Rare Hackernews W. Thanks for posting. This is a really great read.
Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage
141–150 of 221 posts
Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It's interesting seeing people argue about AI, because they're plainly not speaking about the same issue and simply talking past each other. There's actually some ground truth facts about AI many people are not knowledgeable about. Many people believe we understand in totality how LLMs work. The absolute truth of this is that we overall we do NOT understand how LLMs work AT all. The mistaken belief that we understan…
> we do NOT understand how LLMs work AT all. > We Do Not understand Why or How an LLM produced a specific response for a > specific prompt. You mean the system is not deterministic? How the system works should be quite clear. I think the uncertainty is more about the premise if billions of tokens and their weights relative to each other is enough to reach intelligence. These debates are older than LLM's. In 'old' AI…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrvK_KuIeJk&t=284s
For context, George Hinton is basically the Father of AI. He's responsible for the current resurgence of machine learning and utilizing GPUs for ML.
The video puts it plainly. You can get pedantic and try to build scaffolding around your old opinion in attempt to fit it into a different paradigm but that's just self justification and an attempt to avoid realizing or admitting that you held a strong belief that was utterly incorrect. The overall point is:
We have never understood how LLMs work.
Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is Rick Rubin pretty much. He has 100/100 in taste, but almost 0/100 in skill. He can't really play an instrument, but he knows exactly what works and what doesn't and can articulate it.
Being able to articulate taste is a skill in and of itself.
Another important skill in this area, or maybe it's a personality trait: Being able to tell yourself that taste is actually really important. You have to kind of double down on following ideas to their extreme, or something like that. Or maybe taking very subtle emotions very seriously.
Most of the time when you chase taste you are working on splitting hairs. Or it will look like that to an outside observer.
Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is Rick Rubin pretty much. He has 100/100 in taste, but almost 0/100 in skill. He can't really play an instrument, but he knows exactly what works and what doesn't and can articulate it.
That’s an odd take for a massively successful person. In the realm of producing hip-hop, his taste and skill are at the top of the industry. Sort of like saying Bill Belichick has a skill gap because he’s not a top NFL player. AFAIK he never played pro ball at all (and college wasn’t at a top D1 program). Bit, he’s undeniably one of the most successful coaches in the business.
Rubin was also in the right place at the right time.
Putting out Run-DMC – Raising Hell, Slayer – Reign in Blood and Beastie Boys – Licensed to Ill in the same year is completely insane but things are probably much different if he is 20 years older or 20 years younger. '
He was in the perfect place as hip hop and metal were taking off.
Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage
#145> the "taste-skill discrepancy." Your taste (your ability to recognize quality) develops faster than your skill (your ability to produce it). This creates what Ira Glass famously called "the gap," but I think of it as the thing that separates creators from consumers. This resonated quite strongly with me. It puts into words something that I've been feeling when working with AI. If you're new to something and using AI…
I'm confused. I often say of every genAI I've seen of all types that it is totally lacking in taste and only has skill. And it drastically raises your skill floor immediately, perhaps all the way up to your taste, closing the gap. Maybe that actually is what you were saying? But I'm confused because you used the opposite words.
After sleeping on it and reading some replies I think I worked out what they were saying. Take drawing - your skill at producing an image is raised to a professional aesthetic (what I was saying) but your skill at drawing is unchanged (what they are saying).
But they're saying your taste, in the context of self-judgment at attempting to learn to draw, might also be raised to a professional aesthetic, because you can already produce images of that level by typing words.
I guess I will add that a difference here is we are talking about taste somewhat differently. To me, genai has been a demonstration that taste and skill are not two points on the same dimension.
Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
As an aside, beleichick was a lacrosse player as a hobby/sport/passion, not an American football player. I’m very torn at the moment if he was an incredible coach or just rode the wave or Brady talent. I pay a lot of attention to football as a hobby (and a gambling outlet) so these next two seasons at UNC for ‘ol Bill will be really telling.
