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The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

lewiscampbell.tech

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Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#241

Post by y0eswddl »

jason_oster wrote: post #208
WolfeReader wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given how much energy LLMs use, I'd greatly prefer not to let the results speak for themselves.

Quick napkin math time! Steam reached a new peak of 42 million concurrent players today [1]. An average/mid-tier gaming PC uses 0.2 kWh per hour [2]. 42 million * 0.2 gives 8,400,000 kWh per hour, or 8,400 MWh per hour. By contrast, training GPT3 was estimated to have used 1,300 MWh of energy [3]. This does not account for training costs of newer models, nor inference costs. But we know inference costs are extraordin…

it's very weird to compare LLM training with a subset of gamers.

Who lied to you and told you this was some kind of saving gotcha??

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#242

Post by JamesSwift »

moron4hire wrote: post #171
meowface wrote: post #23

I feel no strong need to convince others. I've been seeing major productivity boosts for myself and others since Sonnet 3.5. Maybe for certain kinds of projects and use cases it's less good, maybe they're not using it well; I dunno. I do think a lot of these people probably will be left behind if they don't adopt it within the next 3 years, but that's not really my problem.

What's there to be left behind on? That's like arguing people who stick to driving cars with manual transmissions are going to get left behind when buses "inevitably get good." The whole point of the AI coding thing is that it lets inexperienced people create software. What skill moat are you building that a skilled software developer won't be able to pick up in 20 minutes?

(Dont take this as an attack on you personally, just on the sentiment you are giving in your comment)

The attitude you present here has become my litmus test for who has actually given the agents a thorough shake rather than just a cursory glance. These agents are tools, not magic (even though they appear to be magic when they are really humming). They require operator skill to corral them. They need tweaking and iteration, often from people already skilled in the kinds of software they are trying to write. Its only then that you get the true potential, and its only then you realize just how much more productive you can be _because of them_, not _in spite of them_. The tools are imperfect, and there are a lot of rough edges that a skilled operator can sand down to become huge boons for themselves rather than getting cut and saying "the tools suck".

Its very much like google. Anyone can google anything. But at a certain point, you need to understand _how to google_ to get good results rather than just slapping any random phrase and hoping the top 3 results are magically going to answer you. And sometimes you need to combine the information from multiple results to get what you are going for.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#243

Post by pepperball »

Terr_ wrote: post #7

> And then, inevitably, comes the character evaluation, which goes something like this: I saw a version of this yesterday where a commenter framed LLM-skepticism as a disappointing lack of "hacker" drive and ethos that should be applied to making "AI" toolchains work. As you might guess, I disagreed: The "hacker" is not driven just by novelty in problems to solve, but in wanting to understand them on more than a surf…

Give it a few months and LLM-skepticism will be framed as domestic terrorism.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#244

Post by pepperball »

JamesSwift wrote: post #242
moron4hire wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's there to be left behind on? That's like arguing people who stick to driving cars with manual transmissions are going to get left behind when buses "inevitably get good." The whole point of the AI coding thing is that it lets inexperienced people create software. What skill moat are you building that a skilled software developer won't be able to pick up in 20 minutes?

(Dont take this as an attack on you personally, just on the sentiment you are giving in your comment) The attitude you present here has become my litmus test for who has actually given the agents a thorough shake rather than just a cursory glance. These agents are tools, not magic (even though they appear to be magic when they are really humming). They require operator skill to corral them. They need tweaking and ite…

> Its very much like google. Anyone can google anything. But at a certain point, you need to understand _how to google_ to get good results rather than just slapping any random phrase and hoping the top 3 results are magically going to answer you. And sometimes you need to combine the information from multiple results to get what you are going for.

Lmao, and just as with google, they’ll eventually optimize it for ad delivery and it will become shit.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#245

Post by tstrimple »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #238
woah wrote: post #51

The anti-LLM side seems much more insecure. Pro-LLM influencers are sometimes corny, but it's sort of like any other influencer, they are incentivized to make everything sound exciting to get clicks. Nobody was complaining about 3d printer influencers raving about how printing replacement dishwasher parts was going to change everything. LLMs have also become kind of a political issue, except only the "anti" side even…

> The anti-LLM side seems much more insecure. I can't agree with that. The pro-LLM side is relentlessly pushing everyone into using it, even when very few people want it (e.g. WhatsApp not even allowing people to turn it off). That smacks of insecurity to me. Anti-LLM people are happy to continue coding/writing/drawing without the new digital tools - that sounds like someone who knows what they're doing and feels sec…

