Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

acko.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 500 posts

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#121

Post by lxgr »

zimpenfish wrote: post #96
lxgr wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know how one can spins this as a bad thing. People spin all kinds of things if they believe (accurately or not) that their livelihood is on the line. The knee-jerk "AI universally bad" movement seems just as absurd to me as the "AGI is already here" one. > Spore is well acclaimed. Minecraft is literally the most sold game ever. Counterpoint: Oblivion, one of the first high-profile games to use procedural te…

> Oblivion, one of the first high-profile games to use procedural terrain/landscape generation I might be misremembering but wasn't the Oblivion proc-gen entirely in the development process, not "live" in the game, which means... > "In the best case, a skilled artist uses automation to fill in mechanical rote work" ...is what Bethesda did, no?

Yes, but I beg to differ on the "skilled" part. I find the result very jarring somehow; the scale of the world didn't seem right. (Probably because it was too realistic; part of the art of game terrain design is reconciling the inherently unrealistic scales.)

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#122

Post by porridgeraisin »

fzeroracer wrote: post #71
raincole wrote: post #34

> Video games stand out as one market where consumers have pushed back effectively No, it's simply untrue. Players only object against AI art assets. And only when they're painfully obvious. No one cares about how the code is written. If you actually read the words used in Steam AI survey you'll know Steam has completely caved in for AI-gen code as well. It's specifically worded like this: > content such as artwork,…

> Yeah, exactly. And LLM help developers save time from writing the same thing that has be done by other developers for a thousand times. I don't know how one can spins this as a bad thing Do you ever ask why you're writing the same thing over and over again? That's literally the foundational piece of being an engineer; understanding when you're reinventing the wheel when there's a perfectly good wheel nearby.

When you make a function

  f(a, b, c)
It is reusable only if simply changing a, b, c is enough to give the function that you want. Options object etc _parameterise_ that function. It is useful only if the variability in reuse you desire is spanned by the parameters. This is syntactic reuse.

With LLMs, the parameterisation goes into semantic space. This makes code more reusable.

A model trained on all of GitHub can reuse all that code regardless of whether they are syntactically reusable or not. This is semantic reuse, which is naturally much broader.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#123

Post by lxgr »

mikkupikku wrote: post #109
lxgr wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know how one can spins this as a bad thing. People spin all kinds of things if they believe (accurately or not) that their livelihood is on the line. The knee-jerk "AI universally bad" movement seems just as absurd to me as the "AGI is already here" one. > Spore is well acclaimed. Minecraft is literally the most sold game ever. Counterpoint: Oblivion, one of the first high-profile games to use procedural te…

> Counterpoint: Oblivion, one of the first high-profile games to use procedural terrain/landscape generation, seemed very soulless to me at the time. Is that even a counter point? Nobody in their right mind would ever claim that procedural generation is impossible to fuck up. The reason Minecraft/etc are good examples is because they prove procedural generation can work, not that it always works.

True, I should have said "counterexample". Procedural generation is just another tool, in the end, and it can be used for great or mediocre results like any other.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#124

Post by porridgeraisin »

Sharlin wrote: post #97
raincole wrote: post #34

> Video games stand out as one market where consumers have pushed back effectively No, it's simply untrue. Players only object against AI art assets. And only when they're painfully obvious. No one cares about how the code is written. If you actually read the words used in Steam AI survey you'll know Steam has completely caved in for AI-gen code as well. It's specifically worded like this: > content such as artwork,…

> Yeah, exactly. And LLM help developers save time from writing the same thing that has be done by other developers for a thousand times. Before LLMs we did already have a way to "save developers time from writing the same thing that has been done by other developers for a thousand times", you know? A LLM doing the same thing the 1001st time is not code reuse. Code reuse is code reuse.

Oh come on, you don't have to be condescending about function calls.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47260385

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#125

Post by Kwpolska »

> Engineers who know their craft can still smell the slop from miles away when reviewing it, despite the "advances" made. It comes in the form of overly repetitive code, unnecessary complexity, and a reluctance to really refactor anything at all, even when it's clearly stale and overdue.

