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The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

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Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#141

Post by simianwords »

voidUpdate wrote: post #107
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…

> "Why hasn’t the boilerplate been automated as libraries or other abstractions?" Because a lot of programmers don't know how to copy-paste or make packages for themselves? We have boilerplate at my work, which comprises of some ready made packages that we can drop in, and tweak as needed, no LLMs required

they don't go as deep as llm's which capture regularities at much more granular levels

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#142

Post by theshrike79 »

KellyCriterion wrote: post #139
keyringlight wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another example is upscaled texture mods, which has been a trend for a long while before 'large language' took off as a trend. Mods to improve textures in a game are definitely not new and that probably means including from other sources, but the ability to automate/industrialize that (and presumably a lot of training material available) meant there was a big wave of that mod category a few years back. My impression…

This should be completely crushed by Nano Banana models?

The issue isn't objective quality or realism, it's sticking to a specific style consistently.

_Everyone_ (and their grandmother) can instantly tell a ChatGPT generated image, it has a very distinct style - and in my experience no amount of prompting will make it go away. Same for Grok and to a smaller degree Google's stuff.

What the industry needs (and uses) is something they can feed a, say, wall texture into and the AI workflow will produce a summer, winter and fall variant of that - in the exact style the specific game is using.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#143

Post by raincole »

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.

Because code reuse is hard. Like, really hard. If it weren't we wouldn't be laughing at left-pad. If it weren't hard we wouldn't have so many front-end JavaScript frameworks. If it weren't Unreal wouldn't still have their own GC and std-like implementation today. Java wouldn't have been reinventing build system every five years.

The whole history of programming tool is exploring how to properly reuse code: are functions or objects the fundamental unit of reuse? is diamond inheritance okay? should a language have an official package management? build system? should C++ std have network support? how about gui support? should editors implement their own parsers or rely on language server? And none of these questions has a clear answer after thousands if not millions of smart people attempted. (well perhaps except the function vs object one)

Electron is the ultimate effort of code reuse: we reuse the tens of thousands of human-years invested to make a markup-based render engine that covers 99% of use case. And everyone complains about it, the author of OP article included.

LLM-coding is not code reuse. It's more like throwing hands up and admitting humans are yet not smart enough to properly reuse code except for some well-defined low level cases like compiling C into different ISA. And I'm all for that.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#144

Post by ulbu »

mr_toad wrote: post #136
noemit wrote: post #106

Many people don't know this, but the Luddites were right. I studied Art History and this particular movement. One of the claims of the Luddites is that quality would go down, because their craft took half a lifetime to master (it was passed down from parent to chile.) I was able to feel wool scarves made in europe from the middle ages. (In museum storage, under the guidance of a curator) They are a fundamentally diff…

> One of the claims of the Luddites is that quality would go down, because their craft took half a lifetime to master (it was passed down from parent to chile.) Sounds like a tautology. If you deliberately hoard knowledge of course it’s going to be hard to obtain.

closed source

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#145

Post by cure_42 »

thendrill wrote: post #105
doodaddy wrote: post #87

There’s a cold reality that we in this profession have yet to accept: nobody cares about our code. Nobody cares whether it’s pretty or clever or elegant. Sometimes, rarely, they care whether it’s maintainable. We are only craftsmen to ourselves and each other. To anyone else we are factory workers producing widgets to sell. Once we accept this then there is little surprise that the factory owners want us using a tool…

Exactly.... I will just copy paste my comment from another thread but still very relevant> Coding isn’t creative, it isn’t sexy, and almost nobody outside this bubble cares Most of the world doesn’t care about “good code.” They care about “does it work, is it fast enough, is it cheap enough, and can we ship it before the competitor does?” Beautiful architecture, perfect tests, elegant abstractions — those things feel…

This is just sad. If your passion for creating something you can be proud of is entirely propped up by imaginary sex appeal that not even most teenagers would believe exists, it's no surprise you'd arrive at such a cynical, pathetic conclusion.

