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The Rise of Whatever

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Re: The Rise of Whatever

#161

Post by dale_glass »

zwnow wrote: post #130
dale_glass wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there's a real difference. Thinking a job is "mundane" IMO is mostly a case of not working that job. Many "mundane" jobs have depth and rewards, even if not in every instance. I've heard people express that they liked working in retail. By extension somebody must have enjoyed being a bank teller. After all, why not? You get to talk to a lot of people, and every time you solve some problem or answer a qu…

This sounds like a strawman tbh, I have worked retail for years and I do not know a single person enjoying retail work. Especially not cashiers. I can understand what you are on about, but do you think this is the majority of people? The issue is being able to support yourself which these mundane jobs hardly are able to. Personally I want these mundane things automated because I don't want to interact with people. I…

I mean, retail has many different instances of it. Yes, I can imagine working in a busy supermarket owned by a giant like Walmart would be unpleasant.

But imagine working in a nice cafe in a quiet small town, or a business that's not too frantically paced, like a clothing store. Add some perks like not always doing the same job and a decent boss, and it shouldn't be too bad. Most any job can be drastically improved by decreasing the workload, cutting hours and adding some variety. I don't think being a cashier is inherently miserable. It's just the way we structure things most of the time makes it suck.

Just like you think a human touch makes art special, a human touch can make a mundane job special. A human serving coffee instead of a machine can tell you about what different options are available, recommend things, offer adjustments a machine might not, chat about stuff while it's brewing... You may end up patronizing a particular cafe because you like the person at the counter.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#162

Post by Shorel »

KPGv2 wrote: post #17
62702b077f3 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The garbage generator generates garbage, but if you run it enough times it gets something slightly-less-garbage that can satisfy a compiler! You're stupid if you don't think this is awesome!

I had Copilot for a hot minute. When I wrote things like serializers and deserializers, it was incredible . So much time saved. But I didn't do it enough to make the personal cost worth it, so I cancelled. It's annoying to have to hand-code that stuff. But without Copilot I have to. Or I can write some arcane regex and run it on existing code to get 90% of the way there. But writing the regex also takes a while. Copi…

I remember writing LISP code that created the serialisers and deserialisers for me.

Now that everything is containerised and managed by docker style environments, I am thinking about giving SBCL another try, the end users only need to access the same JSON REST APIs anyway.

Everything old is new again =)

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#163

Post by VMG »

> Finally, society says, with a huge sigh of relief. I don’t have to write a letter to my granddaughter. I don’t have to write a three-line fetch call.

one of these things is not like the other

I agree with the author, I usually do not care how exactly the fetch call looks like. Whatever indeed.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#164

Post by _thisdot »

chrismorgan wrote: post #100

> Like, just to calibrate here: you know how some code editors will automatically fill in a right bracket or quote when you type a left one? You type " and the result is "|"? Yeah, that drives me up the wall. It saves no time whatsoever, and it’s wrong often enough that I waste time having to correct for it. I have not yet figured out why anyone would choose this behaviour in a text editor. You have to press somethin…

I have this turned on in my code editors and Obsidian. The main advantage is reducing the cognitive load. You don’t have to double-check whether you remembered to close your string, bracket, or parenthesis — it’s just there.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#165

Post by Shorel »

Lariscus wrote: post #158
Shorel wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right about this. Also, someone mathematically proved that's enough. And then someone else proved it empirically. There was an experiment where they trained 16 pigeons to detect cancerous or benign tumours from photographies. Individually, each pigeon had an average 85% accuracy. But all pigeons (except for one outlier) together had an accuracy of 99%. If you add enough silly brains, you get one super smart b…

Its also mathematically proven that infinite monkeys typing on typewriters for eternity will recreate all works of Shakespeare. It still takes someone with an actual brain to recognize the correct output.

