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The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

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Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#171

Post by bombcar »

optionalsquid wrote: post #166
bombcar wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Procedural generation underlies the most popular game of all time (Minecraft) and is foundational for numerous other games of a similar type - Dwarf Fortress, et al. And it's used to power effect where you might not expect it (Stardew Valley mines). What procedural generation does NOT work at is generating "story elements" though perhaps even that can fall, Dwarf Fortress already does decently enough given that the p…

> And it's used to power effect where you might not expect it (Stardew Valley mines). Apparently Stardew Valley's mines are not procedurally generated, but rather hand-crafted. Per their recent 10 year anniversary video, the developer did try to implement procedural generation for the mines, but ended up scrapping it: https://www.stardewvalley.net/stardew-valley-10-year-anniver...

They're quasi-generated with random elements and fixed elements - similarly to early Diablo procedural generation.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#172

Post by techpression »

bartread wrote: post #146
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. Powermonge…

I’m a hard core rogue-like player (easily over a thousand hours at least in all the games I’ve played) but even so I can admit that hey have nothing compared to a well crafted world like you’d find in From Software titles or Expedition 33, or classic Zelda games for that matter. Making a great world is an incredibly hard task though and few studios have the capabilities to do so.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#173

Post by K0balt »

Sharlin wrote: post #99
marginalia_nu wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the people doing the most rote and monotonous work were and are doing so in some of the least productive circumstances, with clear ways of increasing speed and productivity. If development velocity was truly an important factor in these businesses, we'd migrated away from that gang of four ass Java 8 codebase, given these poor souls offices, or at least cubicles to reduce the noise, we wouldn't make them spen…

Yep. It's ridiculous to talk about 10x or 5x or 2x anything in any but the smallest companies. All this talk about programmer velocity is micro-optimizing something that's not a bottleneck .

I’ve been thinking a lot about this. I think that AI software automation tools are disproportionately more useful in greenfield work done by small or tiny organizations. By an order of magnitude, maybe 2 in some cases.

What that means is anyone’s guess, but it seems like it should result in a Cambrian explosion of disruptive new companies, limited in scope by the idea space.

The thing about small teams is, with a few exceptions, the biggest challenges are typically funnels for users and product-market fit, overcoming and exploitation of network effects, etc… so even in small orgs, if you make 30 percent of the problem 4x faster/smaller you still have the other 70 percent which is now 92.5% of the problem.

This applies even more acutely in larger organizations… so for them, 99 percent of the problem remains.

Intangibles in an organization like reluctance, education, and organizational inertia fill the gap left by software acceleration, and in the end you only see tiny gains, if any.

What really happened, on an organizational scale, is that software development costs went down. We wouldn’t expect a wage collapse in coding to foment an explosive revolution in company profitability or dynamism. We shouldn’t expect those things of LLM assistance.

We should look at it as a reduction in cost with potentially dangerous side effects if not managed carefully, with an especially big reduction in r&d development costs.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#174

Post by whazor »

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…

I found that it normally takes one prompt early-on to go from 'vibe-coded spaghetti' to something having a decent architecture.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#175

Post by aosnsbbz »

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…

A big difference is cutting quality for the sake of mass production when it enables creating more necessities for people to live is a good thing. It is a good tradeoff. Cutting quality to make previously deterministic software more non deterministic does not improve anyones life except Sam Altman, Dario Amodei and the rest of the billionaire class.

I have no doubt in the future there will be a class of vibe software and it will be known as distinctly lower quality than human understood software. I do think the example you describe is a good use of vibing. I also think tech orgs mandating 100% LLM code generation are short sighted and stupid.

A lot of this push for “slop” is downstream of our K shaped economy. Give the people more money and quality becomes a lot more important. Give them less, and you’re selling to their boss who is often insulated from the effects of low quality.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#177

Post by dostick »

It seems like with time hallucinations and lying increased, it’s very different now from what it was 2 years ago. is this because of training bias ? Is there any research data on dynamics over past years ?

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#178

Post by lesam »

Kwpolska wrote: post #125

> Engineers who know their craft can still smell the slop from miles away when reviewing it, despite the "advances" made. It comes in the form of overly repetitive code, unnecessary complexity, and a reluctance to really refactor anything at all, even when it's clearly stale and overdue. I’ve seen reluctance to refactor even 10+-year-old garbage long before LLMs were first made available to the broader public.

If it's lasted 10 years and someone is still using it after all that time, that seems like a pretty good signal there's a lot of value in the 'garbage'?

I've seen a lot of 'fixes' for 10 year old 'garbage' that turned out to be regressions for important use cases that the author of the 'fix' wasn't aware of.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#179

Post by [deleted] »

Dumblydorr wrote: post #158
bartread wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Powermonge…

Is it wildly uneducated to not know any of the games you mentioned? I didn’t realize education covered less known video games? Wouldn’t a better example be No Man’s Sky, if we’re talking procedural gen and eventually a good game. In any case, I agree that gamers by and large don’t care to what extent the game creation was automated. They are happy to use automated enemies, automated allies, automated armies and pre-m…

[deleted]

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#180

Post by boesboes »

spicyusername wrote: post #153
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…

luddites were right And yet in the 200 years since human civilization has improved by every imaginable metric, in most cases by orders of magnitude. The difference between 2026 and 1826 is nearly incomprehensible. I suspect most people scarcely imagine how horrific the average life was in 1826, relatively speaking. And between then and now were the industrial revolution, multiple world wars, and generally some of the…

try reading :)
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