You cannot post anything positive about your experience with LLMs without being dogpiled by the anti-ai zealots. They are as predictable as the "But What About China!" crowd any time US emissions come up in a discussion. They are the "Nothing will work but nuclear!" folks who crop up in every single conversation about renewable energy. Their comments are exactly the same every single time regardless of the context and add nothing at all to the conversation.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#246

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

tstrimple wrote: post #245
ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The anti-LLM side seems much more insecure. I can't agree with that. The pro-LLM side is relentlessly pushing everyone into using it, even when very few people want it (e.g. WhatsApp not even allowing people to turn it off). That smacks of insecurity to me. Anti-LLM people are happy to continue coding/writing/drawing without the new digital tools - that sounds like someone who knows what they're doing and feels sec…

You cannot post anything positive about your experience with LLMs without being dogpiled by the anti-ai zealots. They are as predictable as the "But What About China!" crowd any time US emissions come up in a discussion. They are the "Nothing will work but nuclear!" folks who crop up in every single conversation about renewable energy. Their comments are exactly the same every single time regardless of the context an…

I think you've got the zealotry back to front. The "anti-ai"s are basically just the status quo from a few years ago, but the zeal is from the "pro-ai"s as the technology is continuously forced onto people who may not want it. The thing is that there are a lot of people inflating claims about how it's going to change the workforce, change society etc. and we're just not seeing how you can rely on systems that are basically a condensed version of mediocrity pulled from the internet.

If the tech is really all that it is hyped up to be, then let's see the actual results rather than a hundred and one blog posts that are often AI-slop themselves. (Not accusing you of posting AI-slop, just to be clear)

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#247

Post by tstrimple »

theshrike79 wrote: post #221
budududuroiu wrote: post #2

I somewhat agree with this poster. However, I think the unfortunate reality of programming for money is that a mediocre programmer that pumps out millions of lines of slop that seems to drive the business forward and manages to hide disastrous bugs until after the contract / promotion cycle is over will get further ahead than the more competent programmer that delivers better, less buggy, less spaghetti code.

Most of us are paid to solve problems and deliver features, not craft the most perfect code known to man. If the slop-o-matic next to you is delivering 5 features a week without tripping up QA and you do one every two weeks - which one will the company pick when layoffs hit again?

Most developer jobs are like working at Ikea, but most developers on HN pretend they are fine furniture craftsman and that's really what everyone needs or the whole world will fall apart. It turns out, the vast majority of the population is quite happy with a LACK side table and their carefully crafted dovetail joinery adds nothing but expense to the average use case.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#248

Post by throwawayffffas »

ambicapter wrote: post #150
throwawayffffas wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hearing people on tech twitter say that LLMs always produce better code than they do by hand was pretty enlightening for me. That's hilarious LLM code is always very bad. It's only merit is it occasionally works. > LLMs can produce better code for languages and domains I’m not proficient in. I am sure that's not true.

It seems true by construction. If you're not proficient in a language than the bar for "better than you" is necessarily lower.

If you are an experienced developer in general your code will in general be better than an LLMs even in languages you are not proficient. The LLM code might be more in keeping with the languages conventions but that does not make the code automatically superior. LLMs typically produce bad code in other dimensions.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#249

Post by Krei-se »

throw128 wrote: post #205
blibble wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are probably better than most of us most top engineers will have their best work locked up in their employer's private repositories simonw and antirez have an advantage here, and at least the former is very good at self-promotion

It's a tactical error to disagree with influencers in public, much less actually criticize them, since it only arouses the mob. When there's a power difference you have to cede the platform (since they already have it), and try to ask good questions. Questions like.. did we really even need to invoke particular influencers to discuss this issue? Why does that come up at all, and why is it the top comment? If names an…

On the plus side having people listening to influencers calling interpreter languages programming languages you get more job security if they distract enough newcomers to never go bit flipping manually.

I understand your point and how frustrating it is trying to reason with people who think using a tool repeatedly means they understand how it works.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#250

Post by Krei-se »

jraph wrote: post #14

This doesn't feel completely right. Simon Wilson (known for Django) has been doing a lot of LLM evangelism on his blog these days. Antirez (Redis) wrote a blog post recently with the same vibe. I doubt they are not good programmers. They are probably better than most of us, and I doubt they feel insecure because of the LLMs. Either I'm wrong, or there's something more to this. edit: to clarify, I'm not saying Simon a…

You should doubt however loud shouting means good programming.

Here have some actual skill

https://github.com/PCBox/PCBox

This guy is half his age and keeps to himself. Pure quality.

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