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The Rise of Whatever

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Re: The Rise of Whatever

#121

Post by dale_glass »

zwnow wrote: post #95
JW_00000 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But isn't that the same as saying: what about all the horse carrier drivers who lost their jobs due to cars? What about all the bank tellers we lost after inventing the automated teller machine?

There is a difference in killing off passion work and mundane work. We are also killing off empathy while we are at it.

I don't think there's a real difference. Thinking a job is "mundane" IMO is mostly a case of not working that job. Many "mundane" jobs have depth and rewards, even if not in every instance.

I've heard people express that they liked working in retail. By extension somebody must have enjoyed being a bank teller. After all, why not? You get to talk to a lot of people, and every time you solve some problem or answer a question and get thanked for it you get a little rush of endorphins.

Many jobs that suck only suck due to external factors like having a terrible boss or terrible customers, or having to enforce some terrible policy.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#122

Post by zpeti »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #61
raincole wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People will write lengthy and convoluted explanation on why LLM isn't like calculator or microwave oven or other technology before. (Like OP's article) But it really is. Humans have been looking for easier and lazier ways to do things since the dawn of civilization. Tech never ever prevents people who really want to hone their skills from doing so. World record of 100m sprint kept improving even since car was invente…

>LLM isn't like calculator or microwave oven or other technology before. (Like OP's article) But it really is. I would not buy a calculator that hallucinated wrong answers part of the time. Or a microwave oven that told you it grilled the chicken but it didn't and you have to die from Salmonella poisoning.

Do you use a GPS? That sometimes gets the route wrong, but overall gets you to where you want to go in less traffic than if you didn't use it? And occasionally really delights you with new routes?

(thanks Rory Sutherland for this analogy)

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#123

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

JW_00000 wrote: post #90
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>LLM isn't like calculator or microwave oven or other technology before. (Like OP's article) But it really is. I would not buy a calculator that hallucinated wrong answers part of the time. Or a microwave oven that told you it grilled the chicken but it didn't and you have to die from Salmonella poisoning.

My grandma did not have a microwave oven because she didn't see the point of it.

I'm in my 40s and don't have a microwave oven because I don't see the point of it... when I lived in a rented apartment, I got gifted one because how could I not have one? I tried it for a few days and just didn't find it useful. When I bought my own apartment and renovated the kitchen, I didn't bother to install one.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#124

Post by ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 »

Shorel wrote: post #46
icameron wrote: post #16

Love this writing. One paragraph hit very close to home. I used to be the guy who could figure out obscure scripts by google-fu and rtfm and willpower. Now that skill has been completely obliterated by LLMs and everyone’s doing it- except it’s mostly whatever > I don’t want to help someone who opens with “I don’t know how to do this so I asked ChatGPT and it gave me these 200 lines but it doesn’t work”.

I am still the guy doing google-fu and rtfm. The skill has not been obliterated. We still need to fix the slop written by the LLMs, but it is not that bad. Some people copy and paste snippets of code without knowing what it does, and in a sense, they spread technical debt around. LLMs lower the technical debt spread by the clueless, to a lower baseline. The issue I see is that the amount of code having this level of…

> LLMs lower the technical debt spread by the clueless, to a lower baseline.

Yeah? What about what LLMs help with? Do you have no code that could use translation (move code that looks like this to code that looks like that)? LLMs are real good with that, and they save dozens of hours on single sentence prompt tasks, even if you have to review them.

Or is it all bad? I have made $10ks this year alone on what LLMs do, for $10s of dollars of input, but I must understand what I am doing wrong.

Or do you mean, if you are a man with a very big gun, you must understand what that gun can do before you pull the trigger? Can only the trained can pull the trigger?

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#125

Post by Karrot_Kream »

csomar wrote: post #34
tptacek wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There hasn't been much change in models from 6 months ago. I made the same claim in a widely-circulated piece a month or so back, and have come to believe it was wildly false, the dumbest thing I said in that piece.

