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Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

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Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#451

Post by CamperBob2 »

27183 wrote: post #440
WD-42 wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These arguments are so silly. Other person probably doesn’t like the idea that LLMs will replace hard earned skills. On the flip side, I bet you’ve seen your skills atrophy at an alarming rate and are trying to justify it. Both sides come from fear. Just relax and take things as they come. Whatever happens happens.

> Both sides come from fear. Maybe. I'll have to think about that one. It doesn't feel like fear to me, but that could be some kind of coping mechanism. From where I sit, I don't believe I fear this AI stuff because I don't really see what all the fuss is about. I don't think I'll be replaced by Claude anytime soon, because fundamentally language models cannot do the things necessary to compete with me. They can gene…

because fundamentally language models cannot do the things necessary to compete with me.

One imagines Lee Sedol telling himself the same thing. True one day and false the next.

It's all the other things--developing understanding, having insights, thinking really hard, making connections, communicating--that are valuable

Spend some time working with frontier models like Fable and Astra. It's clear you haven't. Or if you have, you haven't paid attention to anything but acceptance of the final work product.

"Thinking really hard," LOL. You won't beat an LLM at that. No one ever will again. Insights are still our domain as humans -- if only because the motivations behind them are still entirely ours -- but now we can put those insights into practice at a rate never possible before. And your reaction is disgust?

Meanwhile managers are forcing workers to use LLMs for everything, for no clear reason

I'm with you there. Don't worry, those managers will be the next to go.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#452

Post by CamperBob2 »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #282
andai wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real programmers use a magnetized needle and a steady hand!

People have been "writing code" like this for decades. That a programmer happens to do it doesn't turn it into writing code, no one would have made that claim 25 years ago, and people who aren't programmers wouldn't make that claim today.

people who aren't programmers wouldn't make that claim today

How many times have you laughed at people working with HTML calling themselves "coders?"

Well, now they can be. That's a GOOD thing.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#454

Post by 27183 »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #451
27183 wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Both sides come from fear. Maybe. I'll have to think about that one. It doesn't feel like fear to me, but that could be some kind of coping mechanism. From where I sit, I don't believe I fear this AI stuff because I don't really see what all the fuss is about. I don't think I'll be replaced by Claude anytime soon, because fundamentally language models cannot do the things necessary to compete with me. They can gene…

because fundamentally language models cannot do the things necessary to compete with me. One imagines Lee Sedol telling himself the same thing. True one day and false the next. It's all the other things--developing understanding, having insights, thinking really hard, making connections, communicating--that are valuable Spend some time working with frontier models like Fable and Astra. It's clear you haven't. Or if y…

Why is it always "you clearly haven't used the latest model, let me tell you this time it'll blow your socks off!"

How many times have we heard this? If it wasn't true all the other times why must I believe it now?

Here's a challenge: show something impressive. Show me how using your LLM will actually help me do something better. How come if this stuff is so great, it's just not all that obvious? I'm looking around and over the past year or 18mo I'm just not seeing a whole lot of change in software. Maybe increased bugs shipped?

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#455

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

"This article wasn't written by an AI. So what if it had been!" | https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2026/09/07/this-arti...

"It seems to me that the moral panic around writing with AI exists on a different plane of reality. Behind the admonishments to never outsource one's writing is a naive implication that inside everyone rests a hidden Hemingway, and all they need is time and the discipline to sit with a blank page. To do otherwise is loser behaviour.

This is a bonkers, elitist vision of the writing world, which is now fuelling a cottage industry of word police, like Claude's watermarking or Pangram's AI-writing score. Neither shows you how to make your draft stronger. They are essentially just scolds in the form of software: You're writing wrong, you cheat. Be better!

But how do you write better if you don't know what better writing looks like?"

