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The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

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Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#221
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…

Before mass production, the women of the household would be forced to spend every free moment of their day, outside of their other work, making fabric.

Before mechanised farming, the men were forced to spend all day in the fields.

Never again.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#222

This is such a comically bad take. The use of loaded and pejorative language like "forgery" emphasizes that this is not a logical argument, but a moral one. The repeated comparisons to "true craft" reveals the author would prefer that code be regarded like artisanal cheese. Beyond the pretension, it's head in the sand to imply that the technology hasn't progressed. It's just very clearly not true to anyone who is pay…

This is the most rational take. I'm a quality guy (Deming, Juran, etc), but nothing about incorporating an LLM into my own work has lowered its quality. That isn't to say that I haven't encountered slop. The difference is that, self-identifying as a craftsman, I have the ability to decide whether or not something stays or goes on the scrap heap. It seems a lot of people are missing that point: just because you can churn out shit doesn't mean you have to (and sorry, sunk-cost bias re: tokens isn't an excuse—that's the cost of doing business). It's a choice. AI-assisted coding is a tremendous boon on productivity, if (and I'd argue only if) you treat it like a power tool and not a genie lamp.

No, you won't be rewarded magic beans for churning out crappy dashboards any more. But if you're serious about shipping quality, nothing is stopping you here.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#223

There’s a cold reality that we in this profession have yet to accept: nobody cares about our code. Nobody cares whether it’s pretty or clever or elegant. Sometimes, rarely, they care whether it’s maintainable. We are only craftsmen to ourselves and each other. To anyone else we are factory workers producing widgets to sell. Once we accept this then there is little surprise that the factory owners want us using a tool…

I think it varies. Most enterprise software is good enough if it just works. In the consumer space quality and polish is way more important. Then there are things like modeling and video where performance is a much bigger deal.

Sure, no one really cares about the code but the quality of the code matters more for some products (and in different ways) than others.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#225

> 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,…

localization? Why would you oppose LLMs doing localization?

I guess the chain of reasoning would be: AI for art is bad -> Writing is art -> Translation is writing.

Personally, I do appreciate good localisation, Nintendo usually does a pretty impressive job there. I play games in their original language as long as I actually speak that language, so I don't have too many touch points with translations though.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#226

There’s a cold reality that we in this profession have yet to accept: nobody cares about our code. Nobody cares whether it’s pretty or clever or elegant. Sometimes, rarely, they care whether it’s maintainable. We are only craftsmen to ourselves and each other. To anyone else we are factory workers producing widgets to sell. Once we accept this then there is little surprise that the factory owners want us using a tool…

They don't care until the whole thing collapses in on itself from the technical debt. Then they have surprised pikachu face when it takes an insane about of effort to add a simple feature.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#227
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah, exactly. And LLM help developers save time from writing the same thing that has be done by other developers for a thousand times. Before LLMs we did already have a way to "save developers time from writing the same thing that has been done by other developers for a thousand times", you know? A LLM doing the same thing the 1001st time is not code reuse. Code reuse is code reuse.

Hard agree. Before LLMs, if there was some bit of code needed across the industry, somebody would put the effort into writing a library and we'd all benefit. Now, instead of standardizing and working together we get a million slightly different incompatible piles of stochastic slop.

Before LLMs companies and people were forced to use one-size-fits-all solutions and now they can build custom, bespoke software that fits their needs.

See how it's a matter of what you're looking at?

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#228

> 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,…

localization? Why would you oppose LLMs doing localization?

In case they hallucinate? There's no point having content in a wide variety of languages if it's unpredictably different from the original-language content.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#229

> 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,…

Also RE: procgen, one of the hit games right now, Mewgenics, is doing super well and uses it extensively. Obviously it's old school procgen that makes use of tons of authored content, but it's still procgen.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#230
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah, exactly. And LLM help developers save time from writing the same thing that has be done by other developers for a thousand times. Before LLMs we did already have a way to "save developers time from writing the same thing that has been done by other developers for a thousand times", you know? A LLM doing the same thing the 1001st time is not code reuse. Code reuse is code reuse.

Because code reuse is hard. Like, really hard. If it weren't we wouldn't be laughing at left-pad. If it weren't hard we wouldn't have so many front-end JavaScript frameworks. If it weren't Unreal wouldn't still have their own GC and std-like implementation today. Java wouldn't have been reinventing build system every five years. The whole history of programming tool is exploring how to properly reuse code: are functi…

>"well perhaps except the function vs object one"

If this is what I think it is, I consider it very lopsided view, failure to recognize what model fits for what case and looking at everything from a hammer point of view

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