I have my own test to measure performance: https://omarabid.com/gpt3-now So far the only model that showed significant advancement and differentiation was GPT-4.5. I advise to look at the problem and read GPT-4.5 answer. It'll show the difference to other "normal models" (including GPT-3.5) as it shows considerable levels of understanding. Other normal models are now more chatty and have a bit more data. But they do…

I was able to have Opus 4 one-shot it. Happy to share a screenshot if that wasn't your experience.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#126

Post by thombles »

nottorp wrote: post #120
thombles wrote: post #113

Speaking as a grump who recently chilled out, put reservations on hold and gave Claude a crack... it turns out that the anti-AI crowd (which still includes me in many regards) gets a lot wrong about the experience of using it, as demonstrated in TFA. You don't get reams of wishy-washy code unless you ask for it. If you're an experienced developer who Knows What They Want then you can wield it like a scalpel. None of…

> If you're an experienced developer who Knows What They Want then you can wield it like a scalpel. But that's not what the marketing says. The marketing says it will do your entire job for you. In reality, it will save you some typing if you already know what to do . On HN at least, where most people are startup/hustle culture and experts in something, they don't think long term enough to see the consequences for no…

Well I never set much store by marketing and I'm not planning to start. :) More seriously though it helps explain the apparent contradiction that it sounds scammy at a macro level yet many individuals report getting a lot of value out of it.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#127

Post by dale_glass »

pjc50 wrote: post #42
gyomu wrote: post #10

Broadly agreed with all the points outlined in there. But for me the biggest issue with all this — that I don't see covered in here, or maybe just a little bit in passing — is what all of this is doing to beginners, and the learning pipeline. > There are people I once respected who, apparently, don’t actually enjoy doing the thing. They would like to describe what they want and receive Whatever — some beige sludge th…

More fundamental question: if everyone can generate an album in an afternoon, why would anyone else listen to any of those? It turns into dust in the long tail.

Anyone can write a comment here in less than a minute. Why should anyone read it?

IMO, because it's good in a way or another. I'm not reading your writing because I imagine you toiled over every word of it, but simply because I started reading and it seemed worthwhile to read the rest.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#128

Post by pests »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #97
raincole wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People will write lengthy and convoluted explanation on why LLM isn't like calculator or microwave oven or other technology before. (Like OP's article) But it really is. Humans have been looking for easier and lazier ways to do things since the dawn of civilization. Tech never ever prevents people who really want to hone their skills from doing so. World record of 100m sprint kept improving even since car was invente…

>People will write lengthy and convoluted explanation on why LLM isn't like calculator or microwave oven or other technology before. (Like OP's article) But it really is. You generally don't need a lengthy explanation because it's common sense. When someone doesn't get it then people have to go into lengthy convoluted explanations because they are trying to elucidate common sense to someone who doesn't get it. I mean…

[flagged]

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#129

Post by zpeti »

> But the dream has died. It almost came true, and then it was immediately co-opted by a bunch of get-rich-quick grifters and a bunch of turbo-libertarians whose entire identities are defined by the Things that they Own and who want to cryptographically impose that on everyone else too because they’re mad that World of Warcraft nerfed warlock or something.

Oh come on. As someone who works with plenty of entrepeneurs, you don't get much more enthusiasm from anyone about what they are doing than them, who care about it as much. It's up there with professional sports and professional artists.

Just because things didn't get built that were the absolute dream of what things could be, doesn't mean people didn't care and didn't put in all their efforts to build things. Just because they didn't meet this couch critic's expectations doesn't mean people didn't put the effort in.

I really don't like this attitude. He's really unhappy about paypal and stripe existing? What exactly is the alternative? What alternate universe are they dreaming about? Perfection doesn't exist.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#130

Post by zwnow »

dale_glass wrote: post #121
zwnow wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a difference in killing off passion work and mundane work. We are also killing off empathy while we are at it.

I don't think there's a real difference. Thinking a job is "mundane" IMO is mostly a case of not working that job. Many "mundane" jobs have depth and rewards, even if not in every instance. I've heard people express that they liked working in retail. By extension somebody must have enjoyed being a bank teller. After all, why not? You get to talk to a lot of people, and every time you solve some problem or answer a qu…

This sounds like a strawman tbh, I have worked retail for years and I do not know a single person enjoying retail work. Especially not cashiers. I can understand what you are on about, but do you think this is the majority of people? The issue is being able to support yourself which these mundane jobs hardly are able to. Personally I want these mundane things automated because I don't want to interact with people. I appreciate art though and I want to support human art. I appreciate everything from ancient architecture and stone cutting to renaissance paintings to basement drawings of amateurs. Art used to have character and now its all the same AI slop. Video games will become unplayable for me in the near future. Advertisements will be fully AI slop. Sure there are still artists out there, but they get overshadowed by AI slop.
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