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Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

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Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#731

Post by parthianshotgun »

hnfong wrote: post #719
parthianshotgun wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

all of it coheres to consciousness, we know what it's like to be a human, but I think it'd be hubris to think we've cracked the code and made a blueprint of anything other than a word calculator

Hubris goes both ways. It is also hubris to assume our intelligence is special, instead of a boring neural network with sufficient number of neurons that exhibit emergent properties.

There's probably more dimensions to hubris but typically I understand it as flying too close to the sun, the other way for me is humility.

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#732

Post by aarong11 »

pksebben wrote: post #416
janoc wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that actually anyone wants? Google and Amazon have tried to sell theirs for a long time. And none were actually selling much. Amazon admitted to be selling theirs at a loss. Facebook has tried their own - and quickly cancelled them. Google's is in every Android device - and yet pretty much nobody uses them. Even Apple's Siri is more annoyance than help. That something can be built doesn't mean it will sell or tha…

> Hoping for one of these with an open API that anyone could integrate whatever they want with, I am not holding my breath here. OpenAI is already on it. The latest gen of GPT-3 and -4 are finetuned to respond to "do this thing" commands with JSON structured to: - provide the name of a given function call - provide arguments to that function call it's "early stage", which in this case probably means "good enough to b…

Just before the point they built this, I was already chaining queries together to do this. I built a plugin system with bits of JS code that are eval'd and arguments injected.

They couldn't have released this at a better time, I have about 30 plugins and i'd say it manages to get the right one about 90% of the time as opposed to about 70 with my hacked together version (but I guess I wrote it and know what to say so maybe that's a bit skewed)

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#733

Post by imdsm »

rchaud wrote: post #219
imdsm wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With exception to the term experts, which I imagine is a term you've applied, I don't think there's anything inherently bad with people changing their focus to the latest tech. Could this perhaps be a you issue? How do you feel when you think about people changing from microservice architecture to blockchain to crypto and now to language models?

"Changing their focus to" vs "appointing themselves as an expert at" are two very different things.

Depends if people are appointing themselves as experts or if people are claiming people are experts for changing their interests. Right now, its impossible to know which. I've seen people getting excited about LLMs and their potential and there's nothing wrong with that.

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#734

Post by imdsm »

iamben wrote: post #151
imdsm wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, to say crypto has no real use cases is wrong. A lot of people are against crypto, and I can understand that, the whole cultural side of it is tough to digest. But if you strip away all of that: the twitter bots, the airdrops, the spam, the shills, the whole cultural lot, and you just look at the core, there are real use cases. Buying the pizza with bitcoin was the first proof. That being said, I can understan…

I get the analogy, but banking without cash is pretty convenient. I mean, I don't even have to carry a wallet around if I don't want to (my cards are on my phone). I can send money anywhere in minutes, I can pay online, or over the phone and everything is pretty secure (and insured). I'm sure there's some niche edge cases I'm missing, but where the 'post cash'/bank cards world has real advantages, how would cryptocur…

I don't think crypto will become the only thing (which I assume is what you mean by the thing), just as bank cards and NFC isn't the only thing. Cash still exists. In the same way that we still have traditional centralised banking alongside decentralised crypto etc.

> How would cryptocurrency improve any normal persons day to day?

I see your point, but I can think of at least a few situations:

1. Global transactions with lower fees

2. Remittance, if you're working abroad etc, no more WesternUnion fees

3. Alternative to cash for previously cash transactions (less chance of being mugged etc)

There are definitely arguments for it, but anything you can do with it you can do without it, so it doesn't invent new use cases really, but I find the arguments against it are never based on pragmatism and logic, but on emotion and bias.

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#735

Post by imdsm »

codegeek wrote: post #333
imdsm wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, to say crypto has no real use cases is wrong. A lot of people are against crypto, and I can understand that, the whole cultural side of it is tough to digest. But if you strip away all of that: the twitter bots, the airdrops, the spam, the shills, the whole cultural lot, and you just look at the core, there are real use cases. Buying the pizza with bitcoin was the first proof. That being said, I can understan…

"grandparents only use cash, they don't trust bank cards" You may not have meant it but it sounds like an argument made in bad faith. Cash has real world application and can be used anywhere. Not trusting bank card is a choice but the alternative can be used anywhere which is cash. Crypto at best is used for get rich quick schemes, scams, dark web payments, ransom demands etc. You said buying pizza with bitcoin. Wher…

> Crypto at best is used for get rich quick schemes, scams, dark web payments, ransom demands etc. You said buying pizza with bitcoin. Where ? Is it an anecdote ?

