speaking of chance discovery, what a great personal website! I love the daily virtues from the diary section.
I'm Not Consulting an LLM
21–30 of 81 posts
Re: I'm Not Consulting an LLM
#22If people used LLMs more we would have fewer instances of misinformation. Lots of comments in social media could easily be dispelled by a single LLM search.
LLMs can be injected with biases as well. Just look at Grok's responses any time it's tagged in anything mildly political.
I mean yeah, it's Grok. They had to work really hard to get their preferred levels of political bias in there.
Re: I'm Not Consulting an LLM
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s like saying journalism is not useful because journalists are biased. Bias is useful and inevitable
Bad journalists are biased. Good journalists will present a story as factually as possible and as void of bias as possible (of course it's impossible to not have any biases). Opinion pieces can have as much bias as they like as long as they're strictly marked as opinions.
That's not true. Any journalist would tell you that picking the stories you chose to cover is just as much a bias as how you chose to cover them. Even then, the specific words you pick, how you ask the interviewees, how you place the story on the page, what you pick as the "related stories". All of that is Editorial and reflects an opinion.
Good journalists are open about their angle. Bad journalists tell you they are "unbiased" and "just bringing you the facts".
Re: I'm Not Consulting an LLM
#24> “I’m Feeling Lucky” intelligence is optimized for arrival, not for becoming. You get the answer but nothing else (keep in mind we are assuming that it's a good answer). You don’t learn how ideas fight, mutate, or die. You don’t develop a sense for epistemic smell or the ability to feel when something is off before you can formally prove it.
All you're saying is that you can't imagine working on a task that is longer than 1 Google Search.
If "I'm feeling lucky" works by magic, that doesn't mean your life is free of all searching, it just means you get the answer to each Google Search in fewer steps, which means the overall complexity of tasks that you can handle goes up. That's good!
It doesn't mean you miss out on the journey of learning and being confused, it just means you're learning and being confused about more complicated things.
Re: I'm Not Consulting an LLM
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean it can also depend on scale. I use hundreds of sub-agent instances to do analysis that I just would not be able to do in a reasonable timeframe. That is a TON of thinking done for me.
Is "not having to think" a good metric now?
I think it could be. It doesn't have to be one or the other.
In my opinion it's entirely comparable to anything else that augments human capability. Is it a good thing that I can drive somewhere instead of walking? It can be. If driving 50 miles means I get there in an hour instead of two days, it can be a good thing, even though it could also be a bad thing if I replace all walking with driving. It just expands my horizon in the sense that I can now reach places I otherwise couldn't reasonably reach.
Why can't it be the same with thinking? If the machine does some thinking for me, it can be helpful. That doesn't mean I should delegate all thinking to the machine.
Re: I'm Not Consulting an LLM
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or it could give out bad information and make everything worse because a subset of people seem to think LLMs are infallible or gods rather than aggregates of the knowledge they’ve consumed.
If you’ve used LLMs you’d know that they are way more correct than not.
Even a small % of incorrectness quickly produces compounding effects, if you view LLMs as an information source. True or false statements are made with equal confidence, because the LLM can’t distinguish true from false.
Re: I'm Not Consulting an LLM
#27Yawn. Just a post++ about white-horse attitudes regarding "muh expertise". And yet the top of the top experts in their fields (Terrence Tao, Karpathy, hell even Linus) are finding ways to make them useful for them . That's the crux imo. If you can't find a way to make these tools useful for you, you are the problem. Not the LLMs. THere's something there, even if currently not much, but there's something there for eve…
Even Knuth is starting to be impressed: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/claude-cyc...
Re: I'm Not Consulting an LLM
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean it can also depend on scale. I use hundreds of sub-agent instances to do analysis that I just would not be able to do in a reasonable timeframe. That is a TON of thinking done for me.
Is "not having to think" a good metric now?
While "I don't have to think, I just get the LLM to do the task" is a bit careless (or a "hype" way of putting it)... I'd reckon it's always been true that you want to think about the stuff that matters and the other stuff to be done for minimal effort.
e.g. By using a cryptography library / algorithm someone else has written, I don't need to think about it (although someone has done the thinking, I hope!). Or by using a high level language, I don't need to think about how to write assembly / machine code.
Or with a tool like a spell-checker: since it checks the document, you don't have to worry about spelling mistakes.
What upsets is the imbalance between "tasks which previously required some thought/effort can now be done effortlessly". -- Stuff like "write out a document" used to signal effort had been put into it.
Re: I'm Not Consulting an LLM
#29> you had to build a model of the world just to survive the tension?
The world the author is describing currently has LLM in it. Irrespective of the author liking it or not, it is here to stay. So to build a model of the world, you would still need to consult an LLM, understand how it can give plausible looking answers, learn how to effectively leverage the tool and make it part of your toolkit. It does not mean you stop reading manuals, books or blogs. It just means you include LLM also in those list of things.
Re: I'm Not Consulting an LLM
#30I google a lot (or rather, Kagi). I loved to explore the web when I was younger. But over time I lost any interest in trying to gather informational bits from increasingly shittier websites designed to have more ads and hide relevant information for as many ad slots as possible. These days I hit the quick answer button inside Kagi more often and just accept that I might have some false information in there. If it is critical to be right, I usually consult primary sources directly anyway.