What "serious" tasks does banking involve?

I log in to transfer money, to take a photo of a check to deposit it, to check my balance.

All of that is fine on a phone screen. Actually, it's a lot easier to take the check photo.

And a banking app is a whole lot more secure than a browser tab running extensions that might get hijacked, on a desktop OS whose architecture allows this like widespread disk access, keyloggers, etc.

> To think you had to put in effort.

But that's the whole point...

When things that previously took hundreds of hours of effort to learn now become available with just a few minutes, they become available to all -- even those without all that extra time, which is most people who have a lot of other competing priorities in their lives.

That's democratization.

I don't understand why you're trying to argue against that. It's a dictionary definition. It's just a meaning of the word.

Whatever you seem to be upset about is something else, I don't know what.

> That is your reading and not the comment... different people share different context.

That makes as much sense as saying that the comment being written in English is just my "reading" of it, and that in a different context all the words could have entirely different meanings. That is technically true, but also completely useless when you're engaged in a real-life conversation with the rich context of the year 2026 on planet Earth... I tried to explain to you the shared context in case you were somehow ignorant of it. If you insist on denying that, then you're going to have a very hard time communicating with others, as you seem to be having with this conversation. Good luck.

> What do you make of the fact that these things have basically the entire corpus of human knowledge memorized and they haven't been able to make a single new connection that has led to a discovery?

If that's what you're experiencing, then you're not asking them the right questions.

If you're at the edge of your field so you're able to judge whether something is novel or not, and you have a direction you'd like the LLM to explore, just ask it. Prompt it to come up with some ideas of how to solve X, or categorize Y, or analyze Z. Encourage it to take ideas from, or find parallels in, closely related or distantly related fields.

You will probably quickly find yourself with a ton of new ideas, of varying quality, in the same way as if you were brainstorming with a colleague.

But they don't work "solo". They need to you guide the conversation. But when you do, they're chock-full of new ideas and connections and discoveries. But again -- just like with people, the quality varies. If you're looking for a good startup idea, you need to sift through hundreds. Similarly if you're looking for an idea of a paper you could publish, there are a lot of hypotheses to sift through. And you're supplying your own expert "good taste" to try to determine what's worth pursuing and developing further, etc.

LLMs don't just magically come up with new proven discoveries unprompted. But they turn out to be fantastic research and idea-generation partners. They excel at combining existing related-but-distant facts and models and interpretations in novel ways.

What you write doesn't make any sense. You say it's "silly to expect a comment to be neutral" but the comment is "as neutral as possible" and then answer if the commenter was neutral with "yes". Those aren't consistent.

I don't know what definitions of neutral or value judgment you're using, but I hope you can use this as a learning opportunity. The original comment has the obvious implicit judgment that a greater CO2 footprint is a bad thing. This is shared context. It is so obvious it doesn't need to be explicitly stated, any more than "murdering people is bad". The purpose of the comment is clearly to shame the person for having such a high carbon footprint, otherwise there's no purpose in bringing it up. I don't know what your purpose was in trying to deny that. But if you genuinely didn't understand before, I hope now you do, and that this has been helpful in improving your reading comprehension or understanding of shared/implicit context.