Your perspective is a path with only one logical end. That nothing you do or think or believe matters unless someone you're attracted to finds it attractive.

That is not how I or most others live. We take pride in and derive satisfaction from our accomplishments without the need for external validation.

Yeah, only I care whether the solution I found to a problem today was elegant, or whether my kitchen was pristine and well organized after I prepped for next week's lunches, but so what? I care and it injects more than enough meaning into my life to be worth it.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#146

Post by bartread »

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,…

> Classic procedural generation is noteworthy here as a precedent, which gamers were already familiar with, because by and large it has failed to deliver.

Yes, this is a wildly uneducated perspective.

Procedural generation has often been a key component of some incredibly successful, and even iconic games going back decades. Elite is a canonical example here, with its galaxies being procedurally generated. Powermonger, from Bulldog, likewise used fractal generation for its maps.

More recently, the prevalence of procedurally generated rogue-likes and Metroidvanias is another point against. Granted, people have got a bit bored of these now, but that's because there were so many of them, not because they were unsuccessful or "failed to deliver".

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#147

Post by porridgeraisin »

Sharlin wrote: post #134
porridgeraisin wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh come on, you don't have to be condescending about function calls. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47260385

I was talking about libraries, higher-level units of reuse than individual functions. And your "syntactic" vs "semantic" reuse makes zero sense. Functions are literally written and invoked for their semantics – what they make happen. "Syntactic reuse" would be macros if anything, and indeed macros are very good at reducing boilerplate. You might have a more compelling argument if instead of syntax and semantics you c…

A library is a collection of data structures functions. My argument still holds.

> Syntactic reuse would be macros

Well sure. My point is that what can be reused is decided ahead of time and encoded in the syntax. Whereas with LLMs it is not, and is encoded in the semantics.

> Pragmatics

Didn't know what that is. Consider my post updated with the better terms.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#148

Post by mr_toad »

jesterswilde wrote: post #48
vladms wrote: post #31

> Whether something is a forgery is innate in the object and the methods used to produce it. It doesn't matter if nobody else ever sees the forged painting, or if it only hangs in a private home. It's a forgery because it's not authentic. On a philosophical level I do not get the discussions about paintings. I love a painting for what it is not for being the first or the only one. An artist that paints something that…

Regarding art, what do you feel about museums? Why would you go see an original instead of simply looking at a jpg. Even if you aren't in the group, there is clearly a group of people who appreciate seeing the original, the thing that modified our collective artistic trajectory. Forgeries and master studies have a long history in art. Every classically trained worth their salt has a handful of forgeries under their b…

> Regarding art, what do you feel about museums? Why would you go see an original instead of simply looking at a jpg.

Generally you get a much better ‘view’ of the artwork in a museum. It’s higher ‘resolution’ you can view it from multiple angles etc.

There are some exceptions. You’re probably going to get a better look at the Mona Lisa online than if you try and see it at the Louvre.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#149

Post by porridgeraisin »

fzeroracer wrote: post #132
porridgeraisin wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reus…

There are two important failures I see with this logic: First, I am not arguing for reusability . Reusability is one of the most common mistakes you can make as a software engineer because you are over-generalizing what you need before you need it. Code should be written for your specific use case, and only generalized as problems appear. But if you can recognize that your specific use case fits a known problem, then…

I am not talking about using an LLM to make code reusable in the sense youre arguing.

My point is that the very act of training an LLM on any corpus of code, automatically makes all of that code reusable, in a much broader semantic way rather than through syntax. Because the LLM uses a compressed representation of all that code to generate the function you ask it to. It is like having an npm where it already has compressed the code specific to your situation (like you were saying) that you want to write.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#150

Post by regentbowerbird »

orthoxerox wrote: post #127
theshrike79 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If you consider only the product is relevant and not how it is made, then no it does not matter; or at least it doesn't matter as long as you don't personally attach any emotional qualities to products beyond their material qualities (unlike the vast majority of people).

But the comment you reply to explicitly points out the process is in fact relevant as it is itself a cultural artifact. You're not replying to their main point.

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