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AI: Accelerated Incompetence

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Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#41

Post by bsaul »

"[AI] is not capable of working at a conceptual level".

I wonder where did author got that feeling. What recent LLMs proved time and time again is that they are definitely able to work at conceptual level (by correctly translating concepts from one language to another depending on the context for example). Saying it doesn't "understand" the concepts as humans do is a different thing. It wouldn't "understand" pain, because it has no experience of it. But humans constantly talk about thing they've never personally experienced (and indeed maybe they shouldn't, but that's another topic).

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#42

Post by karn97 »

Etheryte wrote: post #38
EncomLab wrote: post #14

Remember when 3d printing was going to replace all manufacturing? Anybody? AI is closer to this sentiment than it is to the singularity.

This is an easy quip to make, but it's also pretty wrong. 3D printing has been a massive breakthrough in many industries and fundamentally changed the status quo. Aerospace is a good example, much of what SpaceX and other younger upstarts in the space are doing would not be feasible without 3D printed parts. Nozzles, combustion chambers, turbopumps etc are all parts that are often printed.

That's less than 1% of all manufacturing done on the planet. Stupid comment for the sake of commenting.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#43

Post by mjburgess »

paradite wrote: post #25

> LLMs as they currently exist cannot master a theory, design, or mental construct because they don't remember beyond their context window. Only humans can can gain and retain program theory. False. > An LLM is a token predictor. It works only at the level of text. It is not capable of working at a conceptual level: it doesn't reason about ideas, diagrams, or requirements specifications. False. Anyone who have spent…

The problem with people "who have spent time in machine learning or reinforcement learning" is that they've spent no time, literally none, understanding what a concept is.

There is no such thing as a higher dimensional concept, nor can they be projected into a weight space, because they aren't quantities.

The concept, say, "Dog" composes with the concept, "Happy" to form "Happy Dog". The extension(Dog) is all possible dogs, the extension(Happy) is all happy objects, the extensions here compose. The intension of "Dog" depends on its context, eg., "get that damned dog!" has a different intension than, "I wish I looked less like a dog!". And the intensions here do not compose like the extensions.

Take the act of counterfactual reality-oriented simulation, called "imagination" narrowly, call that `I`. And "curry" this operator with a simulation premise, "(as if) on mars", so we have I' = I(Mars)(...).

Now, what is the content of I'(Dog), I(Happy Dog), I(Get that damned dog), I(get that damned happy dog) ? and so on

The contents of `I` is nowhere modelled by "projection" because this does not model composition, and is not relevantly discrete and bounded by logical connectives.

These are trivial issues which arise the moment you're aware that few writing computer science papers have ever studied the meaning of the words they use with abandon.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#44

Post by api »

90s_dev wrote: post #33
api wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use an OG forum software that's good and powered some of the classic forums of the time. Make it stylishly retro.

Definitely. Honestly I was going to write a custom forum in the style of those perl bboards but with https://90s.dev aesthetics (the website, not the os). But maybe first and foremost I need a mailing list so people can be notified of things like this when they're announced/released?

I'm interested. I don't think it should just be an older coders club though. It should be for anyone of any age that's into the craft of fine, well built software, and who wants to learn from people who have been into it a long time.

I also like /r/tinycode for its spirit. My #1 saying in coding is "simplicity is harder than complexity." It's gone downhill like the rest of Reddit though.

I'm also not totally anti-AI. I use it a little bit. I just think if you aren't a good developer you aren't competent to use it properly. It's like saying autocomplete will make a bad developer good. I think it's like super autocomplete. Also found it useful for "here's a big block of code, explain it" -- you have to check what it tells you of course, but it gives you a passable first pass analysis, like asking a junior dev to do that.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#45

Post by karn97 »

api wrote: post #30
bearjaws wrote: post #23

Let's be real, 70% of staff are phoning in their jobs so badly that an AI often is just as good if not better. The real struggle will be, the people phoning it in are still going to be useless, but with AI. The rest will learn and grow with AI.

For large companies this is true, and this may be the best AI coding take I have read. It's similar with full self drive. FSD is better than a bad, drunk, or texting human driver, and that's a lot of the drivers on the road.

[flagged]

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#47

Post by silvestrov »

8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: post #3

Is AI perhaps an opportunity for years of paid cleanup and re-design work that those of us who have dedicated decades to learning the craft of software engineering will be able to cash in on?

This will require companies to be able to survive for some time using the old code and to recognise the importance of cleaning up.

Has this ever happened besides the Y2K fixes?

Wouldn't it be much more likely that the companies will simply go under? Or that they will make a team that writes a completely new version of the code, somewhat like Mac OS X was a replacement of MacOS 9 and not a cleanup.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#48

Post by nyrikki »

monero-xmr wrote: post #9

I use LLMs for annoying shit that used to take an inordinate amount of time. For example an analyst gives me a CSV, it has some data clean up issues, eventually it needs to become a series of SQL inserts. What was a day of script writing becomes 15 minutes of prompt engineering to clean up the CSV and convert it into the proper statements. Massive time savings! I believe one can vibe code a basic app or script. Like…

Honest question, what type of CSV to SQL code are you doing whre correctness doesn't count?

Perhaps my few decades in the industry have been in areas whree it is always the details, correctness, and fitness for purpose that tends to make those problems hard, not the work itself.

I do see a use case for throw away spikes, or part of a red-green-refactor, etc.. but if accuracy and correctness aren't critical, data cleanup is easy even without an LLM.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#49

Post by karn97 »

sensanaty wrote: post #21

> Input Risk. An LLM does not challenge a prompt which is leading ... (Emphasis mine) This has been the biggest pain point for me, and the frustrating part is that you might not even realize you're leading it a particular way at all. I mean it makes sense with how LLMs work, but a single word used in a vague enough way is enough to skew the results in a bad direction, sometimes contrary to what you actually wanted to…

Almost all of ai hype seems to be on the backs of no coders or people who make toys as a career (if they even have one)

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#50

Post by foxes »

My most recent ai related peeve is people releasing some ai tool and claim that it's "democratising x". "democratising art", "democratising education" -- yeah giving all your data to and relying on a centralised model run by a fascist mega corp is so totally democratic. Maybe can't blame them -- that is what they actually mean based on "democracy" in the US etc though.
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