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Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

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Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#211

Post by georgemcbay »

thunky wrote: post #186
Loughla wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The item lost is pipeline of talent in all of this though. Precision machining is going through an absolute nightmare where the journeymen or master machinists are aging out of the work force. These were people who originally learned on manual machines, and upgraded to CNC over the years. The pipeline collapsed about 1997. Now there are no apprentice machinists to replace the skills of the retiring workforce. This wi…

> The item lost is pipeline of talent in all of this though. Totally agree. However, I think this pipeline has been taking a hit for a while already because juniors as a whole have been devaluing themselves: if we expect them to leave after one year, what's the point of hiring and training them? Only helping their next employer at that point.

Its the employers who are responsible for the fact that almost everyone working in tech (across all skill levels) will have a far easier time advancing in both pay and title by jumping jobs often.

Very few companies put any real thought into meaningful retention but they are quick to complain about turnover.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#212

Post by ofjcihen »

abletonlive wrote: post #125
tasty_freeze wrote: post #18

One thing I find frustrating is that management where I work has heard of 10x productivity gains. Some of those claims even come from early adopters at my work. But that sets expectation way too high. Partly it is due to Amdahl's law: I spend only a portion of my time coding, and far more time thinking and communicating with others that are customers of my code. Even if does make the coding 10x faster (and it doesn't…

I’m a tech lead and I have maybe 5X output now compared to everybody else under me. Quantified by scoring tickets at a team level. I also have more responsibilities outside of IC work compared to the people under me. At this point I’m asking my manager to fire people that still think llms are just toys because I’m tired of working with people with this poor mindset. A pragmatic engineer continually reevaluates what t…

It’s funny. We fired someone with this attitude Thursday. And by this attitude I mean yours.

Not necessarily because of their attitude but because it turns out the software they were shipping was ripe with security issues. Security managed to quickly detect and handle the resulting incident. I can’t say his team were sad to see him go.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#213

Post by ysofunny »

deepsquirrelnet wrote: post #198
martinald wrote: post #33

I personally don't really get this. _So much_ work in the 'services' industries globally comes down to really a human transposing data from one Excel sheet to another (or from a CRM/emails to Excel), manually. Every (or nearly every) enterprise scale company will have hundreds if not thousands of FTEs doing this kind of work day in day out - often with a lot of it outsourced. I would guess that for every 1 software e…

Making a comparison to crypto is lazy criticism. It’s not even worth validating. It’s people who want to take the negative vibe from crypto and repurpose it. The two technologies have nothing to do with each other, and therefore there’s clearly no reason to make comparative technical assessments between them. That said, the social response is a trend of tech worship that I suspect many engineers who have been around…

wrong.

ultimately, crypto is information science. mathematically, cryptography, compression, and so on (data transmission) are all the "same" problem.

LLMs compress knowledge, not just data, and they do it in a lossy way.

traditional information science work is all about dealing with lossless data in a highly lossy world.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#214

Post by khazhoux »

I'm honestly started to get pissed seeing these articles on HN every day. Aren't we technologists? I see these articles and it's just people who can't accept the future, or feel threatened by it, or are pissed they are not contributing to it.

I'm an expert in my field with decades of experience, and a damn good programmer, and Cursor is like zipping down the street on a powered bike. There is no wishful thinking here!

Can I use it for everything? No, and that applies to every tool. But ffs I have to read here every day on HN some self-important blogger telling me I'm imagining things.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#216

Post by ares623 »

CharlesW wrote: post #112
ibaikov wrote: post #79

Crypto and NFT situation happened because of our society, media and vc/startup landscape who hype things up a lot for their own reasons. We treat massive technologies as new brands of bottled water. Or, actually, as a new hype toy as fidget spinners or pop it toys. This tech is massively more complex and you have to invest time to learn about its abilities, limitations and potential developments. Almost nobody actual…

It makes no sense to compare the current AI hype to the tulip mania of crypto/NFTs. A much better parallel is to cloud computing hype in 2009.

I was just joining the workforce at that time, so I was unaware of any hype. From my perspective, cloud computing was just "there". Was the hype really comparable to today?

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#218

Post by dosnem »

hotpotat wrote: post #30

I have to say I’m in the exact camp the author is complaining about. I’ve shipped non trivial greenfield products which I started back when it was only ChatGPT and it was shitty. I started using Claude with copying and pasting back and forth between the web chat and XCode. Then I discovered Cursor. It left me with a lot of annoying build errors, but my productivity was still at least 3x. Now that agents are better an…

> there’s a process of research and planning and perusing in careful steps, and I set the agent up for success

Are there any good articles you can share or maybe your process? I’m really trying to get good at this but I don’t find myself great at using agents and I honestly don’t know where to start. I’ve tried the memory bank in cline, tried using more thinking directives, but I find I can’t get it to do complex things and it ends up being a time sink for me.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#219

Post by awkwabear »

phyzome wrote: post #208
awkwabear wrote: post #165

This seems like a really bad take. I do PhD research for superconducting materials and right I've been adapting and scaling an existing segmentation model from a research paper for image processing to run multithreaded and took the training runtime per image from 55min to 2min. Yeah it was low hanging fruit but honestly its the type of thing that is just tedious and easy to make mistakes and spend forever debugging.…

I don't think you got the author's point. They didn't say "AI is bad". Take another look.

Ah I'm sorry you're totally right, I was irresponsible and just skimmed the article last time.

I retract my last statement about it being a bad take

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#220

Post by adi_kurian »

jorl17 wrote: post #152
TeMPOraL wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's due to a more R&D-ish nature of my current work, but for me, LLMs are delivering just as much gains in the "thinking" part as in "coding" part (I handle the "communicating" thing myself just fine for now). Using LLMs for "thinking" tasks feels similar to how mastering web search 2+ decades ago felt. Search engines enabled access to information provided you know what you're looking for; now LLMs boost that…

This, and if you add in a voice mode (e.g. ChatGPT's Advanced Mode), it is perfect for brainstorming. Once I decide I want to "think a problem through with an LLM", I often start with just the voice mode. This forces me to say things out loud — which is remarkably effective (hear hear rubber duck debugging) — and it also gives me a fundamentally different way of consuming the information the LLM provides me. Instead…

This 100%. Though think there is a personality component to this. At least I think when I speak.
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