You are familiar, I guess, with Larry Wall’s assertion that the three great virtues of a programmer are laziness, impatience, and hubris?

wiki.c2.com?LazinessImpa...

I’m quite sure I didn't see anything this obviously wrong on the spellcheckers I used in the 80s and 90s, so why are they so awful now, when they have thousands of times more processing power and memory at their disposal?

I guess that must mean that there's interference there, but it must be pretty strong to get in the way of the connection between the phone and the car, when the phone's in the car and a matter of inches away from the head unit? What on Earth could be causing it?

Great (as always). You say:

“There's probably some mathematical theorem to the effect that there is no system that works well all the time.”

There are a number of “no go” theorems around voting, the best known of which is Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow's...

In case you’ve not already seen this:

youtu.be/9rmBqIFeHN8

Which might go some way to explaining why the linguistic turn in philosophy was both attractive and somewhat successful?

Could it be the car that LLMs do have a world model *to exactly the degree that there’s a world model encoded within natural language*.

This is what’s surprised me about the impressive abilities of LLMs: how much of human capability is encoded within the corpus.