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Taste Is All That's Left

notashelf.dev

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Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#311

Post by account42 »

agentultra wrote: post #215
notashelf wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll risk sounding antagonistic and ask you this: if LLMs are not "good enough", why are they still around? Obviously "good enough" was a poor pick of words of words on my behalf---and I'll gladly own it---but they should be "good enough" for something if a significant amount of resources keep getting allocated to them. Yes on a very personal level you look at LLM-generated code and think to yourself "wow this is gar…

The market logic isn’t going to be defensible. The market is highly irrational and prone to be influenced by those with the most capital, not the, “invisible hand.” Cars are freaking everywhere not because they are the best solution of transportation but because people with vested interest in the sale of oil and cars made it so by buying politicians, starting political and marketing campaigns, and on for generations.…

Cars are actually the best solution to transportation once you stop ignoring inconvenient but real requirements like autonomy and isolation.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#312

Post by coldtea »

ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #214
hellojomp wrote: post #8

On the topic of taste, I think of this quote in Susan Sontag's "Notes On 'Camp'" often: “For taste governs every free — as opposed to rote — human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion — and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. (One of the facts to be reckoned with is that taste tends to deve…

An important feature of taste is also that it is highly variable between people, and because there is no system or proof of good taste, we cannot really say that one person's taste is objectively better than another's. This is what causes one person to build a large software system in a classical OOP language while another builds almost the same system in a typed functional language, each following their own internal…

>because there is no system or proof of good taste, we cannot really say that one person's taste is objectively better than another's

We can't say it in times of a general culture of confusion, like now. In times when there was an established cultural and artistic hierarchy, they could.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#313

Post by ben_w »

ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #214
hellojomp wrote: post #8

On the topic of taste, I think of this quote in Susan Sontag's "Notes On 'Camp'" often: “For taste governs every free — as opposed to rote — human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion — and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. (One of the facts to be reckoned with is that taste tends to deve…

An important feature of taste is also that it is highly variable between people, and because there is no system or proof of good taste, we cannot really say that one person's taste is objectively better than another's. This is what causes one person to build a large software system in a classical OOP language while another builds almost the same system in a typed functional language, each following their own internal…

> One thing I fear is going to happen when more and more people use LLM's for coding is that they will default to the "average taste" of the LLM, and we will stop getting new interesting ideas about how to build things.

I don't think it will have any impact at all on creativity in coding.

Creativity is rewarded in humans, just not by their employment where both training examples and monetary rewards can be found, rather the creativity is rewarded by challenges such as code golf, demoscene, and so on.

Go to a job interview and I have to know the shibboleths of Clean Code, SOLID, an arbitrary one of five frameworks, three different ways to handle asynchronous code, and four design patterns, and the magic word "agile". Invent something new at the workplace? If you're in a small team, or high enough in the hierarchy, fine. Big team? People will reject it with reference to those same shibboleths.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#314

Post by coldtea »

altmanaltman wrote: post #239
ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An important feature of taste is also that it is highly variable between people, and because there is no system or proof of good taste, we cannot really say that one person's taste is objectively better than another's. This is what causes one person to build a large software system in a classical OOP language while another builds almost the same system in a typed functional language, each following their own internal…

> One thing I fear is going to happen when more and more people use LLM's for coding is that they will default to the "average taste" of the LLM, and we will stop getting new interesting ideas about how to build things. It is a possibility. But I also think we're underestimating the human need to create cool, unique things. Like yes most of the projects in this situation will have "average taste" but most of the proj…

>But I think it is a bit of an overblown fear that LLMs will just kill creativity and innovation in coding. Hackers will be hackin

Hacking and a taste for hacking is a muscle you develop. LLMs will make most people not train it at all. Same way a huge number of people are obese and out of shape. For LLMs to be bad news in this regard, it doesn't matter if some people will still find a way to do something creative. As long as far more people (than without LLMs) don't, that's already bad news.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#315

Post by bonoboTP »

nazgu1 wrote: post #310

I have mixed feelings... I stumbled upon, read a post-mortem that looks even more AI-generated than the article. "That says something about my writing. It says nothing about who wrote it." - Two contradicting sentences, author's writing skills are part of the author as-a-whole "The short sentences, the reversals, the one-word lines" and then "I will write the next one plainer.". - even more? And... I wonder if this i…

Had the same taste response, checked and Pangram also says AI. They have very low false positive rate.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#316

Post by ben_w »

account42 wrote: post #311
agentultra wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market logic isn’t going to be defensible. The market is highly irrational and prone to be influenced by those with the most capital, not the, “invisible hand.” Cars are freaking everywhere not because they are the best solution of transportation but because people with vested interest in the sale of oil and cars made it so by buying politicians, starting political and marketing campaigns, and on for generations.…

Cars are actually the best solution to transportation once you stop ignoring inconvenient but real requirements like autonomy and isolation.

