This is completely incoherent. 3 reasons: 1. he talks about what he's shipped, and yet compares it to crypto – already, you're in a contradiction as to your relative comparison – you straight up shouldn't blog if you can't conceive that these two are opposing thoughts 2. this whole refrain from people of like, "SHOW ME your enterprise codebase that includes lots of LLM code" – HELLO, people who work at private compan…
Re. 2 - I find it fascinating that people using coding agents have seemingly no problem to reveal their full codebases to AI companies.
Can you clearly articulate me why they should have a problem?
If you don't want training on your codebase, many AI companies offer this option. What's the issue?
In a brief nutshell, I'm personally not in favor of how AI is taking over the industry (all of industry, that is). First of all, LLMs aren't even really what I would call AI, but that's a digression. I think, mainly, people are using it for the wrong reasons. I've seen graphics designers at work use it to generate images—and I don't just mean Adobe Firefly generative fill, but all-out "create me this logo." That's ju…
Like so much of everything produced now. Mainstream film and video games have been non-AI slop for almost 2 decades now.
This is completely incoherent. 3 reasons: 1. he talks about what he's shipped, and yet compares it to crypto – already, you're in a contradiction as to your relative comparison – you straight up shouldn't blog if you can't conceive that these two are opposing thoughts 2. this whole refrain from people of like, "SHOW ME your enterprise codebase that includes lots of LLM code" – HELLO, people who work at private compan…
> So far, most of the time, my impression was "I would have been so badly mislead and wouldn't even know it until too late". It would have saved me some negative time. That was my impression with Perplexity too, which is why I mostly stopped using it, except for when I need a large search space covered fast and am willing to double-check anything that isn't obviously correct. Most of the time, it's o3. I guess this i…
This is called deprivation sensitivity. It’s different from intellectual curiosity, where the former is a need to understand vs. the latter, which is a need to know. Deprivation sensitivity comes with anxiety and stress. Where intellectual curiosity is associated with joyous exploration. I score very high with deprivation sensitivity. I have unbridled drive to acquire and retain important information. It’s a blessing…
You're not neurodivergent. You're a suffering conscious being just like everyone else. Anxiety and depression are caused by ignorance, not circumstance or personality traits, or anything else. With ignorance there is greed, and anger, and delusion. It is because there is no limit to the diversity of delusion that you cling to the view that you are neurodivergent, and otherwise hold the view that you exist in such and such relations to such and such entities and possess so and so qualities and essences. This is why it is said that ignorance alone is the cause of all mental suffering and dissatisfaction experienced by conscious beings.
You had a fine criticism in the article: that people's claims of success or failure should be accompanied by contextual information, to prevent bad extrapolations. But then you title it "Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking." Was this tongue in cheek? Hyperbole for effect? Because it seems you're saying that when the data comes out, people will realize this was all a fraud. There's a big diffe…
"People make huge outrageous claims without backing them up with anything except 'trust me bro', and people uncritically accept that as truth" would probably make a better title. But if you can't go past the title, well, you might have bigger problems.
My only problem is when people say everything about LLMs is wishful thinking.
The best way I’ve heard this described: AI (LLMs) is probably 90% of the way to human levels of reasoning. We can probably get to about 95% optimizing current technology. Whether or not we can get to 100% using LLMs is an open research problem and far from guaranteed. If we can’t, it’s unclear if it will ever really proliferate the way things hope. That 5% makes a big difference in most non-niche use cases…
I've always looked at it as we're not making software that can think, we're (quite literally) demonstrating that vast categories of things don't need thought (for some quality level). The problem is, it's clearly not 100%, maybe it's 90-some percent, but it doesn't matter, we're only outsourcing the unimportant things that aren't definitional for a task. This is very typical of naive automation, people assume that mo…
The reason management thinks coding is the bottleneck is because they don't understand the first thing abiut code and neither have the ability or temprament to. Their whole professional career is about plausibly convincing other people through jargon, manipulation and popularity contests, which generally oprn up doors, solve problems and provoke seal like clapping from all involved. The idea that the core problem in many systems and software is due to their constitutonal inability to think rigorously to define requirements logically has never crossed their mind: it must be the magic spells those losers we bullied at school use and we are now tragically dependent on.
This is called deprivation sensitivity. It’s different from intellectual curiosity, where the former is a need to understand vs. the latter, which is a need to know. Deprivation sensitivity comes with anxiety and stress. Where intellectual curiosity is associated with joyous exploration. I score very high with deprivation sensitivity. I have unbridled drive to acquire and retain important information. It’s a blessing…
You're not neurodivergent. You're a suffering conscious being just like everyone else. Anxiety and depression are caused by ignorance, not circumstance or personality traits, or anything else. With ignorance there is greed, and anger, and delusion. It is because there is no limit to the diversity of delusion that you cling to the view that you are neurodivergent, and otherwise hold the view that you exist in such and…
Our brains are prediction machines. Anxiety is the anticipation of unpleasant experience, which comes from conditioning, not ignorance.
You can be completely aware of your experience and still feel anxiety. So your thinking is flawed.
Your response is telling. You are triggered by a benign comment and generalize harsh views towards all people.
You sound like a troubled young man who feels invisible.
Reaction to a post at 21:39:36: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44468067 Reaction to a different post at 21:40:30: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44468069 Fast typist! (Incidentally, both are exactly 59 tokens long)
> Like most skeptics and critics, I use these tools daily. And 50% of the time they work 50% of the time. I use LLMs nearly every day for my job as of about a year ago and they solve my issues about 90% of the time. I have a very hard time deciphering if these types of complaints about AI/LLMs should be taken seriously, or written off as irrational use patterns by some users. For example, I have never fed an LLM a co…
Your comment is no better than the comment in the article that the author is calling out. "90%" also seems a bit suspect.
It either helps me find a solution or it doesn't. About 90% of the time, or less formally I would just say "almost all of the time", it does. Keep in mind that I, the user, decide which questions to ask in the first place. If my batting average seems unbelievably high, perhaps my skill is in knowing when to use an LLM and when not to.
> An LLM won't call other nodes in the organization to check when it sees that the value is unreasonable for some out-of-context reason, like yesterday was a one-time-only bank holiday and so the value should be 0. Why not? LLMs are the first kind of technology that can take this kind of global view. We're not making much use of it in this way just yet, but considering "out-of-context reasons" and taking a wider pers…
> considering "out-of-context reasons" and taking a wider perspective is pretty much the defining aspect of LLMs as general-purpose AI tools. "out-of-context" literally means that the reason isn't in its context. Even if it can make the leap that the number should be zero if it's a bank holiday, how would an LLM know that yesterday was a one-off bank holiday? A human would only know through their lived experience tha…
That kind of knowledge is present in the training set, doesn't need to be in the context or system prompt.
That said, I too would only use an LLM today in the same kinds of role that five years ago would be outsourced to a different culture.
Culture, not even language: this is how you get the difference between "biscuits and gravy" as understood in the UK vs in the USA.