> I’m very torn at the moment if he was an incredible coach or just rode the wave or Brady talent. Honestly, it’s hard to imagine they’d have been anywhere near that successful if the answer wasn't just "both." You see plenty of examples of great coaches stuck with lousy rosters (Parcells with the Cowboys), and also great players on poorly run teams (Patricia-era Lions). Usually when a team only has one or the other,…
Exactly. It is such a stupid debate when Belichick coached and molded Brady into what he became.
Everyone has always said Belichick is basically an encyclopedia of football knowledge.
Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But at heart the objections are about the fear of one's skills becoming economically obsolete. I won't deny that there is some of this in my AI hesitancy But honestly the bigger barrier for me is that I fear signing my name on subpar work that I would otherwise be embarrassed to claim as my own If I don't type it into the editor myself, I'm not putting my name on it. It is not my code and I'm not claiming either cr…
I think you're very wise to preserve your commit handle as something other than a shift operator annotation, not everyone is. I think I'm using it more than it sounds like you are, but I make very clear notations to myself and others about what's a big generated test suite that I froze in amber after it cleared a huge replay event, and what I've been over a fine tooth comb with personally. I type about the same amoun…
I wonder if it's actually accurate to attribute authorship to the model. As I understand it, the code is actually derived from all of the text that went into the training set. So, strictly speaking, I guess proper attribution is impossible. More generally, I wonder what you think about the whole plagiarism/stealing issue. Is it something you're at all uneasy about as you use LLMs? Not trying to accuse or argue; I'm curious about different perspectives on this, as it's currently the hang-up preventing me from jumping into LLM-assisted coding.
Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue as the article points out is you can grow taste much much faster by only engaging in consumption, which leaves skill in the dirt.
I've heard that one way to pace is to... only consume your own stuff (aka dogfooding :) More grown-up way to do it is to consume your mates' stuff? (Trying to go from where TFA left off)
I think you must consume (I hate that word, but let's go with it) elsewhere. Someone said (maybe Stephen King in "On Writing"?) in order to be a writer you must be voracious reader, and there's no escaping this. It rings true to me.
Of course the problem of taste growing much faster than skill remains, but I don't think the answer is to "consume" (yuck) less. I actually don't know if there's an answer.
Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s an odd take for a massively successful person. In the realm of producing hip-hop, his taste and skill are at the top of the industry. Sort of like saying Bill Belichick has a skill gap because he’s not a top NFL player. AFAIK he never played pro ball at all (and college wasn’t at a top D1 program). Bit, he’s undeniably one of the most successful coaches in the business.
You’re saying the same thing as GP. Let me attempt to clarify. What GP is saying is not that Rick Rubin has no skill anywhere, but that he recognized he has 100/100 taste and instead of trying to become a hip hop artist, instead became a producer for other artists. In the same way, you’ve described how Bill Belichick recognized his taste in what makes a player good is not enough to make him also a good player, so he…
It’s weird to frame Belicheck as a talent picker first. Yes, he had a lot of control but he was a coach first, not a GM. The thing that made him extraordinary was not identifying talent it was orchestrating a team system to take advantage of individual talents. Compared to other coaches that had one system and tried to fit players rigidly into it, Belicheck was master of adapting the system to the personnel. Of course he also had Brady and a lot of control on personnel, but it’s ridiculous to speak as if it was primarily his taste that made the Patriots great.
Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage
#150>The quantity group would be graded on volume: one hundred photos for an A, ninety photos for a B, eighty photos for a C, and so on. > The quality group only need to present one perfect photo. > At semester's end, all the best photos came from the quantity group. I think the more interesting experiment would be to give both groups the same assignment in terms of volume, but tell the quality group they had to submit N…
100% - the quality group only had one chance to impress the teacher, whereas quantity group had dozens. The conclusion drawn from this in the text seems to be based on assumptions. We don't actually know how many intermediate photographs the quality group took as well, and without knowing that and also checking the quality of those, it's hard to say anything useful.