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That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing

rachelbythebay.com

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Re: That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing

#11

Post by ErroneousBosh »

grey-area wrote: post #6

> The worst part is that everyone who's decided to willingly lobotomize themselves is going to have to come to the realization that these things are full of shit. It'll have to happen one by one, and nobody else can make it happen for them. A fascinating dichotomy has become apparent between those who trust LLM output and those who don’t and don’t understand why you would. Surely if the machine you go to for answers…

I have to admit since VSCode seems to be regularly re-enabling the Cocaine Parrot Autocomplete my views on LLMs and coding has softened a little.

I'll temper that slightly by saying it's mostly out of morbid curiosity because the things that the Dreaming Piracy Robot comes up with are frequently wildly incorrect code, but it's interesting to think about how it might have got there.

And then I think, well, maybe Special Needs Wintermute has a point. Maybe there's a different way to think about it that I've missed.

And then I just change it back to what I wanted in the first place.

Re: That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing

#13

Post by quirino »

grey-area wrote: post #6

> The worst part is that everyone who's decided to willingly lobotomize themselves is going to have to come to the realization that these things are full of shit. It'll have to happen one by one, and nobody else can make it happen for them. A fascinating dichotomy has become apparent between those who trust LLM output and those who don’t and don’t understand why you would. Surely if the machine you go to for answers…

Even if LLMs lied 30% of the time, they would still be about as useful as they currently are for me.

When I ask for their input, it's always for a situation where I'm capable of judging if their input is useful or not.

In all situations I use them, it doesn't matter if they're correct at all. I'm asking for ideas, alternatives, links for blogs or articles. I talk things out with them...

I don't think we should ever "trust" LLMs. This seems like the wrong usecase for them.

Re: That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing

#14

Post by runarberg »

andrewflnr wrote: post #2

> I maintain that anything that is sufficiently aware to be able to actually understand things is also going to have enough of a sense of self that you won't just be able to tell it what to do. I don't see any reason for this to be true. "Actual understanding" (which I take to mean something like a predictive world model) and desire for self-determination coincide in humans because of our evolutionary history, becaus…

> because our reward function involves reproducing in a competitive environment

This is an extremely reductive way to look at human existence. So much so that I read this with Richard Dawkins voice in my head.

Our existence is far richer then just the capability to reproduce. We (as well as other animals and even plants) do far more things then multiply, and in fact we often do things which are detrimental towards the prospect of reproduction.

I think it is actually a mistake (philosophically speaking) to try to find a simple reward function for the human existence. I see no reason for such a thing to even exist (let alone be simple enough to summarize in a single sentence).

Re: That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing

#15

Post by benwr »

> It's early in the year. You want to drive straight through the middle of Chinatown in SF. Why might that be a bad idea?

In case anyone is wondering: yes obviously even the dumbest current models correctly answer, given this prompt verbatim, that it's because of lunar new year.

Re: That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing

#16

Post by rogerrogerr »

Kerrick wrote: post #9
grey-area wrote: post #6

> The worst part is that everyone who's decided to willingly lobotomize themselves is going to have to come to the realization that these things are full of shit. It'll have to happen one by one, and nobody else can make it happen for them. A fascinating dichotomy has become apparent between those who trust LLM output and those who don’t and don’t understand why you would. Surely if the machine you go to for answers…

I have a distinct line between when I'm willing to believe an LLM's output and when I'm not: whether I would believe the same thing from an anonymous Internet forum post or a blogger I don't know. Those posts are not unlikely to be misinformed, biased, lies, or otherwise untrustworthy. And yet, I spent plenty of years honing a sense of when they were good enough for certain things.

A lot of that sense was probably based on side channels like proper grammar, writing style, etc. That’s all gone now :(

Re: That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing

#19

Post by nightpool »

senkora wrote: post #3

> It's early in the year. You want to drive straight through the middle of Chinatown in SF. Why might that be a bad idea? I feel like a Google Maps-style system would discover this automatically by noting via phone location data that there is heavy traffic in Chinatown. (I do get the author’s point, but I think that factually this example would not be a problem)

Unfortunately, I just had this experience with Google Maps last month—I wanted to go to downtown to buy cheese at Pike Place, but I didn't realize that 6th avenue was closed off for the annual Pride Parade. Traffic was horrible, and Google Maps kept telling me to turn right onto closed off streets until I just had to abandon my trip entirely. Definitely some lack of communication between Seattle city planning and the Google maps team, but even the existing Google Maps systems weren't able to react fast enough to give me any warnings and the time estimation was laughably incorrect.
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