21–30 of 422 posts
> Certainly if we ever ask a hallucination engine for a numeric answer, we should ask it at least three times, so we get some sense of the variation. This works on people as well! Cops do this when interrogating. You tell the same story three times, sometimes backwards. It's hard to keep track of everything if you're lying or you don't recall clearly so you can get a sense of confidence. Also works on interviews, ask…
>I’m often asked, “what is the future of programming?” Should people consider entering software development now? Will LLMs eliminate the need for junior engineers? Should senior engineers get out of the profession before it’s too late? My answer to all these questions is “I haven’t the foggiest” I just want to point out that this answer implicitly means that, at the very least, the profession is at least questionably…
The claim in the blog post that all technology leads to speculative asset bubbles I find hard to believe. Where was the electricity bubble? The steel bubble? The pre-war aviation bubble? (The aviation bubble appeared decades later due to changes in government regulation.)
Is this an AI bubble? I genuinely don't know! There is a lot of real uncertainty about future cash flows. Uncertainty is not the foundation of a bubble.
I knew dot-com was a bubble because you could find evidence, even before it popped. (A famous case: a company held equity in a bubble asset, and that company had a market cap below the equity it held, because the bubble did not extend to second-order investments.)
> hallucinations aren’t a bug of LLMs, they are a feature. Indeed they are the feature. All an LLM does is produce hallucinations, it’s just that we find some of them useful. Nice.
In that framing, you can look at an agent as simply a filter on those hallucinations.
> Maybe LLMs mark the point where we join our engineering peers in a world on non-determinism.
Those other forms of engineering have no choice due to the nature of what they are engineering.
Software engineers already have a way to introduce determinism into the systems they build! We’re going backwards!
>I’m often asked, “what is the future of programming?” Should people consider entering software development now? Will LLMs eliminate the need for junior engineers? Should senior engineers get out of the profession before it’s too late? My answer to all these questions is “I haven’t the foggiest” I just want to point out that this answer implicitly means that, at the very least, the profession is at least questionably…
Students shouldn't ever have become so laser-focused on a single career path anyway, and even worse than that is how colleges have become glorified trade schools in our minds. Students should focus on studying for their classes, getting their electives and extracurriculars in, getting into clubs... Then depending on which circles they end up in, they shape their career that way. The thought that getting a Computer Science major would guarantee students a spot in the tech industry was always ridiculous, because the industry was just never structured that way, it's always been hacker groups, study groups, open source, etc. bringing out the best minds
> hallucinations aren’t a bug of LLMs, they are a feature. Indeed they are the feature. All an LLM does is produce hallucinations, it’s just that we find some of them useful. Nice.
My favorite quote to borrow: “Furthermore I think anyone who says they know what this future will be is talking from an inappropriate orifice.”
> All major technological advances have come with economic bubbles, from canals and railroads to the internet. Is this actually correct? I don't see any evidence for a "airflight bubble" or a "car bubble" or a "loom bubble" at the technologies' invention. Also the "canal bubble" wasn't about the technology, it was about the speculation on a series of big canals but we had been making canals for a long time. More impo…
The AI bubble also isn't about the technology.
A junior engineer can't write code anywhere nearly as fast. It's apples vs oranges. I can have the LLm rewrite the code 10 times until its correct and its much cheaper than hiring an obsequious jr engineer