I think I'm done thinking about GenAI for now

Summary

The Problem Like many other self-styled thinky programmer guys, I like to imagine myself as a sort of Holmesian genius, making trenchant observations, collecting them, and then synergizing them into brilliant deductions with the keen application of my powerful mind. However, several years ago, I had an epiphany in my self-concept. I finally understood that, to the extent that I am usefully clever, it is less in a Holmesian idiom, and more, shall I we, Monkesque. For those unfamiliar with either of the respective franchises: Holmes is a towering intellect honed by years of training, who catalogues intentional, systematic observations and deduces logical, factual conclusions from those observations. Monk, on the other hand, while also a reasonably intelligent guy, is highly neurotic, wracked by unresolved trauma and profound grief. As both a consulting job and a coping mechanism, he makes a habit of erratically wandering into crime scenes, and, driven by a carefully managed jenga tower of mental illnesses, leverages his dual inabilities to solve crimes. First, he is unable to filter out apparently inconsequential details, building up a mental rat’s nest of trivia about the problem; second, he is unable to let go of any minor incongruity, obsessively ruminating on the collection of facts until they all make sense in a consistent timeline. Perhaps surprisingly, this tendency serves both this fictional wretch of a detective, and myself, reasonably well. I find annoying incongruities in abstractions and I fidget and fiddle with them until I end up building something that a lot of people like, or perhaps something that a smaller number of people get really excited about. At worst, at least I eventually understand what’s going on. This is a self-soothing activity but it turns out that, managed properly, it can very effectively soothe others as well. All that brings us to today’s topic, which is an incongruity I cannot smooth out or fit into a logical framework to make sense...