I've seen this statement in a number of places on a number of subjects. It's a key talking point for LLMs spit out by LLMs. Maybe the word is just big enough and understood to hit a perfect token-spend point.

The short story is, "Democratization" does not look like a single-handed number of megacorporations slapping a ticker on thinking, destroying the environment and free resources. I don't know how this gets anywhere close to democracy.

One may argue local models are the perfect solution, I reply that it's still wildly inefficient and all other avenues should be explored first; and finally that learning is fun.

It can be hard to learn programming, old tools have stuck around and grown in strange ways; learning a widely used language seems like a good idea at first but it's decades of baggage piled on over and over at best, makes for a tough starting point or old tutorials doing things the "wrong way."

LLMs as distributed by four megacorporations do things the wrong way nearly every time, teach the wrong lesson nearly every time. By any sensible measure they are a completely worthless tool requiring more work by experts to check and double check than producing quality code. Like autocomplete can look like a sentence, LLMs can generate looks-like code, it may even compile.

We have/had great resources to learn programming- it's every programmers favorite thing to talk about and teach. LLMs and SEO has drowned out good resources. Finding an experts personal opinion on anything became a chore of wading through listicles and listicles of true garbage written by nobody.

Newer languages are doing a great job helping to teach new programmers, comparing a naive gcc call to rustc we see actual warnings and errors report problems before they invisibly fade into your program for a hair-pulling session later. The first thing any C++ programmer must learn is -Wall AND -Wextra. Zig is my favorite and will throw the largest (yet concise) tantrums about any potential problem or inferred operation, I really believe this will go a long way in teaching programming; don't hide anything from students.

Like anything else it largely takes practice. I don't consider myself a good artist, but hot damn getting in the flow feels good. Artists, more than programmers even, love to show off their stuff and process, we've had a literal decade of Bob Ross after all.

Now in this digital age learning to draw/paint can be a wildly cheap endeavor. A good drawing tablet can run under $50 and you're all set for the medium, while physical supplies get cheaper and cheaper over the years.

New mediums are developed too, the awe-inspiring Blender democratizes 3D modeling, I would say video editing too but nobody else agrees with on "blender is a good video editor."

I try not to be negative, I don't find it very productive at the best of times. At this point I think it's time to freak out, lambaste AI hypemen in the wild. Too many corporations have gotten away with price-gouging rug pulls that not only will happen for LLMs but already has been paid for in part by nearby unwilling residents.

I've had too many people come up to me and talk praise of AI this or that which could be better solved with a near ten-line script or has largely already been solved in general. There's no need to debate them, the environment and economic impact should be enough to deter any sympathetic member of man-kind.

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Last modified: Wed, 06 May 2026 05:16:16 GMT