Bad blog post
You don't want to use AI for complex things that you might not fully understand. These are the cases where you'll miss the hallucinations and get fucked
With AI you need to think bigger
161–170 of 182 posts
Re: With AI you need to think bigger
#162[dead]
Re: With AI you need to think bigger
#163As a mostly LLM-skeptic I reluctantly agree this is something AI actually does well. When approaching unfamiliar territory, LLMs (1) use simple language (improvement over academia but also much professional intentionally obfuscated literature), (2) use the right abstraction (they seem good at ”zooming out” to big picture of things, and (3) you can move both laterally between topics and ”zoom in” quickly. Another way…
My experience is instead that LLMs (those I used) can be helpful there where solutions are quite well known (e.g. a standard task in some technology used by many), and terrible where the problem has not been tackled much by the public. About language (point (1)), I get a lot of "hypnotism for salesmen to non technical managers and roundabout comments" (e.g. "which wire should I cut, I have a red one and a blue one" /…
Agreed. LLMs pull you towards the average knowledge, and they suck when you're trying to find a creative solution that challenges the status quo.
Re: With AI you need to think bigger
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
From a knowledge standpoint an LLM can give you pointers at any point. Theres no way it will "fall short". You just have to improve your prompt. In the worst case scenario you can say "please list out all the different research angles I should proceed from here and which of these might most likely yield a useful result for me"
My skepticism flares up with sentences like "Theres no way it will "fall short"." Especially in the face of so many first hand examples of LLMs being wrong, getting stuck, or falling short.
I feel actively annoyed by the amount of public gaslighting I see about AI. It may get there in the future, but there is nothing more frustrating than seeing utter bullshit being spouted as truth.
Re: With AI you need to think bigger
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
100% agree with this, sometimes I feel I'm becoming too reliant on it - but I step back and see how much more ambitious of projects I take on, and finish quickly still, due to it.
Claude 3.7 basically one-shot a multiplayer game's server-authority rollback netcode with client-side prediction and interpolation. I spent months of my life in my 20s trying to build a non-janky implementation of that and failed which was really demoralizing. Over the last couple weekends I got farther than I was able to get in weeks or months. And when I get stumped, I have the confidence of being able to rubber-du…
You know the 80/20 "rule"? Well, that last 20% is what I believe will keep us around.
AI is going to be a great multiplier but if the base is 0, you can multiply it by whatever you want.
I feel ChatGPT-like products are like outsourcing to cheaper countries, it might work for some but for anyone else, now they have to hire more expensive people to fix/redo the work done by the cheaper labor. This seems to be exactly the same but using AI.
Re: With AI you need to think bigger
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’d suggest we are much closer to that reality now than we were in the 90s, in large part thanks to the internet.
Since the Internet became ubiquitous, more people believe the moon landing, climate change, and vaccines are hoaxes.
As an aside, internet hasn’t officially been a proper noun since 2016 or so.
Re: With AI you need to think bigger
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. LLMs are the perfect learning assistant. You can now do literally anything. Literally. Going to take a while for everyone to figure this out but they will given time.
I'm old enough to remember when they first said that about the Internet. We were going to enter a new enlightened age of information, giving everyone access to the sum total of human knowlege, no need to get a fancy degree, universities will be obsolete, expertise will be democratized.... See how that turned out.
I'm old enough to remember when they first said that about the Internet.
(Shrug) It was pretty much true. But it's like what Linus says in an old Peanuts cartoon: https://www.gocomics.com/peanuts/1969/07/20
Re: With AI you need to think bigger
#168I have been using AI coding tools since the first GitHub co-pilot. One thing has not changed: garbage in = garbage out. If you know what you are doing the tools can improve output a lot - but while you might get on for a little bit without that experience guiding you, eventually AI will code you into a corner if it's not guided right. I saw mention of kids learning to code with AI and I have to say, that's great, but…
The AUC of learning to program remains the same before and after AI, both for hobbyist and professionals. What changes is the slope of the on-ramp – AI makes it easier to get started, achieve first wins and learn the table-stakes for your field.
Re: With AI you need to think bigger
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting ! I have a bunch of older android phones that could be repurposed for some tinkering. The touchscreen display and input would open a lot more interactive possibilities. Is there a community or gallery of ideas and projects that leverage this?
There is this repository: https://github.com/tejado/android-usb-gadget They have some examples that emulate an USB keyboard and mouse, and the app shows how to configure the Gadget API to turn the phone into whatever USB device you want. The repo is unfortunately inactive, but the underlying feature is exposed through a stable Linux kernel API (via ConfigFS), so everything will continue working as long as Android lea…
There is also support for doing this without being root:
Re: With AI you need to think bigger
#170I recently discovered that some of the Raspberry Pi models support the Linux Kernel's "Gadget Mode". This allows you to configure the Pi to appear as some type of device when plugged into a USB port, i.e. a Mass Storage/USB stick, Network Card, etc. Very nifty for turning a Pi Zero into various kinds of utilities. When I realized this was possible, I wanted to set up a project that would allow me to use the Pi as a b…
That gives me ideas. I think a lot of the reason linux isn't used for lots of things is that you have to basically be a sysadmin to set up some things. for example, setting up a local LLM. I wonder what you would call getting a "remote" AI to help set up a local AI? Something like but not exactly emancipation or emigration or ...
I set up ollama on our work ‘AI server’ (well, grunty headless workstation running Ubuntu) and then got Dolphin-Mixtral to help me figure out why it wasn’t using the GPUs. :)
I ended up having to figure it out myself (a previous install attempt meant the running instance wasn’t the one I’d compiled with GPU support) but it was an interesting exercise.