I’ve seen reluctance to refactor even 10+-year-old garbage long before LLMs were first made available to the broader public.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#126

Post by rybosworld »

Jooror wrote: post #74
vntok wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An LLM has never saved me time. It has always produced something that doesn't quite work, has the rough shape of what I want, but somehow always gets all the details wrong. This reads like a skill issue on your end, in part at least in the prompting side. It does take time to reach a point where you can prompt an LLM sufficiently well to get a correct answer in one shot, developing an intuitive understanding of wha…

I’m curious about how you landed “git gud; prompt better” and not “maybe the domain I work in is a better fit for LLM code”. Or, to be a bit less generous, consider the possibility that the code you’re generating is boilerplate, marshaling, and/or API calls. A facade of perceived complexity over something that’s as complex as a filter-map or two.

When web search first arrived, the same thing happened. That is, some people didn't like using the tool because it wasn't finding what they wanted. This is still true for a lot of folks today, actually.

It's less "git gud; prompt better", and more, "be able to explain (well) what you want as the output". If someone messages the IT guy and says "hey my computer is broken" - what sort of helpful information can the IT guy offer beyond "turn it on and off again"?

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#127

Post by orthoxerox »

theshrike79 wrote: post #46
boxed wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This geographic protection is extremely bogus in many cases, if not most cases, which imo undermines his argument.

Not really, it's a matter of protecting heritage. Like you can still make Karelian pies[0] anywhere, but unless you follow the exact recipe, you can't sell them as "Karelian pies". It's good for the heritage and good for the customers. You can also make any cheeses and wines and whatever you like, it's just how you name them and market them that's regulated. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karelian_pasty

What if my pasties cannot be singled out by any Karelian chef in a blind taste test? Does it matter how they were made?

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#128

Post by sph »

simianwords wrote: post #29

What the author and many others find hard to digest is that LLMs are surfacing the reality that most of our work is a small bit of novelty against boiler plate redundant code. Most of what we do is programming is some small novel idea at high level and repeatable boilerplate at low level. A fair question is: why hasn’t the boilerplate been automated as libraries or other abstractions? LLMs are especially good at fuzz…

> A fair question is: why hasn’t the boilerplate been automated as libraries or other abstractions?

Because our ways of programming computers are still woefully inadequate and rudimentary. This is why we have a tons of technique for code reuse, yet we keep reinventing the wheel because they shatter in contact with reality. OOP was supposed to save us all in the 1990s, we've seen how it went.

In other fields we've had a lot of time to figure out basic patterns and components that can be endlessly reused. Imagine if car manufacturers had to reinvent the screw, the piston, the gear and lubricants for every new car model.

One example that has bugged me for a decade is: we've been in the Internet era for decades at this point, yet we spend a lot of time reinventing communication. An average programmer can't spend two days without having to deal with JSON serialization, or connectivity, or sending notifications about the state of a process. What about adding authentication and authorization? There is a whole cottage industry to simplify something that should be, by now, almost as basic as multiplying two integers. Isn't that utter madness? It is a miracle we can build complex systems at all when we have to focus on this minutiae that pop up in every single application.

Now we have intelligences that can create code, using the same inadequate language of grunts and groans we use ourselves in our day to day.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#129

Post by liampulles »

I see a future where I program at work less, which is sad but c'est la vie. I think the challenge of the job will be heralding and managing my own context for larger codebases managed by smaller teams, and finding ways to allow for more experimental/less verified code in prod. And plenty of consulting work for companies which have vibe coded their business and who are left with a totally fucked data model (if not codebase).

A Private (system) Investigator. :)

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#130

Post by foobarbecue »

Sharlin wrote: post #97
raincole wrote: post #34

> Video games stand out as one market where consumers have pushed back effectively No, it's simply untrue. Players only object against AI art assets. And only when they're painfully obvious. No one cares about how the code is written. If you actually read the words used in Steam AI survey you'll know Steam has completely caved in for AI-gen code as well. It's specifically worded like this: > content such as artwork,…

> Yeah, exactly. And LLM help developers save time from writing the same thing that has be done by other developers for a thousand times. Before LLMs we did already have a way to "save developers time from writing the same thing that has been done by other developers for a thousand times", you know? A LLM doing the same thing the 1001st time is not code reuse. Code reuse is code reuse.

Hard agree. Before LLMs, if there was some bit of code needed across the industry, somebody would put the effort into writing a library and we'd all benefit. Now, instead of standardizing and working together we get a million slightly different incompatible piles of stochastic slop.
Post reply on HN