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LLM Inevitabilism

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Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#231

Post by mg »

petetnt wrote: post #143
mg wrote: post #70

In the 90s a friend told me about the internet. And that he knows someone who is in a university and has access to it and can show us. An hour later, we were sitting in front of a computer in that university and watched his friend surfing the web. Clicking on links, receiving pages of text. Faster than one could read. In a nice layout. Even with images. And links to other pages. We were shocked. No printing, no shipp…

There’s always a distinct lack of the names in the posts like this. What was the library that was being changed to what? You say it had ”no good documentation”, but it clearly has some sort of documentation considering the LLM did such a good job on the rewrite. Do you understand the ”large library” now?

You are right. I always wish for more specifics too when we talk about code here.

The library was https://mediabunny.dev/

Before I used my own proprietary code for media encoding/decoding. I also tested a WASM port of ffmpeg for a while.

Mediabunny's documentation might be fine for some developers, but personally I prefer a reference where I have a list of all functions and their specifications.

Yes, I understand the library much better now.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#232

Post by croes »

mg wrote: post #70

In the 90s a friend told me about the internet. And that he knows someone who is in a university and has access to it and can show us. An hour later, we were sitting in front of a computer in that university and watched his friend surfing the web. Clicking on links, receiving pages of text. Faster than one could read. In a nice layout. Even with images. And links to other pages. We were shocked. No printing, no shipp…

It wasn’t inevitable, it just happened. Without the rise of online advertisement the whole story could have played out very differently.

Take the atomic age, it seemed inevitable that everything is powered by nuclear power. People saw a inevitable future of household machines powered by small reactors. Didn’t happen.

You can’t look at the past and declare the path it took to the present as inevitable

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#233

Post by handoflixue »

baxuz wrote: post #151
mg wrote: post #70

In the 90s a friend told me about the internet. And that he knows someone who is in a university and has access to it and can show us. An hour later, we were sitting in front of a computer in that university and watched his friend surfing the web. Clicking on links, receiving pages of text. Faster than one could read. In a nice layout. Even with images. And links to other pages. We were shocked. No printing, no shipp…

The thing is that the data from actual research doesn't support your anecdotal proof of quality: - https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... - https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/29/ai_agents_fail_a_lot/ But more importantly, it makes you stupid: - https://www.404media.co/microsoft-study-finds-ai-makes-human... - https://archive.is/M3lCG And it's an unsustainable bubble and wishful thinking, muc…

"But more importantly, it makes you stupid:"

I don't think it was your intent, but that reads out as a seriously uncalled for attack - you might want to work on your phrasing. Hacker News rules are pretty clear on civility being an important virtue.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#234

Post by EverydayBalloon »

mg wrote: post #70

In the 90s a friend told me about the internet. And that he knows someone who is in a university and has access to it and can show us. An hour later, we were sitting in front of a computer in that university and watched his friend surfing the web. Clicking on links, receiving pages of text. Faster than one could read. In a nice layout. Even with images. And links to other pages. We were shocked. No printing, no shipp…

[dead]

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#235

Post by Karrot_Kream »

hosh wrote: post #111
mg wrote: post #70

In the 90s a friend told me about the internet. And that he knows someone who is in a university and has access to it and can show us. An hour later, we were sitting in front of a computer in that university and watched his friend surfing the web. Clicking on links, receiving pages of text. Faster than one could read. In a nice layout. Even with images. And links to other pages. We were shocked. No printing, no shipp…

While the Internet and LLMs are huge turning points — the metaphor that comes to mind are phase change thresholds, from solid to gas, from gas to solids — there is a crucial difference between the internet and LLMs. The early internet connected personal computing together. It built on technology that was democratizing. LLMs appear to be democratizing, but it is not. The enshittification is proceeding much more rapidl…

For the internet to be democratizing it needed PCs first. Before that computing was like LLMs: the mainframe era. You either had access to an institution with a mainframe or you were luckily able to get a thin client to a mainframe (the early time-sharing systems.) Even after PCs were invented, for decades mainframes were inarguably better than PCs. Mainframes and thin clients were even some of the earliest computer networks.

