I figured out last night that LLMs are Dunning-Kruger machines - "If it meets or exceeds my expectations it meets or exceeds everyone's expectations because I am smarter and more accomplished than most people." And here you are, privileging your "give me spoiler-free yet highly specific information on a video game I wanted to play" above the WSJ's "phone in a best man speech" by couching it in terms of "power users."

Do you remember the early objections to AI?

The argument was "bu bu bu professionals will use this to make shitty art to sell to the rest of us" followed by "bu bu bu amateurs will use this to make shitty art to starve professionals". We're now at "bu bu bu amateurs can't tell the difference what do we need professionals for?"

Do you remember when it was interesting?

Two solid years of talented amateurs and professionals going "can we make this interesting" and we're rallying around "I recognize this brand language as Batman-adjacent."

The whole point of a "pareto 80/20 gist of it" is to get enough comprehension to know when you need to go deeper. We used to accomplish that with a search. Or asking a friend. Or wandering into a store.

"Me at the Zoo" was uploaded in 2005. Within ten years, your best bet to change a belt on your washing machine was to find someone who had filmed themselves changing a washing machine belt. Within fifteen years, your best bet was to find a five-year-old video of someone changing a belt because the SEO bots had flooded the zone with bullshit links to purchase parts. Nowhere in there was Youtube ascribed a "world-changing" dynamic.

Your every use-case is some form of "reduce friction between my ignorance and my knowledge by a nominally incremental amount." The Dunning-Kruger machine in effect: LLMs allow non-experts enough expertise to satisfy other non-experts. Sure - you have a few other menial-bullshit tasks up there but ultimately, your every question up there is some form of "Hey Alexa" and "Hey Alexa" has only lost Amazon $25b so far. Your big outlier is "replace Google search because search is garbage now" which, again, is why Microsoft invested in OpenAI. Can't use search anymore because there's so much AI-generated garbage; best use AI instead!

Ultimately, the question is does this tool do anything well enough to pay for itself and the answer seems to be "it probably will someday because mumblemumblemumble." Your sanctioned use cases are "make Excel suck less" "do a web search for me" and "generate some boilerplate." Maybe "multi-stacking" will allow you to do cooler shit! Who knows! The future's so bright we gotta wear shades! Meanwhile the cryptids have been banished in favor of this shit:

Did you know that I've been beta-testing Final Draft for almost 20 years? There was a documentary that never came out in which a spokesman for Final Draft said that they'd go under if it weren't for amateurs who will never make it. It should have come out in 2007 but who the fuck is going to buy a documentary about amateur screenwriting? Truth of the matter is you can kludge a Word macro into formatting screenplays but FD makes it hella quicker. Of course as soon as the whole world became superhero movies the amateur screenwriting market collapsed. The semi-pro field would pay $200 to write screenplays that would get blown off by Warner Brothers but that door is now so shut that all that's left is dudes spending too much effort on their unwatched Youtube videos. Thus, "draw me some fuckin' dragons since no one will ever see this shit anyway." Final Draft? Yeah it got scooped up by Entertainment Partners. Why? The lady who ran the beta-test (who brought me on!) ended up going to the accounting firm and when FD was about to go Chapter 7 Warner Brothers leaned on EP to buy it so their working screenwriters still had a solution. Any feckless wannabe who is still trying hard enough to want to do it right is now being underwritten by Warner Brothers.

I've been beta-testing Pro Tools for almost as long. It was never a semi-pro solution; you don't buy Pro Tools unless you expect to make your money back. Problem is so much of music now goes through Spotify and Bandcamp that why bother with the pros? Avid is supported in no small part by Disney because holy shit if Media Composer goes down y'all will have nothing to fucking watch. Meanwhile, here's Microsoft, "reinventing music". You? you're no amateur! You're a "power user!" Surely there's an AI use-case for you!

NFTs are being used every day by the Arnault Group, by Richemont, by Sheseido and by dozens of other major conglomerates to control black- and gray-market distribution. That was the point.

The side-show that was Bored Apes was never the point. The point was authentication. You don't deal with authentication, so there's no use-case as far as you're concerned. Not your fault. Nobody was talking about authentication except the people who need authentication and as a group, they went "yay massive drop in breakage."

And for the life of me, I can't recall a single Super Bowl commercial about how NFTs were going to change the world, even though they already are.