Over the past few years, I’ve become incredibly familiar with the work of a lot of tech reporters. I am a worker in the tech industry, after all, so it makes sense that I’d be interested in the goings-on of the industry as a whole, but the primary reason I’ve added this to my interests is because of Windows and the rise of LLMs. I’ve had access to a computer of some kind or another for my entire life and have always enjoyed them. The first big thing I ever bought myself was a laptop I could use for computer games that ate up all of my carefully horded babysitting money when I was a teenager, and I’ve been spending a lot of time on a computer ever since. Most of the time, it has largely been a device I took for granted–something that I largely ignored except as a vehicle to deliver other things: video games, my writing, digital access to my friends, and so on. A few years ago, as I became isolated during the first summer of the pandemic, my relationship with my computer changed drastically, turning from the aforementioned vehicle into the portal through which I accessed all of existence other than the physical place my body occupied and the grocery store. Since then, it has shrunk somewhat, but computers still loom large in my life and I can say no cloud has darkened my horizon quite like the appearance of LLMs and every software company’s attempts to shoehorm them into everything. This capitalistic and ruinous desire, the appeal of these plagiarism and theft machines, is actively driving me away from everything to do with computers and would maybe even drive me back into being a console-only gamer except that I know for a fact that the console companies will also shoehorn that shit in if they can ever figure out a way to do it.