"The most wildly successful project I’ve ever released is no longer mine. In all my years of building things and sharing them online, I have never felt so violated."

https://beyondloom.com/blog/onwigglypaint.html

Edit: I am not the author of this. Please go check out https://beyondloom.com/ for more of the author's work.

with more and more bloggers, coders, tech people now trying to publicly normalize their use of LLMs and various ML software, i see a lot of people getting visibly (and understandably) angry about it, for many obvious reasons.

but you don't have to be angry about other people using LLMs. hear me out.

the one concept that i always come back to is craftsmanship. there are those of us who entered, and maintain, our professions because we are attracted to and proud of our craft. honing our skill is always demanding, usually thankless, and quite often economically draining.

but we do it anyway, because we're not just here for a paycheque or internet fame or an easy job. we do it because our craft is an inseparable part of who we are; the process of learning our craft reshapes us.

there have always been people out there looking for the fastest, cheapest, sloppiest way to get results. they're in every industry, from academia to carpentry to mining. it's a gold rush mentality.

but at the end of the year, they'll have whatever money or fame they wanted, and we'll be smarter and wiser with our craft. when the gold rush is over, we'll be *years* ahead of them. they'll be off looking for the next easy meal. i used to get mad about that.

but i'm not angry about it anymore. it actually makes me sad. there are all these people out there madly de-skilling themselves and making themselves less intelligent, convinced they've found some magic time-theft machine that operates by pulling the lever really fast. meanwhile, there are folks like us who are advancing way, way ahead of them just by doing what we've always done: making tiny bits of progress in our understanding and skilfulness.

this isn't a morality tale. it's just the reality of human intellectual and creative growth. getting better at what you do has a tremendous cost, precisely because it is something you can't steal from someone else.