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We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works

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Re: We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works

#41

Post by bryanrasmussen »

nostrademons wrote: post #20

This is sort of the story of the telephone system of the 1950s-1970s, or electricity in the early 1900s, or cars from 1950-1980s, or airplanes from 1910-1939. I have no idea how an electrical transformer works (well, other than the bare theory I learned in physics courses), or how power gets from the power company to my house, or how the circuits in my home are setup. I plug something in, and it works, and occasional…

> And now it's really gone, with everyone having an encrypted cell phone connection over 5G, and your IMEI and IMSI being phoned home to every tower you connect to.

people will hack enterprise pbx systems. The stream just flowed somewhere else.

Re: We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works

#42

Post by smsm42 »

CPLX wrote: post #9

Who cares? There have always been layers of abstraction. I've been around for a while, and when I was a kid, the two choices I remember seeing were assembly code and simple semantic languages like BASIC. Assembly seemed like too cryptic for me to really even follow and I never really did learn it, but at the time I remember people would say that assembly was easy and basically plain English compared to machine code.…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profession_(novella)

Re: We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works

#43

Post by switchbak »

steelframe wrote: post #27

I'm one of the greybeards who has the 2400 BAUD modem negotiation tone sequences emblazened in my neurons. For a while I've been meaning to set up some Wireguard connections among some of my systems. Being as busy as I am with work and family, I've relinquished that to Tailscale for now. Sure, I could have sat down and jumped through the hoops to get everything set up and working across my various hosts, including ne…

The thing is - everyone complains about AI stealing our attention and understanding. But you can just as easily use an LLM as a tool to gain a deeper understanding. It's just the default path for most folks is "Hey clanker, do the thing" rather than "Hello clanker, please tell me about how that thing works".

I've done at least a little of the latter, and it's amazing how underrated it is as an educational tool - especially for the solo individual.

Re: We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works

#44

Post by agentultra »

“The knowledge is not in danger, in fact, it has never been safer. The AI models have read every manual that no human reads.”

I disagree. If you ask a model for a manual and it regurgitates that manual from its training data, it’s over-fitted. It will regurgitate something that looks like a training manual. Or whatever fits your query about training manuals.

You still have to push back on them sometimes when you spot an error. And you can only spot them if you already know what you’re looking for and should expect. Otherwise you have to ignore the output and just get the links which… could be outdated or made up as well. You’ll never know until you verify the results.

And this degrades with compression and time.

There’s no royal road. I agree that trying and getting frustrated and having to take the effort to understand something pays off in spades. I just think it’s still worth it and vastly under appreciated in this era of “everything fast, now.”

Re: We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works

#45

Post by bluefirebrand »

zormino wrote: post #24
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is already shocking to a certain degree seeing very young people not being able to use a vehicle in the narrow sense because all they ever learned were the mechanical controls of the so-called automobile. We could do this forever.

This time is different though (which has also been said every single time). But I'm worried this time it's true (also said every time). Doesn't help with the unease though.

The scale of it is certainly different, if nothing else

We have never before seen every single profession disrupted to this degree, not even the introduction of the personal computer introduced such a dramatic shift

Re: We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works

#46

Post by 101008 »

CommieBobDole wrote: post #22

The issue with this is that we don't know how it works. Generally speaking, we know how the level of abstraction that we were born with works. We might have some understanding of one or two previous levels, but that decreases the farther down you go. We might understand the next level, and some of the next after that, but eventually people will be making things that we don't have the context to understand without hav…

> The issue with this is that we don't know how it works. Generally speaking, we know how the level of abstraction that we were born with works.

What? Definitely not. I went to university and my first two years were subjects where I had to understand really deep levels of abstractions. I had to build logic gates, I had to work with hardware, wires, etc. I didnt see the point back then (I never used any of that professionally). The same about algorithms, databases, and a lot of things. But now I find it valuable and thankful that my professors (and whoever designed the career) considered important topics that I had to lear.

Re: We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works

#47

Post by jtwaleson »

I've been thinking that there might not be new programming languages. The amount of code in the current popular ones will explode, so that's what all LLMs will be trained on.

Good luck coming up with a new language and getting enough content out there that LLMs will be fluent with it.

If true, I think that's a shame. There's plenty of innovation still to be done.

Re: We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works

#48

Post by Ekaros »

smsm42 wrote: post #29
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #8

> The knowledge is not in danger, in fact, it has never been safer. The AI models have read every manual that no human reads. They will recite, flawlessly and forever, exactly how all machines work. That's wrong, and that's exactly why the loss of knowledge is such a problem. LLMs do not, and cannot , actually know a single thing. They are a statistical model, not knowledge. When they give out wrong information ( and…

Yes. And since LLMs can not improve knowledge - I mean, they can generate new arrangements of information, but they have no idea whether any of it real or making sense, unless humans - explicitly or through training - tell them, the more we rely on LLM knowledge the less the quality of it would be. Right now the LLMs are mainly in auxiliary role, so most of the knowledge erosion they generate is laughed at and relati…

I was just thinking. What is the future when LLM is used for both code running itself and then also designing the hardware it runs on? Will it be sustainable? Or will there be some sort of error cascade that destroys the whole thing?

Maybe AGI is impossible with current model as it simply can not reliably improve itself... Enough errors in any part of loop will stop the progression.

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