I am optimistic that local models will catch up and hit the same pareto-optimal point. At some point your OS will ship with a local model, your system will have access to some Intelligence APIs, and that's that. Linux and BSDs will probably ship with an open-weights model. I may be wrong, but this is my hope.

If you're interested in a taste of that future try the Gemma3 class of models. While I haven't tried agentic coding with them yet, I find them more than good enough for day-to-day use.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#236

Post by cdrini »

How do you differentiate between an effective debater using inevitabilism as a technique to win a debate, and an effective thinker making a convincing argument that something is likely to be inevitable?

How do you differentiate between an effective debater "controlling the framing of a conversation" and an effective thinker providing a new perspective on a shared experience?

How do you differentiate between a good argument and a good idea?

I don't think you can really?

You could say intent plays a part -- that someone with an intent to manipulate can use debating tools as tricks. But still, even if someone with bad intentions makes a good argument, isn't it still a good argument?

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#237

Post by mawadev »

I really like what is hidden between the lines of this text, it is only something a human can understand. The entire comment section over here reflects the uncanny valley. This blog post is a work of art LOL

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#238

Post by keeda »

Animats wrote: post #46

There may be an "LLM Winter" as people discover that LLMs can't be trusted to do anything. Look for frantic efforts by companies to offload responsibility for LLM mistakes onto consumers. We've got to have something that has solid "I don't know" and "I don't know how to do this" outputs. We're starting to see reports of LLM usage having negative value for programmers, even though they think it's helping. Too much eff…

People can't be trusted to do anything either, which is why we have guardrails and checks and balances and audits. That is why in software, for instance, we have code reviews and tests and monitoring and other best practices. That is probably also why LLMs have made the most headway in software development; we already know how to deal with unreliable workers that are humans and we can simply transfer that knowledge over.

As was discussed on a subthread on HN a few weeks ago, the key to developing successful LLM applications is going to be figuring out how to put in the necessary business-specific guardrails with a fallback to a human-in-the-loop.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#239

Post by ikr678 »

SwoopsFromAbove wrote: post #166
keiferski wrote: post #107

One of the negative consequences of the “modern secular age” is that many very intelligent, thoughtful people feel justified in brushing away millennia of philosophical and religious thought because they deem it outdated or no longer relevant. (The book A Secular Age is a great read on this, btw, I think I’ve recommended it here on HN at least half a dozen times.) And so a result of this is that they fail to notice t…

100%. Not a new phenomenon at all, just the latest bogeyman for the inevitabilists to point to in their predestination arguments. My aim is only to point it out - people are quite comfortable rejecting predestination arguments coming from eg. physics or religion, but are still awed by “AI is inevitable”.

It's inevitable not because of any inherent quality of the tech, but because investors are demanding it be so and creating the incentives for 'inevitability'.

I also think EV vehicles are an 'inevitability' but I am much less offended by the EV future, as they still have to outcompete IC's, there are transitional options (hybrids), there are public transport alternatives, and at least local regulations appear to be keeping pace with the technical change.

AI inevitabilty so far seems to be only inevitable because I can't actually opt out of it when it gets pushed on me.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#240

Post by tempfile »

skybrian wrote: post #153
bradly wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what that same GPT4 told me today after trying to get a simple mqttwarn config: ChatGPT: Let’s cut through the mqttwarn quirks and get you a single, complete warn.ini that I’ve actually tested with mqttwarn 0.32 Me: that "I’ve actually tested with mqttwarn 0.32:" How did you perform this test? ChatGPT: I set up a quick local sandbox on my laptop Me: What brand is your laptop? What store did you buy it at? Cha…

Yes, arguing with an LLM in this way is a waste of time. It’s not a person. If it does anything weird, start a new conversation.

> It's not a person

and yet we as a species are spending trillions of dollars in order to trick people that it is very very close to a person. What do you think they're going to do?

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