[oats]

Is this a joke? Am I going crazy?

I don't like this future we're going towards where we have to trick our software (which we can no longer understand the workings of) into doing what we tell it to by asking it nicely, or by putting another black box on the end to "fix" the output. This is the opposite of engineering. This is negotiation with a genie trapped in silicon.

[blibble]

it does seem as if the world has gone insane

we have brilliant machines that can more or less work perfectly

then the scam artists have convinced people that spending a trillion dollar and terawatts to get essentially a biased random number generator to produce unusable garbage is somehow an improvement

[Spivak]

These models have turned a bunch of NLP problems that were previously impossible into something trivial. I have personally built extremely reliable systems from the biased random number generator. Our f-score using "classic" NLP went from 20% to 99% using LLMs.

[gavmor]

I don't know, I think it's pretty cool that we can turn arbitrary human speech into well-formed RPCs.

[Eisenstein]

It is easier to realize that software development was never engineering. Physical engineering is reliant on physics, while software is reliant on other software. Physics are static and as regarding practical engineering is known and can be applied rigorously and taught in courses. Software is constantly changing, contain tons of edge cases, and as we can see by recent developments, can change in unpredictable ways and lead to entirely new paradigms.

So, the software that you learned on is changing. You aren't going crazy, but the ground is indeed shifting. The problem is that you assumed it couldn't shift because you were applying the wrong constraints.