Stuff like this just makes me embarrassed. There are so many real problems in the world, but people still want to spend their time trying to build a perpetual motion machine.
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Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)
251–260 of 332 posts
Re: Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of us actually want to get somewhere to do an activity. The getting there is just a modality.
Most of us actually want to get some where to do an activity to enjoy ourselves. The getting there, and activity, are just modalities.
Most of us actually want to get somewhere to do an activity to then have known we did it for the rest of our lives as if to extract some intangible pleasure from its memory. Why don't we just hallucinate that we did it?
Re: Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah but in this case your car is non-deterministic so
> your car is non-deterministic it's not as far as your experience goes - you press pedal, it accelerates. You turn the steering, it goes the way it turns. What the car does is deterministic. More importantly, it does this every time, and the amount of turning (or accelerating) is the same today as it was yesterday. If an LLM interpreted those inputs, can you say with confidence, that you will accelerate in a way tha…
Tesla's "self-driving" cars have been working very hard to change this. That piece of road it has been doing flawlessly for months? You're going straight into the barrier today, just because it feels like it.
Re: Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of us actually want to get some where to do an activity to enjoy ourselves. The getting there, and activity, are just modalities.
Most of us actually want to get somewhere to do an activity to then have known we did it for the rest of our lives as if to extract some intangible pleasure from its memory. Why don't we just hallucinate that we did it?
This leads to us asking the deepest question of all: What is the point of our existence. Or as someone suggests lower down, in our current form all needs could ultimately be satisfied if AI just provided us with the right chemicals. (Which drug addicts already understand)
This can be answered though, albeit imperfectly. On a more reductionist level, we are the cosmos experiencing itself. Now there are many ways to approach this. But just providing us with the right chemicals to feel pleasure/satisfaction is a step backwards. All the evolution of a human being, just to end up functionally like an amoeba or a bacteria.
So we need to retrace our steps backwards in this thought process.
I could write a long essay on this.
But, to exist in first place, and to keep existing against all the constraints of the universe, is already pretty fucking amazing.
Whether we do all the things we do, just in order to stay alive and keep existing, or if the point is to be the cosmos “experiencing itself”, is pretty much two sides of the same coin.
Re: Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because nobody actually wants a "web app". People want food, love, sex or: solutions. You or your coworker are not a web app. You can do some of the things that web apps can, and many things that a web app can't, but neither is because of the modality. Coded determinism is hard for many problems and I find it entirely plausible that it could turn out to be the wrong approach in software, that is designed to solve som…
> Because nobody actually wants a "web app". People want food, love, sex or: solutions. Okay but when I start my car I want to drive it, not fuck it.
Weird kink
Re: Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)
#256The question posed sounds like "why should we have deterministic behavior if we can have non-deterministic behavior instead?" Am I wrong to think that the answer is obvious? I mean, who wants web apps to behave differently every time you interact with them?
Because nobody actually wants a "web app". People want food, love, sex or: solutions. You or your coworker are not a web app. You can do some of the things that web apps can, and many things that a web app can't, but neither is because of the modality. Coded determinism is hard for many problems and I find it entirely plausible that it could turn out to be the wrong approach in software, that is designed to solve som…
> Because nobody actually wants a "web app". People want food, love, sex or: solutions.
Talk about a nonsensical non-sequitur, but I’ll bite. People want those to be deterministic too, to a large extent.
When people cook a meal with the same ingredients and the same times and processes (like parameters to a function), they expect it to taste about the same, they never expect to cook a pizza and take a salad out of the oven.
When they have sex, people expect to ejaculate and feel good, not have their intercourse morph into a drag race with a clown half-way though.
And when they want a “solution”, they want it to be reliable and trustworthy, not have it shit the bed unpredictably.
Re: Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree wholeheartedly. It irks me when people critique automation because it uses large amounts of resources. Running a machine or a computer almost always uses far less resources than a human would to do the same task, so long as you consider the entire resource consumptions. Growing the food that a human eats, running the air conditioning for their home, powering their lights, fueling their car, charging their pho…
I suspect you may be either underestimating how efficient our brains are at computing or severely underestimating how much energy these AI models take to train and run. Even including our system of comfort like refrigerated blueberries in January and AC cooling a 40° C heat down to 25° C (but excluding car commutes, because please work from home or take public transit) the human is still far far more energy efficient…
That's a great point, and I think I was being vague before.