Read

Will reading "AI"-generated text (cf. brain-generated text from competent authors) produce competent writers

Absent the output of competent writers (cf. "AI" output) will there be more high quality material for aspiring writers to read

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#456

Post by CamperBob2 »

27183 wrote: post #454
CamperBob2 wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because fundamentally language models cannot do the things necessary to compete with me. One imagines Lee Sedol telling himself the same thing. True one day and false the next. It's all the other things--developing understanding, having insights, thinking really hard, making connections, communicating--that are valuable Spend some time working with frontier models like Fable and Astra. It's clear you haven't. Or if y…

Why is it always "you clearly haven't used the latest model, let me tell you this time it'll blow your socks off!" How many times have we heard this? If it wasn't true all the other times why must I believe it now? Here's a challenge: show something impressive. Show me how using your LLM will actually help me do something better . How come if this stuff is so great, it's just not all that obvious? I'm looking around…

How many times have we heard this? If it wasn't true all the other times why must I believe it now?

It was true the first time somebody said, "Hey, check out this ChatGPT thing." It blew my socks off. I still haven't found them. I guess they're probably behind the dryer or something.

I'm looking around and over the past year or 18mo I'm just not seeing a whole lot of change in software. Maybe increased bugs shipped?

I think you're just demanding too much too soon. Peoples' workflows are still adjusting. As you said yourself, correctly, management is being stupid about this whole thing.

The improvements won't all be visible at once. I will ship my next hardware product sooner than I would have, because Fable routed a board for me. Specifically, it wrote a Python program to solve a nasty routing problem that I just didn't feel like working on.

This morning, I was pissed because the volume shadow copy program I use for backups, Casper, screwed up a 30-hour job because it had scheduled a task behind my back, without my knowledge, that tried to perform the same backup to the same drive at the same time. Fable figured out what happened; all I knew was that the boot sector on the target drive was hosed. I will avoid that problem in the future by telling Fable or Astra to find me a simple command-line shadow copy utility that doesn't suck, and if no such utility exists, write it from scratch. That will not be a problem for Fable or Astra, but I wouldn't have dreamed of relying on an LLM to do that last year.

Will this win be visible to you, as a consumer? No, because LOL at anybody trying to sell something like that from here on out.

The software that I develop to support the hardware? I rarely work on it anymore, as of a few weeks ago. When I want a new feature added, I ask Claude (or, again, Astra, which is now better than Fable in some respects.) Claude could do a lot of that work last year, but it needed extensive babysitting. Now it has taste. It chooses the controls, lays out the dialog box and writes the help text. You won't notice the details as a consumer, you'll just see more rapid incremental improvements coming out for my software and ultimately the hardware as well.

Speaking of my very-obscure hardware, last week I ran into a very obscure firmware bug in some code I wrote. Or, rather, my customer did. Different customers are demanding both new features and bug fixes, and I only have the bandwidth for one of those. So: "Claude, see if you can figure out why the board stopped responding to input X when input Y went away. Here are the component data sheets." Took it about an hour but it would have taken me longer.

I would like to say I used the time it saved me to work in parallel on new features, but in reality I spent it here instead, arguing with Luddites. They say "you are your calendar," so I guess I enjoy that even more than building new stuff. Funny how much the clankers are teaching me about myself!

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#457

Post by mitxela »

qsera wrote: post #360
mitxela wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stack Overflow is made of humans with understanding...

You would not know that if you was a cave man. Nor would you understand how a large number of humans are able to come together to answer questions through the Internet.. To you, you type your questions, and answers appear. That would look like how LLMs appear to us now.

That is the insane platonic ideal of the site by its original founders, which explains the moderation, but isn't how the site actually works.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#458

Post by asdff »

pastel8739 wrote: post #408
asdff wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>(I work at Anthropic) I agree. I use an LLM to write my code, but I do all of my writing by hand, since it helps me think. You get pushback for this? I saw an anthropic job post recently, and they wanted you specifically to have claude muck with your resume before applying.

It’s Boris Cherny, in charge of Claude code, so probably not

Rules for thee not for me situation I see.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#459

Post by bcrosby95 »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #452
bcrosby95 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been "writing code" like this for decades. That a programmer happens to do it doesn't turn it into writing code, no one would have made that claim 25 years ago, and people who aren't programmers wouldn't make that claim today.

people who aren't programmers wouldn't make that claim today How many times have you laughed at people working with HTML calling themselves "coders?" Well, now they can be. That's a GOOD thing.

Never. It would be like laughing at people writing Prolog calling themselves coders.
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