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That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing

rachelbythebay.com

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Re: That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing

#151

Post by ____mr____ »

grey-area wrote: post #6

> The worst part is that everyone who's decided to willingly lobotomize themselves is going to have to come to the realization that these things are full of shit. It'll have to happen one by one, and nobody else can make it happen for them. A fascinating dichotomy has become apparent between those who trust LLM output and those who don’t and don’t understand why you would. Surely if the machine you go to for answers…

> Perhaps people have to be burned by something really bad personally before they realise the limitations?

I'm reminded of that person who killed themselves due to their discussion with ChatGPT and their parent wrote their obituary using ChatGPT. I don't think it is enough.

Re: That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing

#152

Post by perching_aix »

lazide wrote: post #150
perching_aix wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean why not work myself instead of the agent? That'd be because for me it's been working great, and so it does make sense. In the scenarios it doesn't, I do indeed just fall back to manual work. A lot of those scenarios are obvious too, so not too many wasted runs to speak of either. I did give up on cheaper models, they required constant babysitting, and in those cases yes, the benefits indeed evaporated. The e…

Being engaged == doing stuff, not necessarily being actually productive. Busy does not always equal doing something useful. Easy to pay a lot to the model vendor though eh?

> Being engaged == doing stuff, not necessarily being actually productive.

Sure. So to clarify, no, I did not just spend it on busy procrastination, and I don't think it promotes that either. Would contradict my story anyhow, this was not some trick I was trying to play on you.

> Easy to pay a lot to the model vendor though eh?

Certainly, as I'm not the one paying. Though it's exactly corporate who really wants to have it both ways (who wouldn't?), and keeps trying to get me to use the crappy useless models because they are cheaper, despite them tanking productivity rather than helping it, so go figure.

There will definitely be a time when the hype dries up, and mgmt will start playing hardball. I'm confident that the value is there, and that I'll be able to demonstrate it to them that it is more than worth it. You can choose to not believe that, up to you. Maybe it really isn't true for your line of work, after all.

Re: That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing

#153

Post by archagon »

Legend2440 wrote: post #97
quirkot wrote: post #93

> Thus, anyone who wants to corral that kind of entity and make it do their bidding? Yeah, they want slaves. That's the horror buried underneath all the tech, policy, and gloss. The real, animal brain, desire that drives most of this is: I'd like a slave I don't have to feel bad about.

Oh, that's bs. You could say that about the tractor, or the mechanical loom, or any of the other incredible labor-saving inventions over the last two hundred years. We want things to do our work for us so we can do other things. That's not bad, and it's certainly not the same as literally enslaving another human .

If that's all we wanted, we wouldn't make them talk like humans and pretend to have a sense of self and emotions.

Re: That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing

#154

Post by lazide »

perching_aix wrote: post #152
lazide wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being engaged == doing stuff, not necessarily being actually productive. Busy does not always equal doing something useful. Easy to pay a lot to the model vendor though eh?

> Being engaged == doing stuff, not necessarily being actually productive. Sure. So to clarify, no, I did not just spend it on busy procrastination, and I don't think it promotes that either. Would contradict my story anyhow, this was not some trick I was trying to play on you. > Easy to pay a lot to the model vendor though eh? Certainly, as I'm not the one paying. Though it's exactly corporate who really wants to ha…

I’m not saying it’s bad. I will note, however, that if it is actually accomplishing something net useful usually requires a long attention span and skepticism, which as you note the tools actively train everyone away from.

Re: That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing

#155

Post by perching_aix »

lazide wrote: post #154
perching_aix wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Being engaged == doing stuff, not necessarily being actually productive. Sure. So to clarify, no, I did not just spend it on busy procrastination, and I don't think it promotes that either. Would contradict my story anyhow, this was not some trick I was trying to play on you. > Easy to pay a lot to the model vendor though eh? Certainly, as I'm not the one paying. Though it's exactly corporate who really wants to ha…

I’m not saying it’s bad. I will note, however, that if it is actually accomplishing something net useful usually requires a long attention span and skepticism, which as you note the tools actively train everyone away from.

I did not claim they train people away from either.

That said, the review burden is rough, that I can agree with. I outright felt compelled to evaluate whether the additional review burden did not outweigh the benefits, but at least for my tasks it did not. So grumpily, I simply live with that pain.

Maybe it helps if I mention that my line of work is DevOps and Operations. I have an ongoing suspicion that this area is better suited than average for agentic work. The codebases are relatively tiny, the languages and technologies used are very well represented in training data, and there's a decent amount of side chore. I can definitely imagine agents being a lot more frustrating to work with on proper, sizeable codebases, and the numbers simply no longer adding up. I don't have much of a first hand account with that.

My closest exposure is some personal toy projects, where getting the actual vision out there ended up requiring an inordinate number of turns (this is with a frontier model). In my estimation it was still worth it, but I definitely had to give it a back of the napkin calc.