To clarify, I was making a broad statement about automation in general. Running an automated loom is more efficient in every way that getting humans to weave cloth by hand. For most tasks, automation is more efficient.
However, there are tasks that humans can still do more efficiently than our current engines of automation. Go is a good example because humans are really good at it and it AlphaGo can only sometimes beat the top players despite massive training and inference costs.
On the other hand, I would dispute that LLMs fall into this category, at least for most tasks, because we have to factor in marginal setup costs too. I think that raising from infancy all of the humans needed to match the output speed of an LLM has a greater cost than training the LLM. Even if you include the cost of mining the metal and powering the factories necessary to build the machines that the LLMs run on. I'm not 100% confident in this statement, but I do think that it's much closer than you seem to think. Supporting the systems that support the systems that support humans takes a lot of resources.
To use your blueberries example, while the cost of keeping the blueberries cold isn't much, growing a single serving of blueberries requires around 95 liters of water[1]. In a similar vein, the efficiency of the human brain is almost irrelevant because the 20 watts of energy consumed by the brain is akin from a resource consumption perspective to the electricity consumed by the monitor to read out the LLM's output: it's the last step in the process, but without the resource-guzzling system behind it, it doesn't work. Just as the monitor doesn't work without the data center which doesn't work without electricity, your brain doesn't work without your body which doesn't work without food which doesn't get produced without water.
As sramam mentioned, these kinds of utilitarian calculations tend to seem pretty inhuman. However, most of the time, the calculations turn out in favor of automation. If they didn't, companies wouldn't be paying for automated systems (this logic doesn't apply to hype-based markets like AI. I'm talking more about markets that are stably automated like textile manufacturing). If you want an anti-automation argument, you'll have a better time arguing based on ethics instead of efficiency.
Again, thanks for the Go example. I genuinely didn't consider the tasks where humans are more efficient than automation.
[1]: https://watercalculator.org/water-footprint-of-food-guide/
Re: Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)
#258I like the OP's idea and think it actually has some fun you applications. Especially with a little more narrowing of scope.
Similar fun concept as the cataclysm library for Python: https://github.com/Mattie/cataclysm
Re: Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect you may be either underestimating how efficient our brains are at computing or severely underestimating how much energy these AI models take to train and run. Even including our system of comfort like refrigerated blueberries in January and AC cooling a 40° C heat down to 25° C (but excluding car commutes, because please work from home or take public transit) the human is still far far more energy efficient…
Hm, that gives me an idea: The next human vs engine matches in chess, go, and so on, should be set at a specific level of energy consumption of the engines, that's close or approximately that of an extremely good human player, like a world champion or at least grand master. Let's see how engines keep up then!
That sounds delightful. Get a Raspberry Pi or something connected to a power supply capped at 20 watts (approximate electricity consumption of the human brain). It has to be able to run its algorithm in less than the time limit per turn for speed chess. Then you'd have to choose an algorithm based on if it produces high-quality guesses before arriving at its final answer so that if it runs out of time it can still make a move. I wonder if this is already a thing?
Re: Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because nobody actually wants a "web app". People want food, love, sex or: solutions. You or your coworker are not a web app. You can do some of the things that web apps can, and many things that a web app can't, but neither is because of the modality. Coded determinism is hard for many problems and I find it entirely plausible that it could turn out to be the wrong approach in software, that is designed to solve som…
So basically you say the future of web would be everyone gets their own Jarvis, and like Tony you just tell Jarvis what you want and it does it for you, theres no need for a preexisting software or to even write a new one, it just does what's needed to fulfill the given request and give you the results you want. This sounds nice but wouldn't it get repetitive and computationally expensive, life imagine instead of Goo…
You might end up with ai trying to get information from ai, which saves us the frustration..
knows where we’d end up?
On the other hand the logs might be a great read.