Bitcoin is pure evil

“From mid-2022 to mid-2023, the 34 mines consumed 32.3 terawatt-hours of electricity—33% more than Los Angeles—85% of which came from fossil fuels. We estimated that 1.9 million Americans were exposed to ≥0.1 μg/m3 of additional PM2.5 pollution from Bitcoin mines, often hundreds of miles away from the communities they affected.”

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-58287-3

The reason I get so annoyed about people pitching LLMs as a way to 'democratise programming' or as end-user programming tools is that they solve the wrong problem.

The hard part of programming is not writing code. It's unambiguously expressing your problem and desired solution. Imagine if LLMs were perfect programmers. All you have to do is write a requirements document and they turn it into a working program. Amazing, right? Well, not if you've ever seen what most people write in a requirements document or seen the output when a team of good programmers works from a requirements document.

The most popular end-user programming language in the world (and, by extension, the most popular programming language), with over a billion users, is the Calc language that is embedded in Excel. It is not popular because it's a good language. Calc is a terrible programming language by pretty much any metric. It's popular because Excel (which is also a terrible spreadsheet, but that's a different rant) is basically a visual debugger and a reactive programming environment. Every temporary value in an Excel program is inspectable and it's trivial to write additional debug expressions that are automatically updated when the values that they're observing change.

Much as I detest it as a spreadsheet, Excel is probably the best debugger that I have ever used, including Lisp and Smalltalk.

The thing that makes end-user programming easy in Excel is not that it's easy to write code, it's that it's easy to see what the code is doing and understand why it's doing the wrong thing. If you replace this with an LLM that generates Python, and the Python program is wrong, how does a normal non-Python-programming human debug it? They try asking the LLM, but it doesn't actually understand the Python so it will often send them down odd rabbit holes. In contrast, every intermediate step in an Excel / Calc program is visible. Every single intermediate value is introspectable. Adding extra sanity checks (such as 'does money leaving the account equal the money paid to suppliers?') is trivial.

If you want to democratise programming, build better debuggers, don't build tools that rapidly generate code that's hard to debug.

Os acordais de cuando el cyberpunk nos ponía como una de las cosas más horripilantes del futuro el que la gente empatizase antes con las empresas, o los CEOs que las representan, que con la gente normal?

Quien nos iba a decir que tuiter era la herramienta definitiva para que esa gente cultivase su ejército de fans tontopollas

Lies

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