Yep, there's some positive feedback loop missing in all these LLMs stuff.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#166

Post by eesmith »

zpeti wrote: post #122
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>LLM isn't like calculator or microwave oven or other technology before. (Like OP's article) But it really is. I would not buy a calculator that hallucinated wrong answers part of the time. Or a microwave oven that told you it grilled the chicken but it didn't and you have to die from Salmonella poisoning.

Do you use a GPS? That sometimes gets the route wrong, but overall gets you to where you want to go in less traffic than if you didn't use it? And occasionally really delights you with new routes? (thanks Rory Sutherland for this analogy)

Rarely. I feel lost when I use GPS to get places.

Alec Watson of Technology Connections points out that GPS routing defaults to minimizing time, even when that may not the most logical way to get somewhere.

His commentary, which starts at https://youtu.be/QEJpZjg8GuA?t=1804 , is an example of his larger argument about the complacency of letting automation do things for you.

His example is a Google Maps routing which saves one minute by going a long way to use a fast expressway (plus $1 toll), rather than more direct but slower state routes and surface streets. It optimizes one variable - time - of the many variables which might be important to you - wear&tear, toll costs, and the delight of knowing more about what's going on in the neighborhood.

His makes the point that he is not calling for a return to paper maps, but rather to reject automation complacency, which I'll interpret as letting the GPS figure everything out for you.

We've all heard stories of people depending on their GPS too much then ending up stuck on a forest road, or in a lake, or other place which requires rescue - what's the equivalent failure mode with a calculator?

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#167

Post by Shorel »

sunrunner wrote: post #140
Shorel wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am still the guy doing google-fu and rtfm. The skill has not been obliterated. We still need to fix the slop written by the LLMs, but it is not that bad. Some people copy and paste snippets of code without knowing what it does, and in a sense, they spread technical debt around. LLMs lower the technical debt spread by the clueless, to a lower baseline. The issue I see is that the amount of code having this level of…

I always imagine that there's essentially a "knowledge debt" when doing almost any development today, unless you're operating at the lowest level (or you understand it all the way down, and there's also almost a level below). The copy-paste of usable code snippets is somewhat comparable to any use of a library or framework in the sense that there's an element of not understanding what the entire thing is doing or at…

That's where documentation matters.

Take this snippet of code, and this is what each part means, and how you can change it.

It doesn't explain how it is implemented, but it explains the syntax and the semantics of it, and that's enough.

Good documentation makes all the difference, at least for me.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#168

Post by Semaphor »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #123
JW_00000 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My grandma did not have a microwave oven because she didn't see the point of it.

I'm in my 40s and don't have a microwave oven because I don't see the point of it... when I lived in a rented apartment, I got gifted one because how could I not have one? I tried it for a few days and just didn't find it useful. When I bought my own apartment and renovated the kitchen, I didn't bother to install one.

The use is heating up single portions of leftovers.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#169

Post by elric »

_thisdot wrote: post #164
chrismorgan wrote: post #100

> Like, just to calibrate here: you know how some code editors will automatically fill in a right bracket or quote when you type a left one? You type " and the result is "|"? Yeah, that drives me up the wall. It saves no time whatsoever, and it’s wrong often enough that I waste time having to correct for it. I have not yet figured out why anyone would choose this behaviour in a text editor. You have to press somethin…

I have this turned on in my code editors and Obsidian. The main advantage is reducing the cognitive load. You don’t have to double-check whether you remembered to close your string, bracket, or parenthesis — it’s just there.

The cognitive load of typing two quotes? Golly. That term is starting to take on "whatever" meaning, apparently.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#170

Post by girvo »

JW_00000 wrote: post #84
zwnow wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guy its not only about the art its about killing passion and the lifeline of people. Your take is incredibly ignorant to people who value human created work. These things will kill industries. What jobs should people work in, who got their income cut by LLMs? Force them into blue collar work?

But isn't that the same as saying: what about all the horse carrier drivers who lost their jobs due to cars? What about all the bank tellers we lost after inventing the automated teller machine?

No, this is far far more wide reaching and it’s intellectually dishonest to pretend otherwise.

It’s why it’s so exciting.

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