Everything is "easy" when someone else is doing it for you. Results are best when you develop and apply your own expertise to a problem, but it's not feasible to do that for every problem domain -- relying on others is often important.

I'ts just that if I'm going to rely on someone else, I'd prefer for that someone else to be one of the people who has developed and applied their own expertise to that problem domain, rather than a statistical model that only actually knows how likely words are to appear in proximity to each other, and has no capacity to validate its probabilistic inferences against the outside world.

When some big shit hits the fan either with ChatGPT or internet connections, the only people able to fix systems without an internet connection will be us, the millenials.

The rest will be prompty fired in the spot.

I've found that as far as generational cohorts go, the most adept people are the late Gen-Xers and very early Millenials -- the people who grew up surrounded by C64s and Apple IIs and later had to fiddle with their config.sys and autoexec.bat files to get their game to fit into conventional memory.

People whose first exposure to computing was in the mid-'90s or later seem to have less depth of understanding of the fundamentals and less experiencing tinkering and using process of elimination to solve problems. I started encountering people who didn't understand certain fundamental concepts and had no exposure to the CLI, but still had CS degrees and were applying for developer positions, about 15 years ago.

Yeah, these too. But lots of millenials learnt with RedHat, Debian and they knew a bit of DOS for some issues with Windows 98 and potential recovering from disasters. Still, far more able than the ChatGPT aided people blindly pasting commands into a shell being a recipe for a huge disaster.

we had the same conversation when Gmail came out.

a true test for a progammer is to see what they can do on a computer without the Internet.

- Debian/Devuan/Gnuinos users with offline DVD's ISOs mirrored under an USB drive: easy mode. Most of the docs are already there, just mount the ISO's as a loopback device and run apt-cdrom add against the mount points.

- Windows user: hell.

Ubuntu/Arch/any distro without full ofline mirrors: hell too.