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The Rise of Whatever

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Re: The Rise of Whatever

#131

Post by BlindEyeHalo »

chrismorgan wrote: post #100

> Like, just to calibrate here: you know how some code editors will automatically fill in a right bracket or quote when you type a left one? You type " and the result is "|"? Yeah, that drives me up the wall. It saves no time whatsoever, and it’s wrong often enough that I waste time having to correct for it. I have not yet figured out why anyone would choose this behaviour in a text editor. You have to press somethin…

I think it is practical when highlighting text and then pressing " once puts quotes and the start and the end of the highlighted region.

But I agree that in normal input it is often annoying.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#132

Post by zpeti »

dalemhurley wrote: post #111

> "live in some futuristic utopia like the EU where banks consider "send money to people" to be core functionality. But here in the good ol' U S of A, where material progress requires significant amounts of kicking and screaming, you had PayPal." I remember when PayPal came to Australia, I was so confused by it as I could just send money via internet banking. Then they tried to lobby the government to make our bankin…

I don't get this sentence. It's pretty damn hard sending money in the EU too. We only had SWIFT and CHAPS too like in the USA. The EU isn't some banking haven with ultrafast transfers. If they are talking about the new legislation about fast transfers (SEPA), that came 1 decade after paypal.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#133

Post by indigoabstract »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #67
simonw wrote: post #62

Looks like I was the inspiration for this post then. https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/post/3lt2xbayttk2... > Quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw. The reaction to that post has been interesting. It's mainly intended to be an argument against the LLM hype! I'm pushing back against all the people who ar…

You have to realize that we're only a couple years into wide spread adoption of LLMs as agentic coding partners. It's obvious too everyone, and you that LLMs currently cannot replace coders. People are talking about the trendline, what AI was 5 years ago versus what AI is today points to a different AI 5 years down the line. Whatever AI will be 5 years from now it is immensely possible that LLMs may eliminate program…

I don't know what will come in the future, but to me it's obvious that any variation of LLMs, no matter how advanced won't replace a skilled human who knows what they're doing.

Through no fault of their own, but they're literally blind. They don't have eyes to see, ears to hear or fingers to touch and feel & have no clue if what they've produced is any good to the original purpose. They are still only (amazing) tools.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#134

Post by tavavex »

tyre wrote: post #5

The author is mad at Stripe and PayPal for banning transactions involving unicorn wieners but this is imposed on them by the backing banks. The reason behind banning adult materials has to do with Puritanism and with the high rates of refunds on adult websites.

I still think it's mostly puritanism. "Adult transactions" is a massive category of goods and services, and I'm willing to bet that John the average guy buying an overpriced subscription on generic porn website #729 and regretting it 20 minutes later is much more likely to trigger a refund or chargeback than someone commissioning an artist or buying goods (anything from real-life things to 3D models).

Yet, the payment processors will all reliably treat anything NSFW equally by suppressing it as much as they can. From banning individuals who dare do transactions they don't approve of to directly pressuring websites that might tolerate NSFW content by threatening to take away their only means of making money. If they only cared about refunds and profitability, they wouldn't ban individual artists - because the fact how these artists often manage to stay undetected for years suggests that many of their customers aren't the kind to start complaining.

It's quite fascinating how this is the one area where the companies are willing to "self-regulate". They don't process sales of illicit drugs because the governments above them said no and put in extensive guardrails to make these illegal uses as difficult as reasonably possible. Yet, despite most first-world governments not taking issue with adult content at large (for now), the payment processors will act on their own and diligently turn away any potential revenue they could be collecting.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#135

Post by this15testingg »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #75
pjc50 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The things that were revolutionary in the past all eventually become common place and boring. It's happened to almost everything and continues to happen to anything new that comes out. LLMs will accelerate the pace of this assimilation. New trends and new things will become popular and generic so fast that we'll have to get really inventive to stay ahead of the curve.

ahead of what curve? intrinsically human endeavors are drowned in noise. what is the point? if even drawing/writing/singing are not worth doing anymore both because effort and the experience itself is worthless, I might as well step in front of a tesla taxi so I can escape this world. human ingenuity is amazing, but this whole mess is embarrassing

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#136

Post by robin_reala »

dalemhurley wrote: post #111

> "live in some futuristic utopia like the EU where banks consider "send money to people" to be core functionality. But here in the good ol' U S of A, where material progress requires significant amounts of kicking and screaming, you had PayPal." I remember when PayPal came to Australia, I was so confused by it as I could just send money via internet banking. Then they tried to lobby the government to make our bankin…

In the EU PayPal caved and officially got a banking licence from Luxembourg.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#137

Post by badpun »

lan321 wrote: post #106
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.

The microwave analogy is good. I still use it, even though it often makes half my food scalding hot while the other half remains fridge cold.

You should set the microwave to much lower power and let it heat for much longer, so that the heat gets to transfer evenly across the mass of the food. It even says so in the instruction manual. If you blast with full power, leave the food for at least 2 minutes after it's heated for the heat to balance out across the food (again, it's in the manual).

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#138

Post by ramon156 »

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…

My friend actually went to "yeah well I don't like it enough to hobby program in my free time, otherwise I might lose the enjoyment"

2 years later and he thought of a project he really wanted to make. He didn't succeed, but its very clear he changes his mind

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#139

Post by willvarfar »

atemerev wrote: post #108
chrismorgan wrote: post #100

> Like, just to calibrate here: you know how some code editors will automatically fill in a right bracket or quote when you type a left one? You type " and the result is "|"? Yeah, that drives me up the wall. It saves no time whatsoever, and it’s wrong often enough that I waste time having to correct for it. I have not yet figured out why anyone would choose this behaviour in a text editor. You have to press somethin…

Because otherwise it would break syntax highlighting until you finish writing the string. And no, sorry, I like my syntax highlighting, I won't turn it off. This feature is useful for me. So are LLMs. If someone doesn't want to use this or that, they are not obliged to. But don't tell me that features that I find useful "suck".

Sad this is downvoted, because syntax highlighting is a very plausible explanation for this editor behaviour.

You can perhaps imagine an editor that only inserts the delimiter if you type the start-string symbol in the middle of a line.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#140

Post by sunrunner »

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…

I always imagine that there's essentially a "knowledge debt" when doing almost any development today, unless you're operating at the lowest level (or you understand it all the way down, and there's also almost a level below).

The copy-paste of usable code snippets is somewhat comparable to any use of a library or framework in the sense that there's an element of not understanding what the entire thing is doing or at least how, and so every time this is done it adds to the knowledge debt, a borrowing of time, energy and understanding needed to come up with the thing being used.

By itself this isn't a problem and realistically it's impossible to avoid, and in a lot of cases you may never get to the point where you have to pay this back. But there's also a limit on the rate of debt accumulation which is how fast you can pull in libraries, code snippets and other abstractions, and as you said LLMs ability to just produce text at a superhuman rate potentially serves to _rapidly_ increase the rate of knowledge debt accumulation.

If debt as an economic force is seen as something that can stimulate short-term growth then there must be an equivalent for knowledge debt, a short-term increase in the ability of a person to create a _thing_ while trading off the long-term understanding of it.

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