> Cars are actually the best solution to transportation

"the" is the error here.

There's places and people for whom cars are so. There's other cases where public transport covers the people while business-owned vans cover deliveries of bulky items, which is essentially how I've lived the last 8 years, though for "bulky" I should note I've seen someone take an actual kitchen skink on public transport here in Berlin.

I've also found some islands here Berlin with no bridge connection to the mainland and hence no practical use for a car at those locations; that said, my main reference for "car free" domiciles would be Sark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sark

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#317

Post by scandox »

nazgu1 wrote: post #310

I have mixed feelings... I stumbled upon, read a post-mortem that looks even more AI-generated than the article. "That says something about my writing. It says nothing about who wrote it." - Two contradicting sentences, author's writing skills are part of the author as-a-whole "The short sentences, the reversals, the one-word lines" and then "I will write the next one plainer.". - even more? And... I wonder if this i…

> I'm sincerely sorry for publishing something that has allowed you to feel this way.

What fresh hell is this? If this is human then I wish it was AI

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#318

Post by ReservoirPengui »

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #204
pornel wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're here, because even "bad" code has uses. We can have quantity over quality. We can generate throw-away programs (where the lack of maintainability doesn't matter). We can solve some problems by brute force (keep trying until tests pass). For people who can't program, even bad code can do more than no code. LLMs are also useful as a natural language interface. They're pretty useful for search (as RAG and autore…

> They're here, because even "bad" code has uses. We can have quantity over quality. We can generate throw-away programs (where the lack of maintainability doesn't matter). We can solve some problems by brute force (keep trying until tests pass). For people who can't program, even bad code can do more than no code. If this is an acceptable definition of software engineering productivity, where "quantity over quality"…

It's textbook historical revisionism. It's not like we didn't have mountains of bad code in the pre-LLM era. I'm old enough to remember endless complaint posts about having to wotk with legacy codebases full of horrible spaghetti code. Somebody took a long time to write it by hand.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#319

Post by ben_w »

kaizenb wrote: post #230
madrox wrote: post #142

We've been talking about taste for a year now as it relates to AI, so I'm going to counterpoint it: if competitors can reproduce your features, UX, and visual decisions within days, your taste is not really an advantage. How many apps implemented pull down to refresh once one person did it? How many people even remember (or care) whose taste spawned that UX pattern? [1] AI is not inaugurating an age of taste. It is s…

"What happens when software features, UX, and visual fidelity aren't competitive advantages anymore?" This is the question I've been thinking about. All can be copied very easily and in scale these days.

Ironically given how much hate I have seen for them, this is what patents are for.

Invent something novel, get patent, you have exclusive economic rights to that for however long the patent lasts.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#320

Post by ben_w »

pascahousut wrote: post #307
abrbhat wrote: post #304

On a side note, since the author has included a detailed explanation that the text is not AI generated and this is her default writing style, I just find it very difficult to read this style of extra punchy writing. I don't know if it is just me or anyone else as well.

I assume it's common and understandable to dislike LLM generated content and therefore anything that resembles it regardless of origin. For those who happen to write in a similar way it's a pity. I've noticed some people on the internet dismiss content just by its length too now. I assume this is because they're not used to the idea of a human producing long form content (as opposed to the short form rewarded by popu…

> I also don't see how there could ever be a reliable way of identifying origin of digital content such as text on a forum.

Perfectly reliable, no.

But:

1. these models aren't even trying to hide their nature, if anything the opposite

2. a great many users of those models are (lazy or time constrained, doesn't matter which) or lacking in style of their own, and in each of these cases the result is they don't prompt the models to hide their default style; worse, the outputs keeps getting RLHF-ed so despite how much of an "ugh" factor it has to the reader, most people making these things, to the extent that they do review the content at all rather than blindly uploading, actually like the style

3. Models don't share state between users. This means the model won't act "bored" from having already written the same thing before, so when 5000 people all prompt for "blog post about X", then it will create 5000 blog posts with almost identical in writing style. In turn, this means that the style of the most-used model (I assume for English-language blog posts this is still ChatGPT) has become cliché faster and harder than almost anything else.

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