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Less human AI agents, please

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Re: Less human AI agents, please

#151

Post by ButlerianJihad »

fenomas wrote: post #49
hughlilly wrote: post #21

* fewer.

Nope, "less" is what TFA means.

I think the trouble is that the headline is ambiguous and may confuse people about the theme of the article, although if you'd simply apply common sense, you could reason out that the author can't realistically ask for "fewer AI agents".

A hyphenation would assist in comprehension, in this and many other cases. However, while editing Wikipedia, I found that the manuals of style and editor preferences are anti-hyphenation -- I'm sorry, anti hyphenation, in a lot of cases!

Some more verbosity would've helped, e.g. "I want AI agents to be less human" but as always, headlines use an economy of words.

Re: Less human AI agents, please

#152

Post by slopinthebag »

DangitBobby wrote: post #138
slopinthebag wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, maybe this is how you think but not everyone is a self-admitted NPC. Speak for yourself only please.

It's how literally everyone thinks. Your thoughts come unbidden via a process you do not understand and cannot observe and your consciousness follows them along. Your brain is not as special as you imagine.

Actually that this happens through our subconscious is incredibly special. Our brains are a marvel.

Re: Less human AI agents, please

#153

Post by slopinthebag »

Jtarii wrote: post #144
slopinthebag wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, maybe this is how you think but not everyone is a self-admitted NPC. Speak for yourself only please.

Think of a movie. You had literally -zero- input in what your brain gave you as an answer. It just gave you something, you can make up whatever story you want to tell yourself, "it's my favourite movie", "I saw it last week", whatever you want. It doesn't change the fact that the words on your screen triggered some neural pathway in your brain that is totally out of your control and landed on "Titanic".

> You had literally -zero- input in what your brain does

:)

Re: Less human AI agents, please

#154

Post by ButlerianJihad »

Jtarii wrote: post #132
philipwhiuk wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the first sentence > I asked an AI agent to solve a programming problem You're not asking it to solve anything. You provide a prompt and it does autocomplete. The only reason it doesn't run forever is that one of the generated tokens is interpreted as 'done'.

When someone asks you a question in what ways are you not an "autocomplete"? You aren't aware of how you come up with the words you are saying, you just start talking and the next word somehow falls out of your mouth. Maybe you think before you start talking, but where do the thoughts come from? They just appear to you in your head. We are just as much a predictive machine as LLMs, the human brain is just fuzzier.

Human minds have the ability to reason and to evaluate sources by different authorities. It is why some children are able to obey their parents while ignoring scammers on TV commercials, shouting at them to buy stuff.

We are also able to apply lived experience to our reasoning. That is why we can accurately answer a question about whether to drive or walk to the car wash. Or how we could immediately see how many "r"s are in "strawberry".

LLMs, being "glorified autocomplete" don't have a real way to separate truth from lies, or critically evaluate sources of information. Humans can absorb information in various ways, such as our "classic five senses" which inform our daily lives and motions, or by absorbing information via reading, hearing, seeing, etc., or by inferring and reasoning and being "guided by the Spirit" in a more metaphysical way where LLMs would fail.

Re: Less human AI agents, please

#155

Post by DangitBobby »

slopinthebag wrote: post #152
DangitBobby wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's how literally everyone thinks. Your thoughts come unbidden via a process you do not understand and cannot observe and your consciousness follows them along. Your brain is not as special as you imagine.

Actually that this happens through our subconscious is incredibly special. Our brains are a marvel.

It's like we have little thinking sub-agents auto-completing cognition tokens in the background that then surface findings to the main agent which then auto-completes some more cognition tokens in the foreground.

Re: Less human AI agents, please

#156

Post by chrisjj »

Jtarii wrote: post #148
chrisjj wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course not. One of the major differences between intelligent and word-guessing autocomplete.

Do you think you could explain all AI behaviour by reading a physics textbook?

Nope. But someone smart enough could.

Re: Less human AI agents, please

#157

Post by slopinthebag »

DangitBobby wrote: post #155
slopinthebag wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually that this happens through our subconscious is incredibly special. Our brains are a marvel.

It's like we have little thinking sub-agents auto-completing cognition tokens in the background that then surface findings to the main agent which then auto-completes some more cognition tokens in the foreground.

Hah thats cute actually

Re: Less human AI agents, please

#158

Post by fenomas »

DangitBobby wrote: post #150
fenomas wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a grammar issue; only "less" matches TFA's meaning. (Aside: it's better not to be pedantic, but if you must be pedantic you should remember to be correct as well.)

True. People often incorrectly believe that less and fewer have distinct cases where only one word is correct. They are mistaken.

(The aside was for you - TFA's title is not a case where either word works.)

Re: Less human AI agents, please

#159

Post by dabbledash »

zingar wrote: post #33
gregates wrote: post #15

The version of this I encounter literally every day is: I ask my coding agent to do some tedious, extremely well-specified refactor, such as (to give a concrete real life example) changing a commonly used fn to take a locale parameter, because it will soon need to be locale-aware. I am very clear — we are not actually changing any behavior, just the fn signature. In fact, at all call sites, I want it to specify a def…

> Maybe we should just commit the signature change with a TODO I'm fascinated that so many folks report this, I've literally never seen it in daily CC use. I can only guess that my habitually starting a new session and getting it to plan-document before action ("make a file listing all call sites"; "look at refactoring.md and implement") makes it clear when it's time for exploration vs when it's time for action (i.e.…

I wonder if it has to do with how often TODOs appear in the existing code.

Re: Less human AI agents, please

#160

Post by paradox460 »

bandrami wrote: post #45
gregates wrote: post #15

The version of this I encounter literally every day is: I ask my coding agent to do some tedious, extremely well-specified refactor, such as (to give a concrete real life example) changing a commonly used fn to take a locale parameter, because it will soon need to be locale-aware. I am very clear — we are not actually changing any behavior, just the fn signature. In fact, at all call sites, I want it to specify a def…

At the risk of being That Old Guy, this seems like a pretty bad workflow regression from what ctags could do 30 years ago

It is. Ctags, or a decently powerful llm, coupled with a decent editor, makes this nearly trivial
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