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"Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

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Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#171

Post by greiskul »

s_tec wrote: post #91
xp84 wrote: post #45

The ending is a really powerful point. Most people apparently agree on two things: 1. AI is a great boon for all tasks and specialties we don’t have the skills to do ourselves. Understandable, since (A) we’re ill equipped to see the flaws in its output because it isn’t our area of expertise, and (B) it often can unlock great gains because if we trust it, we then don’t have to pay and wait for humans to do that thing.…

It seems to be a general principle: If AI is better than you at something, you use it. If AI is worse than you, you don't. Each time the frontier models get better, I see another wave of AI doubters suddenly become believers. People say things like, "AI couldn't code last year, but now I use it for everything!" Interesting. Now we know how that the person who said this has the coding skills of a Claude Opus 4.5 or wh…

> the person who said this has the coding skills of a Claude Opus 4.5 or whenever the frontier was when they flipped

It's not about just skill. It's a matter of skill, time, and how critical the software you are writing is. There is a lot of software that is not critical. That is not close to security mechanisms. And that even if the code quality is not the highest, it does not matter.

Even if you are the best coder in the world, you would already become more productive by using ai. Things that in the past you might have not coded yourself but delegated to an intern, or things that you wouldn't even delegate to an intern because they are just too boring to do like some refactorings.

Like I had this project at work that was written without typescript strict mode turned on. When I turned it on, it had over 700 errors. I might be better than AI to fix every single of one these errors. But my time is worth more than that in doing other things. But I can, and did, ask AI to fix every single one. And then I reviewed it batches, and something that my team wanted to do for multiple years and nobody had the time for, finally got done.

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#172

Post by anigbrowl »

raincole wrote: post #8
mapmeld wrote: post #5

I think it's an interesting perspective, because translation is one of the jobs that I (a) hear is the first to lose work due to AI, and (b) often used as an example of "acceptable" AI by people who are skeptics of LLMs and AI-generated art.

There are translators and there are translators. Translating legal/business documents is a completely different thing from translating movies/books/games. I can confidently say that LLMs do a better job than the average traditionally published fictions in my country, at least when the original works are in English. Every single time I watch a subbed movie there will be some lines noticeably wrong.

Yes, I've become very leery of artistic translation, in part because the paradigm of translators as adapters and localizers often ends up at odds with the job of faithfully and accurately representing the original material.

The most egregious example I came across recently was where a friend enthused about some manga he was reading and I agreed to read a few chapters, only to discover that the translator has decided to render the countryside accents of western Japan (engaging with a protagonist visiting from Tokyo) by having them say 'y'all' and 'bless your heart' and other Southern USA tropes. I get the aspiration of the translator, but it was excruciatingly unpleasant to read. At that point, why not just say the protagonist was from New York and on vacation in Florida, or draw in some meshback caps on some of the characters and add alligators here and there in the background?

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#173

Post by Ancapistani »

FromTheFirstIn wrote: post #100
TekMol wrote: post #57

AI isn’t replacing me. Like a toddler, it needs to be constantly coached. Like a toddler, it will grow up. Humans are really bad at noticing trajectories. They see the current situation. They know what the situation was 5 years ago. But for some reason they do not believe that there is a trajectory. They view the present state as the final destination.

It’s been basically the same for 3 years now. Are you sure we’re the ones who can’t see trends?

Your experiences must be much different from mine.

Three years ago, AI was barely able to provide sort-of reliable command completion.

Two years ago, it could extrapolate a single function from a docstring - but the docstring had to be so verbose that it wasn't practical to use in that way.

A year ago, I was tinkering with Devin to try to find a way to get it to reliably implement small, isolated features from verbose Jira tickets.

Six months ago, I started using AI to generate the majority of my code output. Most of my time was spent reviewing, and I was ecstatic to reach ~2x output because I could run the next task while reviewing the last.

Now, at work I'm managing a half dozen Claude Code instances, Devin sessions, and orchestrating a review loop between Claude, Devin, and CodeRabbit. It's not uncommon for me to be working on four or more discrete features at once. My output is approximately 15x my pre-AI baseline - and I've not sat down and written a line of code directly in six months.

At home I'm managing a Hermes agent that can spin up a whole fleet of purpose-tuned agents for whatever purpose I'd like. I've implemented spec-driven development a'la Acai, and extended it to the point that my agent creates specs from text or voice conversation, I review them, and it handles implementation end-to-end. The code itself is an almost disposable artifact - useful primarily to ensure no regressions have been introduced between rounds.

... I simply don't understand how you can assert that "it's been basically the same for 3 years". It absolutely has not.

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#174

Post by JeremyNT »

tombert wrote: post #9

I have no doubt that the writer is better at translating than AI, but I have to say that AI translation has gotten so good that I'm not sure how much longer translation work will be there, or rather it might end up being more about auditing. For example, I just read the Lawrence Ellsworth translation of The Three Musketeers, which I very thoroughly enjoyed. I don't speak or read French, but from my understanding Ells…

Honestly, translations of fiction are themselves creative works, and the translator needs to really understand both cultures and needs to write cohesively throughout the work. I'm not sure this is even really a question of "can it translate" so much as "can it create a good work of fiction" which is a much higher bar. So maybe the model can mimic the style (especially given that it was probably trained on existing translations) but could it really do so from scratch in a way that is actually compelling? I'm not so sure.

Of course as for the poor OP... is this a majority of what working translators are paid to do?

