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LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick

tomrenner.com

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Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick

#61

Post by latexr »

vanderZwan wrote: post #50
krystofee wrote: post #32

I disagree with the "confidence trick" framing completely. My belief in this tech isn't based on marketing hype or someone telling me it's good – it's based on cold reality of what I'm shipping daily. The productivity gains I'm seeing right now are unprecedented. Even a year ago this wouldn't have been possible, it really feels like an inflection point. I'm seeing legitimate 10x gains because I'm not writing code any…

Even assuming all of what you said is true, none of it disproves the arguments in the article. You're talking about the technology, the article is about the marketing of the technology. The LLM marketing exploits fear and sympathy. It pressures people into urgency. Those things can be shown and have been shown. Whether or not the actual LLM based tools genuinely help you has nothing to do with that.

Exactly. It’s like if someone claimed to be selling magical fruit that cures cancer, and they’re just regular apples. Then people like your parent commenter say “that’s not a con, I eat apples and they’re both healthy and tasty”. Yes, apples do have great things about them, but not the exaggerations they were being sold as. Being conned doesn’t mean you get nothing, it means you don’t get what was advertised.

Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick

#63

Post by energy123 »

krystofee wrote: post #32

I disagree with the "confidence trick" framing completely. My belief in this tech isn't based on marketing hype or someone telling me it's good – it's based on cold reality of what I'm shipping daily. The productivity gains I'm seeing right now are unprecedented. Even a year ago this wouldn't have been possible, it really feels like an inflection point. I'm seeing legitimate 10x gains because I'm not writing code any…

> I'm maintaining a well-structured enterprise codebase (100k+ lines Django)

How do you avoid this turning into spaghetti? Do you understand/read all the output?

Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick

#64

Post by Traubenfuchs »

HWR_14 wrote: post #58
dependency_2x wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm vibe coding now, after work. I am able to much more quickly explore the landscape of a problem, get into and out of dead ends in minutes instead of wasting an evening. At some point I need to go in and fix, but the benefit of the tool is there. It is like a electric screwdriver vs. normal one. Sometimes the normal one can do things the electric can't, but hell if you get an IKEA deliver you want the electric one.

Bad example. IKEA assembles better with a manual screwdriver.

You wouldn't say that anymore if you would have ever assembled PAX doors.

Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick

#65

Post by mossTechnician »

ACCount37 wrote: post #48
mossTechnician wrote: post #2

"AI safety" groups are part of what's described here: you might assume from the general "safety" label that organizations like PauseAI or ControlAI would focus things like data center pollution, the generation of sexual abuse material, causing mental harm, or many other things we can already observe. But they don't. Instead, "AI safety" organizations all appear to exclusively warn of unstoppable, apocalyptic, and unp…

I'd rather the "AI safety" of the kind you want didn't exist. The catastrophic AI risk isn't "oh no, people can now generate pictures of women naked".

Why would you rather it not exist?

In a vacuum, I agree with you that there's probably no harm in AI-generated nudes of fictional women per se; it's the rampant use to sexually harass real women and children[0], while "causing poor air quality and decreasing life expectancy" in Tennessee[1], that bothers me.

[0]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/x-blames-users-f...

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/04/elon-musks-xai-a...

Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick

#66

Post by HWR_14 »

SwoopsFromAbove wrote: post #7
ltbarcly3 wrote: post #3

I think anyone who thinks that LLMs are not intelligent in any sense is simply living in denial. They might not be intelligent in the same way a human is intelligent, they might make mistakes a person wouldn't make, but that's not the question. Any standard of intelligence devised before LLMs is passed by LLMs relatively easily. They do things that 10 years ago people would have said are impossible for a computer to…

I also cannot calculate the square root of 472629462. My pocket calculator is not intelligent. Nor are LLMs.

You'd be surprised. You could probably get three digits of the square root in under a minute if you tried.

Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick

#68

Post by carpo »

vanderZwan wrote: post #50
krystofee wrote: post #32

I disagree with the "confidence trick" framing completely. My belief in this tech isn't based on marketing hype or someone telling me it's good – it's based on cold reality of what I'm shipping daily. The productivity gains I'm seeing right now are unprecedented. Even a year ago this wouldn't have been possible, it really feels like an inflection point. I'm seeing legitimate 10x gains because I'm not writing code any…

Even assuming all of what you said is true, none of it disproves the arguments in the article. You're talking about the technology, the article is about the marketing of the technology. The LLM marketing exploits fear and sympathy. It pressures people into urgency. Those things can be shown and have been shown. Whether or not the actual LLM based tools genuinely help you has nothing to do with that.

But saying it's a confidence trick is saying it's a con. That they're trying to sell someone something that doesn't work. Th op is saying it makes then 10x more productive, so how is that a con?

Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick

#69

Post by bodge5000 »

schnitzelstoat wrote: post #11

I agree that all the AI doomerism is silly (by which I mean those that are concerned about some Terminator-style machine uprising, the economic issues are quite real). But it's clear the LLM's have some real value, even if we always need a human-in-the-loop to prevent hallucinations it can still massively reduce the amount of human labour required for many tasks. NFT's felt like a con, and in retrospect were a con. T…

> The LLM's are clearly useful for many things

I don't think that's of any doubt. Even beyond programming, imo especially beyond programming, there are a great many things they're useful for. The question is; is that worth the enormous cost of running them?

NFT's were cheap enough to produce and that didn't really scale depending on the "quality" of the NFT. With an LLM, if you want to produce something at the same scale as OpenAI or Anthropic the amount of money you need just to run it is staggering.

This has always been the problem, LLMs (as we currently know them) they being a "pretty useful tool" is frankly not good enough for the investment put into them

Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick

#70

Post by latexr »

remus wrote: post #55
vanderZwan wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even assuming all of what you said is true, none of it disproves the arguments in the article. You're talking about the technology, the article is about the marketing of the technology. The LLM marketing exploits fear and sympathy. It pressures people into urgency. Those things can be shown and have been shown. Whether or not the actual LLM based tools genuinely help you has nothing to do with that.

The point of the article is to paint LLMs as a confidence trick, the keyword being trick. If LLMs do actually deliver very real, tangible benefits then can you say there is really a trick? If a street performer was doing the cup and ball scam, but I actually won and left with more money than I started with then I'd say that's a pretty bad trick! Of course it is a little more nuanced than this and I would agree that s…

> If LLMs do actually deliver very real, tangible benefits then can you say there is really a trick?

Yes, yes you can. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this thread:

> When a con man sells you a cheap watch for an high price, what you get is still useful—a watch that tells the time—but you were also still conned, because what you paid for is not what was advertised. You overpaid because you were tricked about what you were buying.

LLMs are being sold as miracle technology that does way more than it actually can.

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