21–27 of 27 posts
lots of people (such as yourself) who think they are really smart with no understanding of how consciousness works, confidently proclaiming what does and does not count as consciousness
“it’s just glorified autocomplete”
ok, so prove to me that the post you just wrote with your brain was doing something differently than glorified autocomplete
Crypto was mostly grift targeting non-technical people LLMs are a real, genuinely-useful technological innovation that happens to have arrived first in software engineering. Lots of SWEs spend their whole day talking with LLMs and feel a personal connection/expertise with the thing that's also at the top of the hype cycle for non-technical news
But we understand the world better than anyone before us, most big breakthroughs have been made, and in a lot of engineering fields we reach the limits of what is possible with the resources we have at our disposal.
So our lifetime is an age of refinement, and a lot of the engineers understand this, and how the world works, and are fine with getting large amounts of money for being more or less ok with being lazy and just solving problems to refine already available tech.
For a long time, engineers had the carrot.
Now the computer has the carrot, and it dangles the tasty promise of being able to invent new things out of thin air again in front of the engineers eyes. No more refinement, it’s eureka time, baby. AGI, the holy grail of engineering is upon us or so they say.
And engineers are now willing to pay handsomely from all the years of getting money thrown at you for doing boring refinement, for the illusion of being inventors again.
I think it’s kinda beautiful. Engineers refine the machine by sharing the only thing the machine can’t replicate by itself to teach it to solve problems better than them, so they become obsolete.
This is like watching the dinosaurs talking about the water temperature while the giant extinction-level tsunami wave is slowly crawling to landfall.
Everyone has a different way to deal with reality. I think all the events of the past few years just let more people realize how the world really is, they use the way of expression available to them to make sense of it, and society definitely had a vibe shift.
We are fighting for resources again, when did that ever go well in the last 2000 years for everyone? It is what it is.
The LLM frenzy is only unmasking something that happened long ago. The dilution started 20+ years ago when people with no real interest in CS were attracted to the software profession by the high pay and low bar to entry. Posts on Hacker News by people who liked their profession and CS topics were often met by "I'm just in in for the paycheck" and IMO that's gradually increased over the years. I've often remarked on…
I mean, none of these people actually have much of any personal projects, and the few that do mostly got the ideas out of a list of "great beginner projects to make your CV look good"... Not out of curiosity, passion or fun. Nobody tinkers, hacks, explores...
Of course that's an over generalization, there's still a few young hackers here and there, but we're a very small minority.
It's sad to see, I always thought that college would be the place where I would finally find passionate people who could talk about computer science for hours and hours, but so far I haven't even met one.
i think the opposite is the problem lots of people (such as yourself) who think they are really smart with no understanding of how consciousness works, confidently proclaiming what does and does not count as consciousness “it’s just glorified autocomplete” ok, so prove to me that the post you just wrote with your brain was doing something differently than glorified autocomplete
Prove to me that autocomplete contributes even 2% of what we write here, if you are so trigger-happy to assign the burden of proof to someone else.
i think the opposite is the problem lots of people (such as yourself) who think they are really smart with no understanding of how consciousness works, confidently proclaiming what does and does not count as consciousness “it’s just glorified autocomplete” ok, so prove to me that the post you just wrote with your brain was doing something differently than glorified autocomplete
(Maybe they should have their LLMs write the proof for them if they are unable to figure it out themselves? Good luck with that.)