As far as my work goes, it is of course not magic, creatively worded AWS docs will still trip it up (as they initially also do me). In those cases, my expertise is still required. But the well trodden is very well trodden, and I could cut out a lot of cruft, including a lot of organizational minutia, which I very much appreciate. I was able to burn through my backlog almost completely, for example.

Re: That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing

#156

Post by zombot »

grey-area wrote: post #6

> The worst part is that everyone who's decided to willingly lobotomize themselves is going to have to come to the realization that these things are full of shit. It'll have to happen one by one, and nobody else can make it happen for them. A fascinating dichotomy has become apparent between those who trust LLM output and those who don’t and don’t understand why you would. Surely if the machine you go to for answers…

> people have to be burned by something really bad personally

That's why e.g. cross-generational learning rarely works. If culture or technology still allows it, you have to repeat the stupidest mistakes of your parent generation to learn the same lessons. "Learning from the mistakes of others" in your own generation equally hardly ever works. So much less if the lesson involves falsehoods you wanted to believe.

Re: That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing

#157

Post by QuantumGood »

grey-area wrote: post #6

> The worst part is that everyone who's decided to willingly lobotomize themselves is going to have to come to the realization that these things are full of shit. It'll have to happen one by one, and nobody else can make it happen for them. A fascinating dichotomy has become apparent between those who trust LLM output and those who don’t and don’t understand why you would. Surely if the machine you go to for answers…

"Yes, ..." is how I notice all the models (4-5 that I use) in the last week or so have begun saying "No, ..." except for Kimi. I ask a lot of questions in the form of "Question about the feature: does it allow for ..." and the answer will reliably start with "Yes, the feature exists and does this thing you have labeled as [blank] which can be explained as ..." and later "However, ..." giving the information I requested (no, it doesn't allow for what you need). It's actually kind of uncanny.

I've started testing identical prompts across models, just to clearly see the "Yes, ..." with the "..but.." buried.

Example: "Can you view the salvage car in the lot before it is scheduled for sale?" "Yes, cars are viewable on the lot by members before they go on sale, blah, blah, blah." Then later "However, cars not yet scheduled for sale are not allowed to be viewed at the lot".

Example: "Can I control the keyboard shortcut Chrome has hijacked so that my existing OS keyboard shortcut will work even while Chrome has focus?" "Yes, chrome keyboard shortcuts, blah, blah, blah," and later "No, chrome does not allow ... ".

There is clearly some recent implementation of the idea that starting with "Yes, ..." has some benefit, but I'm having trouble adapting to the feeling of being lied to as a policy.

Re: That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing

#158

Post by IAmBroom »

wilg wrote: post #21
axus wrote: post #17

"Thus, anyone who wants to corral that kind of entity and make it do their bidding? Yeah, they want slaves." Always comes to mind when I see Elon and friends getting excited about AI robots. Slavery was more about economics than the role-playing.

Slavery was about racism and power and control, not economics. Slavery is bad for the economy! https://www.nber.org/papers/w31758 https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/nations-dont-get-rich-by-plund...

Slavery is at least as old as recorded human history, and had nothing to do with racism in most cases (although it often involves xenophobia). The Torah and Old Testament give specific moral guidelines on how to acquire and keep slaves. Prisoners of war are often made into slaves (from earliest times through today's conflicts). You seem to be conflating "slavery" with "18th-century US slavery".

If slavery truly provided no economic advantages, it's hard to explain why countless human civilizations have engaged in it. It's wrong on every moral front, but riches were inarguably built upon its back.

Re: That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing

#159

Post by red-iron-pine »

lazide wrote: post #142
Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Surely if the machine you go to for answers regularly makes things up you would just stop using it? People still respond to ads and political speeches.

Churches remain popular as well.

statistically overall religious sentiment keeps dropping across the board, save for some small spikes with the gen-z who are finding that nihilistic materialism isn't working for them

Re: That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing

#160

Post by close04 »

andrewflnr wrote: post #74
close04 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have difficulty defining “actual understanding”. Humans get a free pass because we assume humans as a species possess this power but if we were to judge based on output alone maybe you couldn’t tell a human from a sufficiently advanced LLM/AI. So I’ll be handwavey here and say that if “actual understanding” is to an LLM what an LLM is to a bash script, so there’s a mechanism there that doesn’t just follow hardcode…

> Since there is no established consensus on this one the burden is on either party to prove their own side. Nah. Separate things are separate until proven otherwise. So much bullshit appears in the form "X is Y" where X and Y are related but distinguishable phenomena. If you really try to pretend that every such phrase deserves serious consideration just because it feels plausible to someone, you drown in nonsense i…

The problem is that if you have nothing g to offer to counter someone’s argument except “nuh-uh” then you have nothing to offer. And yet here you are, insisting to offer nothing and being proud about it.

This is when that “humans get a free pass” bites us all in the ass.

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