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I'm absolutely right

absolutelyright.lol

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Re: I'm absolutely right

#231

Post by dingnuts »

al_borland wrote: post #201
flkiwi wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes I just ride the lightning to see how off course it is willing to go. This is not a productive use of my time but it sure is amusing. In fairness, I’ve done the same thing to overconfident junior colleagues.

I spent yesterday afternoon doing this. It go to the point where it would acknowledge it was wrong, but would keep giving me the same answer. It also said it would only try one more time before giving up, but then kept going.

this happens to me constantly, it's such a huge waste of time. I'm not convinced any of these tools actually save time. It's all a fucking slot machine and Gell-Mann Amnesia and at the end, you often have nothing that works.

I spent like two hours yesterday dicking with aider to make a one line change and it hallucinated an invalid input for the only possible parameter and I wound up using the docs the old fashioned way and doing the task in about two minutes

Re: I'm absolutely right

#232

Post by ascorbic »

peepee1982 wrote: post #101
kuschku wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would a "conversation" with an LLM influence what you decide to do, what you decide to code? It's not like the attitude of your potato peeler is influencing how you cook dinner, so why is this tool so different for you?

I have two potato peelers. If the one I like better is in the dishwasher I am not peeling potatoes. If one of my children wants to join me when I'm already peeling potatoes, I'll give them the preferred one and use the other one myself. But I will not start peeling potatoes with the worse one.

And the moral of that story is to buy a three pack of Kuhn Rikon peelers.

Re: I'm absolutely right

#233

Post by anthem2025 »

al_borland wrote: post #167
trjordan wrote: post #41

OK, so I love this, because we all recognize it. It's not fully just a tic of language, though. Responses that start off with "You're right!" are alignment mechanisms. The LLM, with its single-token prediction approach, follows up with a suggestion that much more closely follows the user's desires, instead of latching onto it's own previous approach. The other tic I love is "Actually, that's not right." That happens…

In my experience, once it starts telling me I’m right, we’re already going downhill and it rarely gets better from there.

Usually it’s a response to my profanity laden “what are you doing? Why? Don’t do that! Stop! Do this instead”

Re: I'm absolutely right

#234

Post by anthem2025 »

Uehreka wrote: post #159
libraryofbabel wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The LLM, with its single-token prediction approach, follows up with a suggestion that much more closely follows the user's desires, instead of latching onto it's own previous approach. Maybe? How would we test that one way or the other? If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the last few years, it’s that reasoning from “well LLMs are based on next-token prediction, therefore ” is a trap. The relationship between the…

The human stochastic parrots (GP, not you) spouting these 2023 talking points really need to update their weights. I’m guessing this way of thinking has a stickiness because thinking of an LLM as “just a fancy markov chain” makes them feel less threatening to some people (we’re past the point where it could be good faith reasoning). Like, I hear people say things like that (or that coding agents can only do web devel…

Nah it can still be entirely on good faith.

Not everyone is an easily impressed and convinced that fancy autocomplete is going to suddenly spontaneously develop intelligence.

Re: I'm absolutely right

#235

Post by anthem2025 »

Uehreka wrote: post #191
teucris wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there’s a bit of parroting going around but LLMs are predictive and there’s a lot you can inuit a lot about how they behave just on that fact alone. Sure, calling it “token” prediction is oversimplifying things, but stating that, by their nature, LLMs are guessing at the next most likely thing in the scenario (next data structure needing to be coded up, next step in a process, next concept to cover in a parag…

Honestly, I think the best way to reason about LLM behavior is to abandon any sort of white-box mental model (where you start from things you “know” about their internal mechanisms). Treat them as a black box, observe their behavior in many situations and over a long period of time, draw conclusions from the patterns you observe and test if your conclusions have predictive weight. Of course, if someone is predisposed…

So just ignore everything you actually know until you can fool yourself into thinking fancy auto complete is totally real intelligence?

Why not apply that to computers in general and then we can all worship the magic boxes.

Re: I'm absolutely right

#236

Post by beeflet »

SilverElfin wrote: post #130
trjordan wrote: post #41

OK, so I love this, because we all recognize it. It's not fully just a tic of language, though. Responses that start off with "You're right!" are alignment mechanisms. The LLM, with its single-token prediction approach, follows up with a suggestion that much more closely follows the user's desires, instead of latching onto it's own previous approach. The other tic I love is "Actually, that's not right." That happens…

Is there a term when everyone sees a phrase like this and understands what it means without coordinating beforehand?

convergence

Re: I'm absolutely right

#237

Post by brianwawok »

dingnuts wrote: post #231
al_borland wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent yesterday afternoon doing this. It go to the point where it would acknowledge it was wrong, but would keep giving me the same answer. It also said it would only try one more time before giving up, but then kept going.

this happens to me constantly, it's such a huge waste of time. I'm not convinced any of these tools actually save time. It's all a fucking slot machine and Gell-Mann Amnesia and at the end, you often have nothing that works. I spent like two hours yesterday dicking with aider to make a one line change and it hallucinated an invalid input for the only possible parameter and I wound up using the docs the old fashioned…

The mistake was using AI for a two minute fix. It totally helps at some tasks. Takes some failures to realize that it does indeed have flaws.

Re: I'm absolutely right

#238

Post by brianwawok »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #188
adastra22 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t need training. Just don’t show it. Can be implemented client side.

Can be as simple as: s/^Ah, I found the problem! // I don't understand why AI developers are so obsessed with using prompt engineering for everything. Yes, it's an amazing tool, yes, when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail, and yes, there are potentially edge cases where the user actually wants the chatbot to begin its response with that exact string or whatever, or you want it to emit URLs that do not re…

Except you could get around a blacklist by asking to base64 encode it, or translate to Klingon, or…

Re: I'm absolutely right

#239

Post by [deleted] »

brianwawok wrote: post #237
dingnuts wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this happens to me constantly, it's such a huge waste of time. I'm not convinced any of these tools actually save time. It's all a fucking slot machine and Gell-Mann Amnesia and at the end, you often have nothing that works. I spent like two hours yesterday dicking with aider to make a one line change and it hallucinated an invalid input for the only possible parameter and I wound up using the docs the old fashioned…

The mistake was using AI for a two minute fix. It totally helps at some tasks. Takes some failures to realize that it does indeed have flaws.

[deleted]

Re: I'm absolutely right

#240

Post by rambambram »

latexr wrote: post #5
stuartjohnson12 wrote: post #2

I /adore/ the hand-drawn styling of this webpage (although the punchline, domain name, and beautiful overengineering are great too). Where did it come from? Is it home grown?

It’s a library (not by the same author). https://github.com/jwilber/roughViz

I especially like this sentence: "Use these charts where the communication goal is to show intent or generality, and not absolute precision."

With all these dark patterns nowadays, it's nice to see a 'light pattern'. ;) Instead of using UI to make dubious things seem legit, this is a way to use UI to emphasize things that are not precise.

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