To unpack this:

1. Crypto at best is used for get rich quick schemes, scams, dark web payments, ransom demands etc.

I think this is the bad faith in this discussion. Cash is also best for scams, crime, ransom demands etc. Knives are used to stab people, so should we limit cutlery to spnorkfs?

2. You said buying pizza with bitcoin. Where ? Is it an anecdote ?

https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2023/05/22/celeb...

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#736

Post by imdsm »

andsoitis wrote: post #332
imdsm wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, to say crypto has no real use cases is wrong. A lot of people are against crypto, and I can understand that, the whole cultural side of it is tough to digest. But if you strip away all of that: the twitter bots, the airdrops, the spam, the shills, the whole cultural lot, and you just look at the core, there are real use cases. Buying the pizza with bitcoin was the first proof. That being said, I can understan…

> Buying the pizza with bitcoin was the first proof. While some thing might work, it doesn’t imply that it is practical.

Perhaps I'm just a bit older than some of the folks here but I'm referring to this: https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2023/05/22/celeb...

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#737

Post by light_hue_1 »

ben_w wrote: post #535
runlaszlorun wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everywhere?? That’s exactly the hype talk that’s going to burst this bubble. Here’s tech’s dirty little secret. Despite all the screams about automation and universal basic income… the exact numbers where job replacement would show are in the labor productivity numbers. If GDP stays flat or grows while the number of jobs is reduced… bingo… you’d see that number climb. Productivity has actually stayed flat or gone dow…

> GDP stays flat or grows while the number of jobs is reduced I lack the economics knowledge to do more than parrot the response I've heard to this, so take this with the appropriate level of "hmmm": As I understand it, the counter-claim is that the measure of GDP mostly excludes exactly the set of things that grows absurdly fast. For example, the measure of inflation may include the cost of a smartphone in the stand…

Good. GDP should not include any of those things. Those are tools. GDP includes outputs and impacts.

Maybe you design a wrench that is 1000x cheaper and faster to use and more reliable. Well, if it makes your car building operation 0.0001% faster, that's the impact. The details of the wrench and how impressive it is are irrelevant to any observer.

If having your genome sequenced leads to far longer or better lives then we would see the impact in productivity. Same with everything else on the list.

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#738

Post by square_usual »

throwuwu wrote: post #689
square_usual wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More people can now cobble barely functioning python scripts together and shoot themselves in the foot when it does something they don't understand :>

The point is they don’t need any code. They can copy paste a csv or something even messier and ask it to write a somewhat personalized email to each person in the list, if they’re smart about it they can include a few small details with each input entry that get included in the email. They also now have access to most NLP tools like sentiment analysis or feature extraction which allows them to process large amounts o…

Realistically, nobody is working with CSVs so small that they fit within ChatGPT's window. I've helped friends and faily use ChatGPT to generate a python script that did what they wanted with CSV, and they all started with attempting to paste a ~x00 line CSV in the chat.

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#739

Post by jokethrowaway »

eterevsky wrote: post #714
kmarc wrote: post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High Frequency Trading, and my circle is mostly platform engineering people, cloud engineers, automatization.

That's a bit curious. I was supposing that all the hedge funds should have incorporated LLMs in their models by now, since it should give them such a huge advantage. Is it not so?

I don't think there is a basis for this reasoning

LLMs don't know what's right automagically, a model fine tuned by a hedge fund is definitely better than just an LLM's hallucinating something

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#740

Post by perrygeo »

SoftTalker wrote: post #557
perrygeo wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are not changing that, yet. But well over a decade ago, we had high-level frameworks for translating "models" into all the gritty details of a crud app. Model description goes in. API endpoints, database migrations, admin UI, all auto-generated. I even developed something like it based on Django 0.96 (now abandoned). It's not a stretch of the imagination to generate your model.py with model.txt containing the pr…

Do you know any real professional software developers who actually use these modeling tools of their own volition and not because some manager fell for a golf-and-steak-dinner sales pitch from the vendor? My experience with every one of them is that getting the model to the point where it will generate something useful is more work than just writing the useful part myself.

As I alluded to in my comment, I have a ton of experience with such systems. And no, it was not some "golf-and-steak-dinner" - it was funded by a non-profit environmental organization, literally. I'm serious, AMA. Don't make shit up - reconsider your first point.

Your second point re: how model-driven code generation can be a dead-end... I totally agree. I didn't say it was a good idea! But it was motivated by a real need: generating lots of web apps in a particular domain.

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