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Taste Is All That's Left

notashelf.dev

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Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#71

Post by red75prime »

win311fwg wrote: post #13
TacticalCoder wrote: post #2

[flagged]

> Who the FUCK speaks like that? If we assume that it is LLM generated, as suggested, apparently a lot of people, as the LLMs were trained to mimic how people speak (write). You might find it to be unusual because you probably have never read anything written by most people. Only peculiar characters tend to get noticed.

> the LLMs were trained to mimic how people speak (write)

It's a foundational model (fresh from autoregressive pretraining) that approximates the probability distribution of human texts. And, no, it's not the statistical average of how people speak. It approximates how a person who could have written a text in its context would have written the next words.

Fine-tuning, RLHF, reinforcement learning change this probability distribution. I guess, it's mostly RLHF that shapes the way LLMs write. The similarity of style is due to common providers of RLHF data.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#74

Post by Hasz »

Taste good, taste hard to cultivate, taste easy to fake and hard to prove. There, TLDR.

We still have a metric for good taste, and it is $. Solve a problem that people care about? They give you $. Solve problem no one care about? No $.

It is not perfect, but I challenge you to find a better metric that is as effective and simple.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#76

Post by inigyou »

dvt wrote: post #64
causal wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also just patently false. Taste is not all that is left. Are software engineers really so full of hubris that they thought coding is all that there is to making a product?

> Are software engineers really so full of hubris that they thought coding is all that there is to making a product? Frankly, this barely scratches the surface of the hubris of engineers. I personally think AI has been one of the best things to happen to software engineering. Writing boilerplate or my millionth auth implementation was never why I fell in love with the craft in the first place.

We have computers, computers can automate things. Boilerplate is a sign of a bad language (not a bad engineer). But then we add infinite automation features to reduce boilerplate and we get C++, and C++ programmers decry the excessive number of features and want to delete them all and go back to writing boilerplate by hand.

I once wrote a pile of C++ templates that would let you wrap a C++ function as a JavaScript function, automatically converting all the arguments and the return type. Then I left the company. How did my successors find it? No idea. Maybe they pulled out all the automation complexity and replaced it with manually operated boilerplate.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#77

Post by DrBrock »

I find this post disheartening. To my eye, it seems to be the author's first blog entry with obvious LLM contributions.

Given the recent "moving to a farm" ... 7 days later ... "leaving the farm" posts, it's hard not to read this as someone clearly struggling with the burnout which is all too common in our industry, and resultingly giving in to the false promise of a machine that can just handle the thinking for you.

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