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Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

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Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent more than half my day yesterday telling Claude to correct itself because it did things I explicitly told it not to do in my prompt. “You’re right - I overstepped” Is the new “You’re absolutely right”. I don’t know if we can qualify something that actively goes against the explicit instructions you give it as “something great”. It just sounds like Dario is building snake oil and selling it too.

Imagine worker that did loop of "you're absolutely right -> same fuckup again" multiple days every week, wasting time of whoever told them to do the task They'd be out of company after a week

I do want to fire Claude at this point and switch to Codex. Unfortunately the guy with the purse strings is ride or die full Claude psychosis and our business can’t afford to just buy anything and everything for funsies.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if other languages are less ambiguous about this. "Steve Wozniak cheered" makes it sound like he did the cheering. But the practice of removing verbs from headlines makes this more ambiguous. "Car collides with bridge" is not a grammatically correct sentence but a perfectly normal headline. But in this case, "Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI" _is_ a grammatically correct sentence, wh…

English isn't ambiguous here either. It's the fault of journalists who have this weird obsession with removing as many words as possible from headlines.

The actual headline is not ambiguous at all

> Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak got cheers, not boos, after telling students they 'all have AI — actual intelligence'

Modern journalism deserves a lot of criticism, but this headline is not one of those cases

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#133

It’s sad that we ended up here. I can’t fathom that young people aren’t excited about technology anymore. I was young once and naive, and I read a bunch of sci-fi. I could never have imagined having these LLMs or coding agents during my lifetime. Never. It was unthinkable to me that something like this could even happen. And yet, here we are. Even if you think it’s just a statistical trick, you should still be blown…

[flagged]

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#134
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blame Dario, guy has been building something great, while selling snake oil. Having great tools means more impressive solutions, not fewer blacksmiths.

I spent more than half my day yesterday telling Claude to correct itself because it did things I explicitly told it not to do in my prompt. “You’re right - I overstepped” Is the new “You’re absolutely right”. I don’t know if we can qualify something that actively goes against the explicit instructions you give it as “something great”. It just sounds like Dario is building snake oil and selling it too.

I have a script at work that writes out some config files and I'm having Claude run them after making changes. The script if it detects breaking changes will spit out a message saying what the breaking changes are, and not do anything, telling you to rerun it after validation with the override flag.

If I don't tell Claude about this behavior, it ignores the script output and lies about passing tests that validate if the config files were regenerated.

So I added to my prompt instructions to observe it, and if it sees that message, double check its work and then inform me and ask what to do before proceeding.

This has had the net result of Claude either running the script with the override flag from the get go (explicitly forbidden) or it seeing the message and convincing itself that the override is warranted and running it a second time with the override flag. It's never once stopped to ask me what to do like instructed.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent more than half my day yesterday telling Claude to correct itself because it did things I explicitly told it not to do in my prompt. “You’re right - I overstepped” Is the new “You’re absolutely right”. I don’t know if we can qualify something that actively goes against the explicit instructions you give it as “something great”. It just sounds like Dario is building snake oil and selling it too.

Imagine worker that did loop of "you're absolutely right -> same fuckup again" multiple days every week, wasting time of whoever told them to do the task They'd be out of company after a week

Such workers exist. AI is cheaper and faster than such workers, though, so management might still like them. Ugh.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#136
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just a broad term for whatever AI integration they put into their various Apps and services. So, a combination of the neural engine stuff they've been doing for years, and integration with white label AI services from Google or OpenAI. Siri is basically unchanged, it looks like they have had serious problems getting LLMs, or generative AI in general to be reliable and 'safe' enough to put their own name on it. B…

How good is AI integration in Apple products? Did they drop the ball as hard as Microsoft did? I naively assumed a few years ago that Microsoft could pull it off perfectly because they had more than enough in terms of resources & engineers (yes, I was this naive in college)

Like most MS vs. Apple differences, it comes down to a matter of taste. They've added quite a few AI enhancements across their apps and operating system, but they are mostly feature enhancements and not major AI branded efforts. Having a Summarize button in Mail.app where it's contextually relevant or having text improvement menu options in text fields vs. slapping a major "Copilot" tab into everything.

