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The Rise of Whatever

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Re: The Rise of Whatever

#221

Post by rcxdude »

senko wrote: post #199

This reads like people have been sleeping through mountains of shit being thrown at them (content, news, user-hostile services...) for decades, and then suddenly woke up and blame the most recent hype. Most of Internet is crap. Most of media is crap. This does need to stop you (or me) from creating.

Sturgeon's law multiplies as accessibility increases. You see more of everything, but many more times more crap than not. Generative AI does substantially lower barriers to making all kinds of things, so the increase in crap is substantial.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#222

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

sunnybeetroot wrote: post #207
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #118

I disagree with many of the points on LLMs (but broadly agree with 80% of the post). But regardless of agreeing or not, it was a pleasure to read this because it's beautifully written, the arguments are solid, it makes you think, and the website has a personality, which is rare nowadays. I clicked halfheartedly, started to read halfheartedly, and got sucked into a read that threw me back into the good old days of the…

It is a nice read but something tells me it’s AI generated due to the frequent em dashes so I wouldn’t place all bets on it being entirely human written. Edit: I apologies, the author has pre-gpt posts that use em dashes so likely it’s part of their writing style.

It would be a monument to hypocrisy if this piece with this specific content were AI-generated.

Color me naive but honestly I'm pretty sure it's not, though. We all tend to be worse at distinguishing AI from human text than we think, but the text sounds genuine to me and transpires an author with a quirky personality that seems difficult to imitate by an LLM. And that could include using em dashes.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#223

Post by lovich »

pm215 wrote: post #191
lovich wrote: post #64

I read through the essay and really resonated with some parts and didn’t resonate with others, but I think they put some words to the feelings I have had on AI and its effect in the tech industry > There are people who use these, apparently. And it just feels so… depressing. There are people I once respected who, apparently, don’t actually enjoy doing the thing. They would like to describe what they want and receive…

I think there's still a difference even if you look at it as "supervising a bunch of juniors". I'm happy to review the output of a human in that case because I believe that even if they got some stuff wrong and it might have been quicker and more interesting for me to just do the thing, the process is helping them learn and get better, which is both good in itself and also means that over time I have to do the superv…

>… the process is helping them learn and get better, which is both good in itself and also means that over time I have to do the supervision and support part less and less. Supervising an LLM misses out both of those aspects, so it's just not-very-fun work.

Legitimately I think you are missing my point. What I quoted out of your response could be applied to prompt engineering/managment/tinkering. I think everyone who likes doing this with juniors and hates it with AI is conflating their enjoyment of teaching juniors with the dopamine you get from engaging with other primates.

I think most people I’ve met who hated AI would have the same level of hate for a situation where their boss made them actually manage an underperforming employee instead of letting them continue on as is ad infinitum.

It’s hard work both mentally and emotionally to correct an independent agent well enough to improve their behavior but not strongly enough to break them, and I think most AI haters are choking on this fact.

I’m saying that from the position of an engineer who got into management and choked on the fact that sometimes upper leadership was right and the employee complaining to me about the “stupid rules” or trying to lie to me to get a gold star instead of a bronze one was the agent in the system who was actually at fault

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#224

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

resonious wrote: post #76

I agree with a lot of this at the outset, but don't really like the gloomy outlook. I don't think there's much to gain by writing off all this unfortunate stuff as people being stupid and greedy. I mean sure, that may be true, but you can flip it around and say that it's impressive that we have it as good as we do despite having to co-exist with stupidity and greed. Better yet, you can see it as a challenge to overco…

The free models are also useful. A little more limited, but still useful.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#225

Post by fsh »

vincnetas wrote: post #65

After reading "...the press release and in the fine print it says that now it can count the number of letters in “Mississippi” correctly or whatever" tried to count letters in another word :) You said: how many letters are in the lithuanian word "nebeprisikaspinaudamas"? Just give me one number. ChatGPT said: 23 You said: how many letters are in the lithuanian word 'nebeprisikaspinaudamas'. Just give me one number. C…

I'm all for making fun of LLMs, but asking this from a software that processes vectors of tokens is a bit silly. The information isn't really there in the input.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#226

Post by recursinging »

Aside from the old-man-in-a-wooden-rocking-chair-on-a-porch tone, it seems to me that the author's beef is mainly about back-patting, and how the "Whatever" machines are flooding the pat-me-on-the-back platforms with "Content" that makes their own stick out less, resulting in fewer back-pats.

