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The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

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Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

#301

Post by bitpush »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #300

>> I am a little bit scared to say this too: last month I spent almost 10k USD on tokens. It sounds so insane. No it just sounds completely stupid. You spent $10k to get a program to write text that you can write yourself just as well and for free. "Dissonance" doesn't even begin to describe it. It's like suddenly everyone has turned into the listless blobs of fat that humans have turned into in Wall-E. I just hope a…

> You spent $10k to get a program to write text that you can write yourself just as well and for free.

"You spent $1k on a flight ticket from SFO to NYC when you could have just walked yourself just as well and for free"

Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

#302

Post by pona-a »

bitpush wrote: post #301
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #300

>> I am a little bit scared to say this too: last month I spent almost 10k USD on tokens. It sounds so insane. No it just sounds completely stupid. You spent $10k to get a program to write text that you can write yourself just as well and for free. "Dissonance" doesn't even begin to describe it. It's like suddenly everyone has turned into the listless blobs of fat that humans have turned into in Wall-E. I just hope a…

> You spent $10k to get a program to write text that you can write yourself just as well and for free. "You spent $1k on a flight ticket from SFO to NYC when you could have just walked yourself just as well and for free"

"Why spend $1k on a helicopter ride to Costco when you can bike there?"

Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

#303

Post by jghn »

michaelsalim wrote: post #256
Levitz wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Conversely, I also am a user of LLMs (true shocker these days, I know), and am noticing a speedup in areas I was already familiar with, and a quicker introduction to new ones. The obvious benefit cannot be denied, and doing so regardless makes you look uninformed. My largest concern comes from something tangential to this: I'm not sure we're all that good at deciding what should be learned and sticking to it. Silly…

I love AI but one thing that is a bummer is: Skills that used to be straightforward but people generally never took the time to learn are now trivial with AI. Things like regex and CSS are not that hard if you take some time to study them. People don't though. Now I don't have that advantage anymore since AI can do them so well. Or... Maybe that could be an advantage since there will be even less people learning it.

They were also easy to look up on the fly as one needed them too. So really really knowing them was never a true advantage. For me it wasn't that I never took the time to learn them. I realized long ago that it wasn't worth my time to keep that information in my brain, and I offloaded it to google 100% of the time it came up in my day to day life. Now I offload it to Claude, same thing.

Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

#304

Post by jghn »

skydhash wrote: post #119
Rumudiez wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Knowing what to learn has always been an implicitly vital skill to career growth. Maybe it’s all right fewer people will know regex, just like as each year passes relatively fewer people know about var hoisting in JS What does the business benefit from you handwriting regex vs a clanker?

The benefits of knowing regex is not about the syntax (that’s what docs/google/books are for), but knowing when it’s right to use it. Immersion with the codebase is not about coding and syntax (which is actually very easy for me). It’s about being able to intuit that a particular combination can result in a buggy state and provides the wrong result downstream. You lose that you stay in the dreamland of specs.

That's fair. This all feels similar to the shift that happened when Google came on to the search scene. To use your example, people realized they no longer needed to memorize syntax. Instead they only needed to ensure they understood the big picture concepts, and they could fill in the blanks on demand with Google. This is all just moving that layer of abstraction one level higher.

Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

#305

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

pona-a wrote: post #302
bitpush wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You spent $10k to get a program to write text that you can write yourself just as well and for free. "You spent $1k on a flight ticket from SFO to NYC when you could have just walked yourself just as well and for free"

"Why spend $1k on a helicopter ride to Costco when you can bike there?"

Actually.

Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

#306

Post by michaelsalim »

jghn wrote: post #303
michaelsalim wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love AI but one thing that is a bummer is: Skills that used to be straightforward but people generally never took the time to learn are now trivial with AI. Things like regex and CSS are not that hard if you take some time to study them. People don't though. Now I don't have that advantage anymore since AI can do them so well. Or... Maybe that could be an advantage since there will be even less people learning it.

They were also easy to look up on the fly as one needed them too. So really really knowing them was never a true advantage. For me it wasn't that I never took the time to learn them. I realized long ago that it wasn't worth my time to keep that information in my brain, and I offloaded it to google 100% of the time it came up in my day to day life. Now I offload it to Claude, same thing.

I do agree with that. I wouldn't say I really really know them either. I know enough to sound competent and be relied upon, and then I can google them to remind myself of the details.

Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

#307

Post by jghn »

michaelsalim wrote: post #306
jghn wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were also easy to look up on the fly as one needed them too. So really really knowing them was never a true advantage. For me it wasn't that I never took the time to learn them. I realized long ago that it wasn't worth my time to keep that information in my brain, and I offloaded it to google 100% of the time it came up in my day to day life. Now I offload it to Claude, same thing.

I do agree with that. I wouldn't say I really really know them either. I know enough to sound competent and be relied upon, and then I can google them to remind myself of the details.

I realized later you likely meant the latter anyways and yeah that's much different. It's important to know what these things are, how they work, and why one would need to tweak them. It was never important to have the syntax on instant recall.

Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

#308

Post by km3r »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #255
xnorswap wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using regex decades, but it never really stuck to do anything too complex, it was the perfect intersection of difficult and infrequent. ( And also variable - PCRE vs others customisations / non-regular parts, etc ). I am very glad that I can now just ask claude for a regex to achieve my intent. Does it mean I'll never master regex? Yes it does, but decades has shown that was unlikely to ever happen anyway.

How do you know that what it produces is correct? I’m wondering if by the time you have been explicit enough in your prompt you might as well have looked up what you needed. The expression is always terse so it’s not as if you are saving much typing.

Automation. And i think that vastly overestimating the time it takes to write explicit prompts.

Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

#309

Post by bruce343434 »

> last month I spent almost 10k USD on tokens. It sounds so insane

It is. That kind of money would change my life and this guy spends it on prompts that "really force him to think".

I use LLMs. So far, 20 bucks per month has me covered. I hit the limit sometimes. I just take a walk. Forces me to think.

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