Earlier quoted context omitted.
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The GP wasn't making a political argument just pointing out statistics.
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AI: Accelerated Incompetence
221–230 of 287 posts
Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence
#222The text in this essay was written without any use of AI Stated with pride? Given the proofreading and critiquing abilities of AI this dubious boast is a useful signal for the head-in-sand arguments of the essay. AI is a profound step change in our workflow abilities, a revolution already. Wise to be wary of it, but this reads as shouting at clouds. The landscape has changed, we have to change with it.
Use it or lose it. Soon you'll find you're unable to structure complex ideas without your friend computer.
Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 clea…
In my experience the difficulty in this kind of task is reading the docs of a bunch of packages I haven't used in months/years and probably won't use again anytime soon, testing things manually and creating all the little harnesses to make that work without running for minutes at a time, etc. Sure for someone who does ETL type work all day, or often enough anyway, they'd scoff, and true LLM won't really save them tim…
There's two schools of thought here: viewing LLMs as machines to replace your thinking, and viewing LLMs as a vast corpus of compressed knowledge to draw upon.
Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have biased view on the definition of "concept" based on English language and logic. In Chinese language, concept is 概念. In Chinese language, happy dog is 快乐的狗. Notice it has an extra "的" that is missing in English language. This tells you that you can't just treat English grammar and structure as the formal definition of "concept". Some languages do not have words for happiness, or dog. But that doesn't mean the…
> But that doesn't mean the concept of happiness or dog does not exist. That would be a consequence of your position. The person who wrote the article is english. The claim being evaluated here is from the article. The term "concept" is english. The *meaning* of that term isn't english, any more than the meaning of "two" is english. My analysis of "concept" has nothing to do with the english language. "Happy" here st…
Okay maybe I need to make myself more clear, and start from your claim:
> It has to do with mental capacities to "bring objects under a concept", partition experience into its conceptual structure ("conceptualise"), simulate scenarios based on compositions of concepts ("the imagination") and so on. These are mental capabilities a wide class of animals possess, who know no language; that LLMs do not possess.
Assume it is true that humans are capable of these capabilities, why do you think LLMs are not capable of them? We don't know if they are capable of these capabilities, and that's what explainable ai is.
Take a step back and assume that LLMs are not capable of these capabilities, how do you prove that these are the fundamental concepts in the universe, instead of projections of higher level concepts from higher dimensional space that humans and animals are not aware of? What if there exist a more universal set of concepts that contains all the concepts we know and others, in a higher dimension, and both LLMs and humans are just using the lower dimension projections of such concepts?
Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence
#225Let'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.
It's almost like people outsourcing their job to AI are asking to get fired, not only by proving that a computer program can do their job better, but even paving the way for it!
Your job will disappear even faster with your head that deep in the sand. At least learning the new tools you can carve out a new role/career for yourself.
Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence
#226Remember when 3d printing was going to replace all manufacturing? Anybody? AI is closer to this sentiment than it is to the singularity.
Great analogy. 3d printing is awesome and incredibly useful tech. Truly world changing. But injection molding is here to stay.
Even the phrase "world-changing" might be a bit too strong.
It's enabled some acceleration of product prototyping and it has democratized hardware design a little bit. Some little companies are building some buildings using 3D printing techniques.
Speaking as someone who owns and uses a 3D printer daily, I think the biggest impact it's had is that it's a fun hobby, which doesn't strike me as "world-changing."
Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence
#227I strongly agree with both the premise of the article, and most of the specific arguments brought forth. That said, I've also been noticing some positive aspects of using LLMs in my day-to-day. For context, I've been in the software trade for about three decades now. One thing working with AI-generated code forces you to do is to read code -- development becomes more a series of code reviews than a first-principles c…
Problem is, paraphrasing Scott Kilmer, corporations are dead from the neck up. The conclusion for them was not that AI will help juniors, is that they will not hire juniors and will ask seniors the magic "10x" with the help of AI. Even some seniors are getting the boot, because AI.
Just look at recent news, layoff after layoff from Big Tech, Middle tech and small tech.
Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence
#228You know, sometimes I feel that all this discourse about AI for coding reflects the difference between software engineers and data scientists / machine learning engineers. Both often work with unclear requirements, and sometimes may face floating bugs which are hard to fix, but in most cases, SWE create software that is expected to always behave in a certain way. It is reproducible, can pass tests, and the tooling is…
Yup. All the people I've worked with through my career post 2020 (AI/ML types) have been AI first and AI native. They're the first users of cursor - a year before it went mainstream.
Sorry not sorry that the rest of the world has to look over their shoulders.
Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence
#229Remember when 3d printing was going to replace all manufacturing? Anybody? AI is closer to this sentiment than it is to the singularity.
Well yeah, the singularity isn't close by any measure.
But 3D printing and AI are on totally different trajectories.
I haven't heard of Mattel saying, "we're going to see in what places we can replace standard molding with 3d printing". It's never been considered a real replacement, but rather potentially a useful way to make PoCs, prototypes and mockups.
Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
A big problem I keep facing when reviewing junior engineers code is not the code quality itself but the direction the solution went into, I'm not sure if LLM models are capable of replying to you with a question of why you want to do it that way(yes like the famous stackoverflow answers).
Nothing fundamentally prevents an LLM from achieving this. You can ask an LLM to produce a PR, another LLM to review a PR, and another LLM to critique the review, then another LLM to question the original issue's validity, and so on... The reason LLM is such a big deal is that they are humanity's first tool that is general enough to support recursion (besides humans of course.) If you can use LLM, there's like a 99%…
"Nothing fundamentally prevents an LLM from achieving this"
Well yes, LLMs are not teleological, nor inventive.