171–180 of 574 posts
Then I went back to a book written by humans (Eric Nikitin's "Realm of Oberon").
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I agree with you in the broad strokes, but replacement by LLMs isn't the only way the level of employment can be reduced. If LLMs can make it so that two programmers can do the work that used to require five, that can result in a very large reduction in employment, even while having (some) programmers is still essential.
On the bet that layoffs will result in programmers ending up at 40% of the staffing level they are now, I will take the over.
I had a similar realization a few months back and am working on a tool that generates "mermaid walkthroughs". It is 1000% less pretty but it is fast and is pretty good at explaining how services work or what a code review does or just as a way for your agent to explain some decision to you.
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It's much better to feed the book to the LLM and ask questions as you read along, instead of asking the LLM to basically write a custom book for you from scratch.
LLM is still too verbose, a real person Socratic conversation can interact a couple sentences at a time, not spew 1-3 windowfuls of low density bullet points. I even wonder if this behavior is due to next-token prediction architectures, somehow.
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It's much better to feed the book to the LLM and ask questions as you read along, instead of asking the LLM to basically write a custom book for you from scratch.
dumb question, but what is the best way to feed the book to the llm? i run into context window limits, or practical limitations of digitizing the book
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If the output can't be trusted, and you use another llm whose output can't be trusted to check the untrusted output of the first llm, then you're back where you started.
Yeah this seems to me similar to how the mortgage backed security risk concentration occurred leading up to the global financial crisis. Whereby the risk from exposure to low grade / risky single mortgages was eliminated via diversification but the diversification was simply packaging all of the risky MBS’s together and in no way diversified or de-risked the entire portfolio
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> I really don't want to read anything generated by something like Opus 5 at this point. Personally, I find that its generated prose tends to have an undue weight to it, almost as if every topic I ask about somehow bears a heavy burden, or is otherwise load-bearing , to use its parlance. Quite puzzling, really.
Yes! I have a personal theory: LLMs are *fundamentally* handicapped at perceiving what's going on in the mind of the human (this can't be "innovated away") and that's at the root of what makes them suck at conversation. Next time you're chatting with someone, notice how much understanding is shared without anything being said. E.g. the other person might share something deeply disappointing, and they can tell without…
I thought LLMs were a great tool for learning new topics - perhaps even complex ones. But overtime, I have had several frustrations with this. First, I get exhausted reading LLM prose. I really don't want to read anything generated by something like Opus 5 at this point. Second, as I dive deeper, I need a way to organize the information in a useful way as I begin to branch out in many different directions. I have tri…
The sycophancy is also a concern, it’s not really an impartial teacher, all its training is to suck up and maximize engagement rather than learning. The incentives are wrong.
That's speculative, isn't it
I thought LLMs were a great tool for learning new topics - perhaps even complex ones. But overtime, I have had several frustrations with this. First, I get exhausted reading LLM prose. I really don't want to read anything generated by something like Opus 5 at this point. Second, as I dive deeper, I need a way to organize the information in a useful way as I begin to branch out in many different directions. I have tri…
Even if you tell the LLM not to use LLM pros they (still) do it. If you feed the Wikipedia article on signs of AI writing and tell them to use none of those signs they will also (still) do it. I have tried (many times) to get an LLM to explain a concept to me, or a process, or an algorithm or what have you, and every time they cannot help themselves. Either they use LLM pros, or they get so verbose that it all just b…