it's seen so much spam it only needs a few examples of spam to work?
He's saying: it has seen so much spam (without it necessarily having been labeled as such) already, that it only needs to see a couple examples labeled as spam in order to recognize the pattern in all of the spam it has seen before.
His advice was that given ten years almost anybody can become a professional software developer.
He's one of the people I've never met/barely interacted with who are dear to me.
He must be over 70 now, and it's been a few years he's neglected his- in past times- lively blog.
He used to be in financial straits, tried to launch a cultural initiative to draw support for Load Bearing Internet People like himself:
http://www.catb.org/esr/loadsharers/
He's still got a subscriberstar if you're looking to lighten your pocket.
I particularly like his series of posts about his modern rewrite of Crowther and Woods' Adventure, starting here: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7536
[0] It helps that ESR's arguments where largely practical in nature rather than ideological. In particular, he coined the aphorism, "with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow".
Edit: O boy, I accidentally read "a brief history of hackerdom". Now to dive into what I actually meant to read
This is an article about the effectiveness of large language models, which have learned to do tasks beyond regurgitating text despite only having been trained to regurgitate text.
As long as you are able to describe the task as a text stream and are ok with having a text stream as output, GPT-3 might actually be able to do the task with just a couple of examples as context. I saw a talk at Black Hat about using GPT-3 as a spam filter. Because GPT-3 has trained on so much spam, it knows what spam looks like. It just needs a couple of examples, and off it goes.
> The most complicated reasoning programs in the world can be defined as a textual I/O stream to a leviathan living on some technology company’s servers.
The references to the UNIX philosophy feel a bit tacked on, honestly. Probably just there to grab attention.