211–220 of 407 posts
The image playgrounds are obviously a nightmare that should never have seen the light of day.
The summaries are nice.
My kids and I have a game while I'm driving where I will ask Siri a perfectly reasonable question and we will guess whether or not it will answer it reasonably. I don't understand how it can be so bad compared to everything else out there.
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I assume they believe in the advantages, to the company, of using these AI tools. Of adding them to the workflow, training their employees, and understanding quickly how it impacts their space. If you just wait and all of your competitors have a workforce enabled and equipped with the best tools, you are at a disadvantage. It's being the company that put off computerization or automation when everyone else went wild.…
> especially if you're doing varied, novel work. What do you mean by that? In my experience they mostly help when you are doing mainstream, well-trodden work for which a company’s/project’s/domain’s inside knowledge isn’t needed. Maybe you mean the latter by “novel”?
This is emblematic of the LLM race in general. We’re actively pressured to use co-pilot at work, and it’s crammed into every Microsoft product. I’m thankful that my iPhone is old enough not to use LLMs. Companies are afraid of being left behind in the new arms race, but that doesn’t actually mean that the technology actually present use-cases which most people need. (Worse are the meeting summaries or emails which ar…
What I don't understand is, what benefit is there for 99% of companies to get in on the ground floor of LLMs? If you're not developing your own model, you're effectively just beta testing someone else's model. And if the sales pitch of LLMs being able to do basically anything comes true, wouldn't most companies still get the same benefit if they just wait? It seems like a lot of companies are so terrified of missing…
Now if LLMs are just effective as your experience says, they are indeed extremely useful and you absolutely should see if they can help you.
It’s only when you attempt to build a product — and it could be one person writing one Python script — that uses LLMs in an automated way with minimal human input that you really get insights into LLMs’ strengths and their limitations. You realize it could be useful, but you have to sometimes baby it a lot.
How many people get to step two? That’s a select few. Most people are stuck in the dreamy phase of trying out interactive LLMs.
This is a re-occurring issue with all new technology. Heck it happens with new software frameworks.
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It's interesting that there is this division between programmers who claim LLMs are super helpful, and those saying they are useless. While it's certainly possible that this divide is based on how 'hard' the problems people are using them on, my current theory is that some people use them like the proverbial rubber duck - in other words, a way to explore the code, and generate some stuff to work on, while thinking th…
This really touches on it. I'm a big advocate of these tools, but they author approximately zero lines of my code, yet I still find them invaluable and a wonderful tool to leverage, and do so constantly. Particularly in challenging projects and needs. I suspect many who find them useless and decry them were sold an exaggerated utility and then were disappointed when they tried to generate libraries or even functions,…
I used to be able to tell Siri "Turn off the lights." Sometimes in 2017 or 2018 they "updated" it and now it replies "Which room?" Followed by slowly listing out the 6 or 7 options including "everywhere." I haven't been able to reprogram myself to say "Turn off all the lights" which works as before. Hearing that reply is the equivalent of hitting your toe on a wardrobe. This update didn't fix this. The functionality…
It confuses things like people's names and the messages they're sending and sometimes will paraphrase names that are also english-language words into related concepts and blend them into sentences that make no sense.
The only thing it seems to do accurately is describe images that have been sent to me, though I don't really see the value in a 2 sentence summary of an image being sent (folks with limited visibility will probably feel differently.)
I have never received a summary that gave me any idea of what the hell the messages it was summarizing was about. It's impressively bad. I'm shocked apple shipped this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's interesting that there is this division between programmers who claim LLMs are super helpful, and those saying they are useless. While it's certainly possible that this divide is based on how 'hard' the problems people are using them on, my current theory is that some people use them like the proverbial rubber duck - in other words, a way to explore the code, and generate some stuff to work on, while thinking th…
This really touches on it. I'm a big advocate of these tools, but they author approximately zero lines of my code, yet I still find them invaluable and a wonderful tool to leverage, and do so constantly. Particularly in challenging projects and needs. I suspect many who find them useless and decry them were sold an exaggerated utility and then were disappointed when they tried to generate libraries or even functions,…
No, I suspect the large majority (and this has been backed by surveys) of people that are dismissive of them are more senior and have been working in highly specific problem domains for a long time where this is rarely/never a good "general" answer for a problem, and have spent an inordinate amount of time debugging LLM-generated or LLM-Advised code by their peers that contains nefarious and subtle errors that look correct at a glance. I personally can tell you that for what I work on, in my domain, these tools have been a net time suck and not a gain, and I pretty much only use them to ask questions about documentation, which it often gets incorrect anyway (again, in subtle ways that are probably hard for someone who isn't very senior to detect).
Hope that helps.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's interesting that there is this division between programmers who claim LLMs are super helpful, and those saying they are useless. While it's certainly possible that this divide is based on how 'hard' the problems people are using them on, my current theory is that some people use them like the proverbial rubber duck - in other words, a way to explore the code, and generate some stuff to work on, while thinking th…
Some people seem to be taking me saying "you must work on boring code" as a judgement against them as developers, and it isn't. I'm speaking directly from my experience: If I asked it beginner-tier questions about how to do X in Y language, it would get those right quite often. I could see Copilot being very useful if you're breaking into a new language, or just knocking the rust off the gears of one in your head. An…
No one takes it as a judgment, and no one is offended. It's just a truth that when people make such claims, they're often exaggerating the uniqueness or novelty of what they're doing.
You described your work in another comment, and what you described is the most bog standard programming in the field. It's always the case.