The last line of the article summarizes it perfectly.:

> Do things. Make things. And then put them on your website so I can see them.

I subscribe fully to the first two sentences, but the last one is bullshit. The gloom in the article is born from the authors attaching the value of "making things" to the recognition received for the effort. Put your stuff out there if you think it is of value to someone else. If it is, cool, and if it's not, well, who cares.

> I can’t remember exactly what they said, but it was something like: “I created a whole album, complete with album art, in 3.5 hours. Why wouldn’t I use the make it easier machine?” This is kind of darkly fascinating to me, because it gives rise to such an obvious question: if anyone can do that, then why listen to your music? It takes a significant chunk of 3.5 hours just to listen to an album, so how much manual work was even done here? Apparently I can just go generate an endless stream of stuff of the same quality! Why would I want your particular brand of Whatever?

This gem implies that the value of the music (or art in general) is partially or even wholly dependent on whether or not someone else thinks it's good. I can't even...

If you eliminate the back-patting requirements, and the stuff we make is genuine, then it's value is intrinsic. The "Whatever" machines are just tools, like the rest of the tools we use, to make things. So, just make your things and get on with it.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#227

Post by ako »

uh_uh wrote: post #98
ako wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, it'll be a big problem if we don't keep our skills and rely on AI too much. Same with outsourcing manufacturing, at some point you loose the skill to produce products completely and are dependent on other countries. With the WWW we thought everyone having access to all information would enlighten them, but without knowledge people do not recognize the right information, and are more likely to trust (mis)infor…

What other sources of information will people turn to? Kids are growing up asking ChatGPT in school. I just can't see a mass exodus happening.

Misinformation, lies and populism, see for example discussions around vaccines where people no longer bother to understand the science, climate change, or religion where people randomly choose 1 out of 3000 available gods and then pretend like their choice is the only correct one.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#228

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

Shorel wrote: post #46
icameron wrote: post #16

Love this writing. One paragraph hit very close to home. I used to be the guy who could figure out obscure scripts by google-fu and rtfm and willpower. Now that skill has been completely obliterated by LLMs and everyone’s doing it- except it’s mostly whatever > I don’t want to help someone who opens with “I don’t know how to do this so I asked ChatGPT and it gave me these 200 lines but it doesn’t work”.

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 have to frequently tell the LLM to RTFM because it's wrong. But I can usually paste the manual in which saves me some reading. It's scary because when it's wrong and you don't happen to know better... Then your code or whatever is just a little worse

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#229

Post by nottorp »

thombles wrote: post #126
nottorp wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're an experienced developer who Knows What They Want then you can wield it like a scalpel. But that's not what the marketing says. The marketing says it will do your entire job for you. In reality, it will save you some typing if you already know what to do . On HN at least, where most people are startup/hustle culture and experts in something, they don't think long term enough to see the consequences for no…

Well I never set much store by marketing and I'm not planning to start. :) More seriously though it helps explain the apparent contradiction that it sounds scammy at a macro level yet many individuals report getting a lot of value out of it.

> many individuals report getting a lot of value

I'm not sure it's a lot of value. It probably is in the short term, but in the long run...

There have already been studies saying that you don't retain the info about what a LLM does for you. Even if you are already an expert (a status which you have attained the traditional way), that cuts you off from all those tiny improvements that happen every day without noticing.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#230

Post by wiseowise »

eddiewithzato wrote: post #143
rednafi wrote: post #117

Software programming used to be a blue-collar thing in the early days, when hardware wiring was all the rage. Then it became hip, and people would hand-roll machine-specific assembly code. Later on, it became too onerous when CPU architecture started to change faster than programmers could churn out code. So we came up with compilers, and people started coding at a higher level of abstraction. No one lamented the los…

LLMs will not be doing that. I wish they could, but they just spit out whatever without verifying anything. Even in Cursor which has the agent tell you to run the test script they generated to verify the output, it just says “yep seems fine to me!”. AI at the current state in my workflow is a decent search engine and stackoverflow. But it has far greater pitfalls as OP pointed out (it just assumes the code is always…

That’s where you, human, come into the scene.
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