I suspect a lot of translation is just grunt work - technical and business documents. The lack of a cohesive voice with considered style is perhaps not really much of an issue in those. The expectations are just much lower; text that conveys the basic meaning is a much lower bar to clear.

She's probably better than a bot at that stuff, at least for now, but my concern is that it won't be "enough" better for businesses to justify her continued employment. And this is my general feeling about this stuff across society, in basically all domains.

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#175

Post by anigbrowl »

geon wrote: post #60
mapmeld wrote: post #5

I think it's an interesting perspective, because translation is one of the jobs that I (a) hear is the first to lose work due to AI, and (b) often used as an example of "acceptable" AI by people who are skeptics of LLMs and AI-generated art.

"Could not connect to translation service" was apparently good enough for someone, so the bar must be extremely low. https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/3e786n/chinese_hair_... On the other hand, a lot of people become extremely put off by the smallest sign of ai slop. And the llms have a tendency to impart their style to any text they touch.

I prefer to get my hair cut at 'Usage limits exceeded.'

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#176

Post by Aurornis »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #138
Aurornis wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is why I use AI for all my medical questions and doctors use AI to write software, and we both smirk at the quality the other person is getting from it. There is an interesting third group emerging: People who acknowledge the quality problem, but think they can deal with it by applying more AI to the output. This takes the form of people who spin up a lot of "agents" and give them personalities like security d…

How did you get over 52,000 karma in under 3 years with no submissions at all? Are you averaging like 2000+ comments a month?

Commenting more than I should, to be honest.

I have a few periods during my daily routine where I’m waiting somewhere away from the computer and need a break from email.

A lot of my comments have double digit upvotes and some get into the mid hundreds. I try to actually read articles and provide thoughtful comments, which gets upvoted a lot more than the throwaway.

> Are you averaging like 2000+ comments a month?

52000 / 3 years would be under 1500 points per month or 48 points per day. That could be done with 1-2 helpful comments per day on popular threads.

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#177

Post by ben_w »

borzi wrote: post #164
ben_w wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2. AI is a terrible replacement for me - my skills are at such a high level that it’s almost theoretical that it’ll ever be good enough to replace me for 90% of what I get paid to do. It’s a tool at best. Most? Perhaps it's depression, but I look back at my career and wonder if any code I've ever been paid to write is beyond what current AI can do. Sure, this leaves me with the non-coding tasks of UX taste, and cod…

And? How valuable are individual lines of code? To the author's point, I'm sure AI can translate individual sentences perfectly, but miss the nuance of communication in a bigger project or body of text. In the same vein, when was the last time someone put an AI on a ralph loop, posted the result on r/vibecoding and ended up with actual users.

> How valuable are individual lines of code?

Don't care, only time I've measured them was personal curiosity about hand-written projects, and one time I was trying to work out how many blank comments a co-worker had put into their codebase*.

How valuable are features? Management kept giving me them, and I always just assumed they'd decided which ones were important. But I've seen git histories of apps where the same feature was added twice, 5 years apart, by the same developer.

> In the same vein, when was the last time someone put an AI on a ralph loop, posted the result on r/vibecoding and ended up with actual users.

How often do the megacorps currently boasting that 80% of their code is now vibed, post anything (other than adverts) to reddit?

* 20% of the whole project, or 24 thousand blank comments.

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#178

Post by xpct »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #169
toddmorey wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always imagine the model rolling its silicon eyes when it’s assigned a personality (“you are an expert growth hacker”) at the start of the prompt. Was that ever actually shown to be effective? Is it still?

I remember there were some studies that this kind of thing was effective a year or so ago, so essentially a lifetime in Model years. However to me it seems completely reasonable that it would work, because my understanding of what happens is the model interprets what you said as: Look for a group of people who are considered to be expert growth hackers by the world at large and answer my questions as though they were…

I propose we move away from the framing of "Model years" - they're standard human research years. Yes, likely more people are working on it, and also working harder, but ever since we acquired a certain amount of compute in the world, many people were able to independently find the same patterns and train models.

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#179

Post by ibudiallo »

Slight tangent into translations:

I read two translations of the book "The Master and Margarita". My first read was so boring I couldn't help but stop reading before the end of the first chapter. I can't find the copy and the name of the person who translated it, but this one had all the Russian nicknames translated. It kept talking about a guy called homeless. I thought it was just a bad book and dismissed it for years. I couldn't understand what all the fuss was about with this book.

But then, I stumbled upon the translation by Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O'Connor. Although I don't speak Russian, I think this is as good as it gets. They did a phenomenal job.

You can see the same effect with the mechanical translation of the book "We" by Yevgeny Zamyatin, where the government is called "United State" easily confused with the "United States". The translation that called it "One State" was so much better.

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#180

Post by FeteCommuniste »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #169
toddmorey wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always imagine the model rolling its silicon eyes when it’s assigned a personality (“you are an expert growth hacker”) at the start of the prompt. Was that ever actually shown to be effective? Is it still?

I remember there were some studies that this kind of thing was effective a year or so ago, so essentially a lifetime in Model years. However to me it seems completely reasonable that it would work, because my understanding of what happens is the model interprets what you said as: Look for a group of people who are considered to be expert growth hackers by the world at large and answer my questions as though they were…

I imagined it as kind of a shorthand for "you should be spending my tokens on looking for / addressing issues like X, Y, and Z," where X, Y, and Z are the sorts of things that an expert in [insert domain here] would be likely to care most about.
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