I know I'm the dummy here because people are doing useful stuff with these techniques, but I don't think I'll ever shake the feeling that this can't possibly be the way forward, that it can only possibly be a short-lived local maximum.

Doesn't this all seem ... kind of silly?

That’s a good point. I remember in elementary school, our librarians were teaching us how to find information online using some really technical search engine. Maybe called like jstor or something else? They hated google and said you can’t properly filter with it the way you could with theirs. But years later I obviously never heard of the previous one again and used google regularly

JSTOR and other similar are really cool when looking for academic papers tbh