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My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

matthewrocklin.com

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Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#141

Post by kermatt »

emseetech wrote: post #15
CharlesW wrote: post #5

I get vibe-coders not having a good experience once the honeymoon is over. But I'm fascinated that a professional software developer could have such a different experience than I do. • LLMs generate junk • LLMs generate a lot of junk

My question is why use AI to output javascript or python? Why not output everything in C and ASM for 500x performance? Why use high level languages meant to be easier for humans? Why not go right to the metal? If anyone's ever tried this, it's clear why: AI is terrible at C and ASM. But that cuts into what AI is at its core: It's not actual programming, it's mechanical reproduction. Which means its incapabilities in…

Isn't it also because LLMs are trained on existing software, and the programs we would write in Python or JS have few examples in C ?

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#142

Post by raincole »

noddingham wrote: post #80

None of these articles address how we'll go from novice to expert, as either self-taught or through the educational system, and all the bloggers got their proverbial "10k hours" before LLMs were a thing. IMO This isn't abstractions, the risk is wholesale outsourcing of learning. And no, I don't accept the argument that correct and LLMs errors is the same as correcting a junior devs errors because the junior dev would…

> how we'll go from novice to expert

You spent the proverbial 10k hours like before. I don't know by AI has to lead to the lack of learning. I don't find people stop learning digital painting so far, even digital painting, from my perspective, is even more "solved" than programming by machines.

I heard that Pixar had a very advanced facial expression simulation system a decade ago. But I am very willing to bet that when Pixar hires animators they still prefer someone who can animate by hand (either in Maya or frame-by-frame on paper).

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#143

Post by gessha »

johnwheeler wrote: post #140

AIs don't generate junk. Engineers with little experience _think_ they generate junk. Or engineers on that bandwagon, which in my opinion is driven by denial or naivety If you know what the fuck you're doing, they're incredible. Scary so.

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#144

Post by glemion43 »

CharlesW wrote: post #5

I get vibe-coders not having a good experience once the honeymoon is over. But I'm fascinated that a professional software developer could have such a different experience than I do. • LLMs generate junk • LLMs generate a lot of junk

[dead]

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#145

Post by AdieuToLogic »

The author presents a false dichotomy when discussing "Why Not AI".

  ... there are some serious costs and reasonable 
  reservations to AI development. Let's start by listing 
  those concerns

  These are super-valid concerns. They're also concerns that 
  I suspect came around when we developed compilers and 
  people stopped writing assembly by hand, instead trusting 
  programs like gcc ...
Compilers are deterministic, making their generated assembly code verifiable (for those compilers which produce assembly code). "AI", such as "Claude Code (or Cursor)" referenced in the article, is nondeterministic in their output and therefore incomparable to a program compiler.

One might as well equate the predictability of a Fibonacci sequence[0] to that of a PRNG[1] since both involve numbers.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_sequence

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudorandom_number_generator

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#146

Post by arach »

> My personal favorite hooks though are these:

  "Stop": [
  {
    "hooks": [
      {
        "type": "command",
        "command": "afplay -v 0.40 /System/Library/Sounds/Morse.aiff"
      }]}],
  "Notification": [
  {
    "hooks": [
      {
        "type": "command",
        "command": "afplay -v 0.35 /System/Library/Sounds/Ping.aiff"
      }]}]
These are nice but it's even nicer when Claude is talking when it needs your attention

Easy to implement -> can talk to ElevenLabs or OpenAI and it's a pretty delightful experience

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#147

Post by opponent4 »

> That being said, there are some serious costs and reasonable reservations to AI development.

Neither this nor the discussion here so far mentions ethics. It should.

According to latest reports AI now consumes more water than the global bottled water industry. These datacenters strain our grids and where needs can't be met they employ some of the least efficient ways to generate electricity generating tons of pollution. The pollution and the water problems are hitting poorer communities as the more affluent ones can afford much better legal pushback.

Next, alas, we can't avoid politics. The shadow that Peter Thiel and a16z (who named one of the two authors of the Fascist Manifesto their patron saints) casts over these tools is very long. These LLMs are used as a grand excuse to fire a lot of people and also to manufacture fascist propaganda on a scale you have never seen before. Whether these were goals when Thiel & gang financed them or not, it is undeniable they are now indispensable in helping the rise of fascism in the United States. Even if you were to say "but I am using code only LLMs" you are still stuffing the pockets of these oligarchs.

The harm these systems cause is vast and varied. We have seen them furthering suicidal ideation in children and instructing them on executing these thoughts. We have seen them generating non-consensual deepfakes at scale including those of children.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#148

Post by utopiah »

jaggederest wrote: post #89
linkregister wrote: post #64

Rather than spending iterations crafting precise permissions, why not just run with --dangerously-skip-permissions If run in a devcontainer[1][2], the worst thing that can happen is it deletes everything in the filesystem below the mounted repo. Recovery would entail checking out the repo again. 1. (conventional usage) https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/devcontainers/containers 2. (actual spec) https://containers.dev…

Be careful running claude in a devcontainer with no other restrictions - it at least nominally knows how to jailbreak out of containers, even though it appears heavily moralized not to. If you (for example) feed it arbitrary web data that contains a prompt sufficiently persuasive to get to try, it's pretty capable of doing it.

> it at least nominally knows how to jailbreak out of containers

Source please. If it's contained (as in Claude runs INSIDE the container, not outside while having access to it) I don't understand how it technically could blue pill out of it. If it were to be able to leave the container then the container code would be updating accordingly to patch whatever exploit was found somehow. So I don't believe this but maybe I'm wrong, hence why I'm asking for a reference.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#149

Post by alkh »

arach wrote: post #146

> My personal favorite hooks though are these: "Stop": [ { "hooks": [ { "type": "command", "command": "afplay -v 0.40 /System/Library/Sounds/Morse.aiff" }]}], "Notification": [ { "hooks": [ { "type": "command", "command": "afplay -v 0.35 /System/Library/Sounds/Ping.aiff" }]}] These are nice but it's even nicer when Claude is talking when it needs your attention Easy to implement -> can talk to ElevenLabs or OpenAI an…

Omg, this is so great, that you so much! Gonna set up a bunch of A320 warning sounds to scare me in case I am idle for too long :)

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#150

Post by llmslave3 »

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #145

The author presents a false dichotomy when discussing "Why Not AI". ... there are some serious costs and reasonable reservations to AI development. Let's start by listing those concerns These are super-valid concerns. They're also concerns that I suspect came around when we developed compilers and people stopped writing assembly by hand, instead trusting programs like gcc ... Compilers are deterministic , making thei…

I suspect the argument is that both AI and a compiler enables building software at a higher level of abstraction.
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