Their use of AI so far has been much less "let AI take the wheel and brand it as a product itself" and more "use AI to improve an aspect of ".

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Woz is a different kind of geek, appreciates the craft, and can sort out the cruft out of it. AI will be there, but it'll transform. When I say I don't use AI (i.e. LLMs, chat interfaces, agents and "autocomplete") for coding, research and whatnot, people label me as a luddite. The fact is I know how to use them. I test them from time to time. Occasionally these tools help. More often they hinder. "Resistance is futi…

Auto-complete on steroids, is still my favorite analogy for AI. I don't mean that in a negative way either. Autocomplete is very good, but that never stopped me from learning English grammar and spelling.

Quite right. I'm worried about the impact that LLMs will have on the learning process, especially in programming, but also in writing. Programming and writing are both skills that seem simple, but take an absolutely staggering amount of practice to master.

Think about how much your own writing (and programming, if you were lucky enough to start early) evolved from, say, age 12 (when a lot of smart kids start to tackle 'real' books) to age 18 (when you supposedly have a good enough education for 50% of work in most countries) to age 25.

All of that evolution is a direct result of one thing: practice! But with a magic answer box available in everyone's pocket, it'll take truly Herculean effort from a learner to actually grind through the practice instead of just cheating for an answer. I really worry how much an LLM user will actually comprehend their own code or even prose; if you've scarcely written a line of code, how can you really understand what's going on in a debugger? If you haven't done the legwork of writing essays and constructing coherent arguments and comprehending grammar, how will you ever communicate effectively?

Maybe I'm just a dinosaur and these kids will sail a whole level of abstraction above my own understanding of writing and programming, much like how my own generation preferred Python to C, and how the previous generation evolved from assembly to C/BASIC/etc. But then I come back to those missing fundamentals, that empty mental model. It's not like my English or CS teachers had me grind through essays and implementing linked lists and Djikstra's Algorithm for pure busywork. They did it because practice is the only way to truly immerse a student in a practical subject. Maybe it'll work for programming, as long as LLMs get good enough that you can always ask them to fix low-level errors for you? But it seems unlikely to work in prose. And even those generational programming jumps I mentioned (assembly to C to Python) were lossy; most kids I went to school with would be absolutely useless writing C code, and even as a bit of a dinosaur I'm pretty awful at even debugging assembly.

Like you said: you still need to learn grammar and spelling. And I suspect a whole skill tree of other fundamentals!

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

did I compare AI to shoes anywhere in my text? They also used to teach comprehension when I went to school.

You chose shoes as your comparison point. Using two symbols of technology: AI (advanced modern technology) Shoes (cheap, basic materials) You were saying the following, in essence, no? "My grandfather got shoes and was happy, new kids get AI and are not happy."

No I wasn't.

This is the whole paragraph:

> People used to have nothing. My grandfather got his first pair of shoes when he was 10 years old. Yet he was more joyful and positive than most people alive today.

I was saying he had nothing, not even shoes (and people now have plenty).

This shouldn't be hard. It's truly basic text comprehension.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Auto-complete on steroids, is still my favorite analogy for AI. I don't mean that in a negative way either. Autocomplete is very good, but that never stopped me from learning English grammar and spelling.

The way I think of it has evolved a lot over the last 5 years. At this point I think human brains probably do something analogous to next token prediction when we think. For all the hype, I think LLMs are actually more , not less, intelligent than that average person realizes. I think it’s legit, actual intelligence, not just “artificial” intelligence. That may be a hot take but it’s just my perception.

It's language. Language itself is the thing that makes us smart in the unique way that we are among the other animals, and it weirdly turns out to be transferable to machines to at least some degree.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#140

Recently there was a flood of articles about "students are using AI to cheat". Now there's a flood of articles about "students are anti AI". My first impression is that floods of articles do not accurately reflect the real world, but just show some facet of it. But if they are both correct and both are to be taken as real, should we expect that students will agree with academia and not use AI in their education? Migh…

If some students use LLMs to do tasks faster and at higher quality, that changes the grading curve, so everybody else might have no choice but to do so as well if they want to graduate. It's the "and yet you participate in society" meme.
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