they packaged, does it use sentinels or length codes), where do they end up (database, plain text), how is the text organised (alphabetical, by data, by points...)? In fact you are not sure about any of those. Still you typed and hit send. So how is that much different from writing a prompt and hit send?
So first of all, when LLMs first came on the scene, I did want to understand them better. I read the Attention is All You Need paper, I did Karpathy's transformer course, etc. And I think this basic understanding of LLMs and further reinforcement techniques makes me understand better how to use LLMs, e.g. what their limitations are, etc.
But most importantly, there are very different qualifications in my head for things I just use and then get on with my day, and tools that are integral to things I am building. I take the bus but I don't really understand how a diesel engine works. But if I'm building it, I'm responsible for it. In fact, you brought up some networking issues in your comment. For a long time when I was a software engineer (primarily a web developer) I felt that my knowledge of network engineering was lacking, so I specifically took some courses in network engineering to better understand how my code interacted with the network. You also brought up text encodings. Once at my job I did a full, rabbit-hole deep dive into text encodings and localization because we had frequent bugs related to localization, and I still find a lot of developers misunderstand a bunch of the important details in localization (e.g. the difference between an encoding and a unicode code point).
But sure, I don't need to understand every minutia of detail at the atomic detail. But I really like to know that I could, and in the meantime I have a enough of an understanding to build a complete conceptual model in my head.
Now consider the case where I send you a message (in a language that's not english) and it doesn't render as text on your screen. Reasonably, because I understand how network protocols work, I can assume that it's not a little/big endian mixup between our systems - the HTTP request would not have worked, then, as utf-8 and utf-16 are incompatible (unlike the weird utf-8 ascii mix). With HN, I can open up developer tools see what encoding it is sent as over-the-wire, and then I can ask you to look at the encoding on your end. I can say "the vibecoded browser you use is trying to interpret this as utf-16 but hackernews only sends utf-8". I can dial down the root cause of the problem and then address it.
Contrast that to a situation where I ask an LLM to use a tool and it can only do it like 98% of the time. How do you root cause that. How do you fix it such that that doesn't happen again?
Also consider: occasionally your support agent gives people free plane tickets.
Yes, we've made a lot of progress towards LLMs being fairly good, and adversarial systems and such do work, but it is asymptotic approach to 100%, never actually 100%
Where I live electricity costs 30 to 40 cents per kWh, I think it's easy to go over 20 dollars per month. Also I find 20 dollars is really a small amount of money to spend on AI. AI fays itself back fast if it helps you with serious stuff.
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