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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?"

#381

Post by TZubiri »

inopinatus wrote: post #243
TZubiri wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either it's LLM generated, or it's written by someone who wants to be ambiguous about using LLMs. Either way, I'm not reading it, it's a clanker or a clanker collaborationist. I mean, how would you even write an em dash? There's no button in the keyboard for em dashes, it's not in ascii, it's just not something we write in internet text with, it's a safety watermark put into LLMs by OpenAI to help making LLM generate…

Your argument goes as follows: “I’m incapable of it, therefore no-one is capable of it”. Followed by, “You should abandon your preferences because I don’t share them”.

On some fields doing somethingothers are not capable is an advantage, on others it's elitism.

Language, communication, are more like the latter, communicarion benefits from everyone using a common language, except when that niche sociolect is domain specific, which an emdash isn't.

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

#382

Post by AnimalMuppet »

sandblast wrote: post #380
madaxe_again wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve a friend who does simultaneous interpretation at the UN and she’s just… good god, how do you even do that. Oh, and she does it in six languages. And here I am, brain the size of a galaxy, and I fumble my way through every language I speak other than English. Serious respect for the linguists.

> brain the size of a galaxy Wow, aren't you humble.

It's a quote from Marvin in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

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

#383

Post by coldtea »

Aurornis wrote: post #118
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.…

> 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…

>It also includes the person who knows that their app is full of bugs, but thinks it's not a problem because they can have the AI fix the bugs as they show up. People in this class haven't encountered security breaches or data loss bugs yet.

How come? Their human code didn't have any of either all those decades?

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

#384

Post by coldtea »

Joker_vD wrote: post #298
tgma wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does not have to be brushed away as "brute force" necessarily. We can, and do, build more reliable systems out of less reliable components. In fact, most industrial engineering accepts some defect rate and builds margins around it. Software is no different. Even without AI, you already have buggy compilers and buggy OSes and buggy libraries. You just tend to accept the risk because you have some idea of what the f…

> you already have buggy compilers and buggy OSes and buggy libraries. Which run, I must add, on effectively infallible hardware. Most of the software straight up assumes that the CPUs and the RAM will function perfectly and don't bother even trying to detect such failures (unless those failures manifest themselves in a catastrophic manner, the show will simply go on). So in effect, we also can, and do, build less re…

>Which run, I must add, on effectively infallible hardware.

Keyword: effective. Hardware is also built on top of components with error tolerances. What do you think ECC memory is for? Or why chips have "yields" and parts that were "turned off" while shipping? Or how thermal throttling happens? Or CPU clocks, which have jitter to be corrected, and tons of other examples, all the way to transistors and capacitors.

And let's not even get into HDs and SSDs.

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

#386

Post by zhuli »

gizajob wrote: post #278

I can’t believe this article hasn’t been written by ChatGPT. The author claims to have written it but has clearly become completely captured by the awful generic style of AI writing.

Sorry but I did write it as a human. And as a humsn, it's a weird experience to have your words dissect by strangers. Interesting... but weird.

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

#387

Post by zhuli »

anotherevan wrote: post #340
zhuli wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote the article. I'm a real person. And I'm shit at recognizing people I don't interact with. PIcture 50 of us in black legging in front of a mirror...!

It's possible you have a touch of prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness. It would make sense as you would recognise people you interact with more regularly by other things (e.g.: voice, or even body or posture as the grandparent comment mentioned), but unfamiliar people tend to me harder to identify.

Could be. Or maybe I'm more focused on the class.

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

#388

Post by zhuli »

anotherevan wrote: post #338
zhuli wrote: post #309

Hey guys, I just found out you were discussing my article, so obviously I had to come here. ;-) I’ll take the time to read the thread properly because, hey, you took the time to read my article. Also, I genuinely enjoy reading and I’m curious to see what you think about AI. The anecdote in the article is real, by the way. I only changed her title. With AI, I went from “surely this won’t affect me” to “AI is dumb” — n…

Welcome to the crazy lolly shop that is Hacker News. Be warned though, as is written on many a candy wrapper: may contain nuts. Also, it is positively charming that you think most of us took the time to properly read something before coming here to espouse an opinion. :-)

Thank you for the welcome and reminder. It made me laugh. It's a weird experience to have strangers analysing your eriting and thoughts. Interesting but weird.

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

#389

Post by neuralkoi »

Translation is an art. [0]

Each of us carries a slightly different model of reality shaped by our genetics, society, and our subjective experience, and we try to share pieces of this model with others through a deeply flexible but inherently ambiguous medium called language.

As I read [1] a bit into the Spanish conquest of the New World, I just can't help but think about how butchered the translations of the Spanish friar's "Requerimiento" to Atahualpa were [2]. A few words trying to compress 1500 years of Christianity and European society structure. How did the native translator (who had only spent a few years with the Spanish crew) translate "Church" and how did the natives interpret/imagine it?

I've also been reading the Tao Te Ching lately, and I find it fascinating authors are able to "translate" the original even though they don't speak Chinese. That is, they have read in between the lines of the existing translations and eeked out the "juice" of the original or at least the truth the author tried to communicate.

[0] https://scroll.in/article/876969/what-makes-a-translation-gr...

[1] The Last Days of the Incas by Kim MacQuarrie

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Requirement_of_1513

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

#390

Post by Joker_vD »

coldtea wrote: post #384
Joker_vD wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you already have buggy compilers and buggy OSes and buggy libraries. Which run, I must add, on effectively infallible hardware. Most of the software straight up assumes that the CPUs and the RAM will function perfectly and don't bother even trying to detect such failures (unless those failures manifest themselves in a catastrophic manner, the show will simply go on). So in effect, we also can, and do, build less re…

> Which run, I must add, on effectively infallible hardware. Keyword: effective. Hardware is also built on top of components with error tolerances. What do you think ECC memory is for? Or why chips have "yields" and parts that were "turned off" while shipping? Or how thermal throttling happens? Or CPU clocks, which have jitter to be corrected, and tons of other examples, all the way to transistors and capacitors. And…

My point is, when you go from hardware to software, there is a noticeable change in attitude and corresponding drop in reliability. Inside hardware, there is a lot of effort to detect and correct glitches and provide reliably correct behaviour; in software, the most common assumption is that the hardware will just work as intended. How many filesystems store checksums? Even back in the days when HDDs were way less reliable? And ECC exists in no small part because writing software that's reliable in the face of memory-corruption (at the very least can detect such corruption) while is possible, it's hard, costly, and produces less performant software (obviously).

Anyway, a larger point of my comment is that when we go from traditional software to AI, there a) seems to be an even bigger drop in reliability, b) the attitudes are even more cavalier, c) the software people largely lack most of discipline/knowledge required to build more reliable system from less reliable ones — because they spent most of their careers doing exactly the opposite: building software that they know will work incorrectly even on perfect hardware, and being fine with it. "You just tend to accept the risk", my ass. Yes, when it comes to software, people do this, but when it comes to hardware — remember when Intel messed up the division algorithm inside their chips?

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