“The gates of hell are open night and day;
Smooth the descent, and easy is the way:
But to return, and view the cheerful skies,
In this the task and mighty labor lies.”
The Aenid, Virgil, Dryden translation.
The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing
531–540 of 668 posts
Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing
#532Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s a deliberate process powered by rightwing and capitalist interests designed to create a dumber, less educated and more distracted population. A war as stupid as the one with Iran would not have been possible three decades ago. As ill-advised as the Iraq war was, Bush at least spent months explaining the rationale and building support for it, successfully. Now that’s not needed. I saw interviews with young Americ…
I was there for that war. Kids weren't listening and didn't care back then either. If anything, Gen Z is the most politically-aware generation we've had since we started keeping track. Trump doesn't have to justify a single thing because the billionaires behind him know that every last bet is off and their very livelihoods are at risk, and his entire base of support up and down the chain are either complicit or foole…
Trump was in part a response to that realization, an outsider from both parties that used the Republicans to get in the door. Bernie Sanders was supposed to be the same, and when he dropped out a lot of us switched to Trump because they represented the same thing.
Tearing down entrenched establishments that don't work for the people is what people were voting for in 2016 and were disappointed he didn't do it. They're glad he's finally doing what he promised a decade ago.
Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing
#533Earlier quoted context omitted.
> At the type of place where I taught until recently—a small, selective, private liberal-arts college—administrators can go quite far in limiting AI use, if they have the guts to do so. They should commit to a ruthless de-teching not just of classrooms but of their entire institution. Get rid of Wi-Fi and return to Ethernet, which would allow schools greater control over where and when students use digital technologi…
> If students want to type notes in class or papers in the library, they can use digital typewriters, which have word processing but nothing else. Only, replacing the guts of such a machine to contain a local LLM is damn easy today. Right now the battery mass required to power the device would be a giveaway, but inference is getting energetically cheaper. > Colleges that are especially committed to maintaining this t…
Local inference? Why? Just install a SIM card and connect to your BigTech account.
Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing
#534Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If students want to type notes in class or papers in the library, they can use digital typewriters, which have word processing but nothing else. Only, replacing the guts of such a machine to contain a local LLM is damn easy today. Right now the battery mass required to power the device would be a giveaway, but inference is getting energetically cheaper. > Colleges that are especially committed to maintaining this t…
Are you suggesting we should do nothing if the solution has any flaws?
Some solutions have flaws but still improve things. Others are hopelessly ineffective and add nothing but overhead.
Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing
#535Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article is a thought experiment. The author hypothesizes that Bob isn't getting the same benefit that Alice is getting. That hypothesis could be wrong. I don't know and the author doesn't know. It could be that Bob is going to have a very successful career and will deeply know the field because he is able to traverse a wider set of problems more quickly. At this point, it's just hypothesis. I don't think that we…
Do you think you learn as much from reading summaries of papers as reading the full thing? Do you think you learn as much from asking a friend to write a paper as when you write it yourself?
A more fair comparison might be, do you learn as much by reading one full paper vs. in a similar amount of time reading summaries of 3-4 papers, asking questions about details, reading the portions of those papers that you are interested in, etc.
Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing
#536Earlier quoted context omitted.
> At the type of place where I taught until recently—a small, selective, private liberal-arts college—administrators can go quite far in limiting AI use, if they have the guts to do so. They should commit to a ruthless de-teching not just of classrooms but of their entire institution. Get rid of Wi-Fi and return to Ethernet, which would allow schools greater control over where and when students use digital technologi…
> If students want to type notes in class or papers in the library, they can use digital typewriters, which have word processing but nothing else. Only, replacing the guts of such a machine to contain a local LLM is damn easy today. Right now the battery mass required to power the device would be a giveaway, but inference is getting energetically cheaper. > Colleges that are especially committed to maintaining this t…
There's always going to be ways to cheat, the idea is to make it hard. I think secretly replacing a computer's internals such that no one else will notice is pretty hard.
Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing
#537> I'm not worried about the machines. The machines are fine. I'm worried about us. We're collectively racing towards the last scene of "Up", justifying each milestone along the way. I've used this analogy more times than I thought I ever would; no regrets. We're entering a post-thought era where knowledge itself is devalued and, worse, _seeking_ that knowledge is discouraged. There's no time to stumble through learni…
"Man was hitherto unable to realize his wishes. Now that he can realize them, he must either change them, or perish".
-- William Carlos Williams (quoted in Steve Reich's "The Desert Music")Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing
#538Earlier quoted context omitted.
That doesn't sound like much of an issue. Bob was already going to encounter problems that are too large and complex for him to solve, agents or otherwise. Life throws us hard problems. I don't recall if we even assumed Bob was unusually capable, he might be one of life's flounderers. I'd give good odds that if he got through a program with the help of agents he'll get through life achieving at least a normal level o…
From the article: > There's a common rebuttal to this, and I hear it constantly. "Just wait," people say. "In a few months, in a year, the models will be better. They won't hallucinate. They won't fake plots. The problems you're describing are temporary." I've been hearing "just wait" since 2023. We're not trending towards superintelligence with these AIs. We're trending towards (and, in fact, have already reached) s…
> Untrained children write better code than the most sophisticated LLMs, without even noticing they're doing anything special.
I’ll take that bet. How much money would you like to put on this, and we’ll have a neutral third party pick both the untrained child and the LLM.
Let me know.
Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing
#539Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no contradiction, the point is that Bob is able to produce valid output using LLMs, but only while he himself is being supervised; and that he doesn't develop the skills to supervise independently himself in the future.
> only while he himself is being supervised No, this is impossible unless Bob is presenting at each weekly meeting simply the output of the LLM and feeding the tutor's feedback straight into it. For a total of 10 minutes work per week, and the tutor would notice straight away at least for the lack of progress. No, the article specifies that Bob actually works with the LLM, doesn't just delegate. He asks the agent to…
This is the rub, Bob would not be promoted if he consistently provided unreliable LLM output. In order to get promoted, Bob needs to learn the skills that get reliable output out of an LLM. These may not be the same skills that Alice learns, but if the argument is that Schwartz's LLM output is valuable -- why are we to assume Bob's path isn't towards Schwartz?
Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing
#540For the people arguing that the output is the code and the faster we generate it the better.. I do wonder where all the novel products produced by 10x devs who are now 100x with LLMs, the “idea guys” who can now produce products from whole clothe without having to hire pesky engineers.. where is the one-man 10 billion dollar startups, etc? We are 3-4 years into this mania and all I see on the other end of it is the L…
Going 100x faster is the problem. As they say, “slow is smooth, and smooth is fast,” when going for product market fit this is very important (and understated, in my opinion). It doesn’t help that your thread is spinning out at a hundred yards a second when what you’re doing is trying to thread the needle.
I wonder if "LLMs make coding 10x faster" is going to turn out to be as total SDLC useful as EVs "straight line acceleration faster than a supercar for $50k" turned out to be in everyday driving?
That is - lacking a supercar was not the thing preventing you from getting to work faster.