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The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

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Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#251

Post by idopmstuff »

wepple wrote: post #196
wolvesechoes wrote: post #155

I am bit tired of such discussions. I don't care if LLMs are good at coding or bad at it (in my experience the answer is "it depends"). I don't care how good are they at anything else. What matters in the end is that this tech is not to empower a common person (although it could). It is not here to make our lives better, more worthwhile, more satisfying (it could do these as well). It is there to reduce our agency, t…

> It is there to reduce our agency, to make it easier to fire us, to put us in even more precarious position Could be. It could also end up freeing us from every commercial dependency we have. Write your own OS, your own mail app, design your own machinery to farm with. It’s here, so I don’t know where you’re going with “I’m unhappy this is happening and someone should do something”

It's also worth nothing that the "our" in that sentence is just SWEs, who are a pretty small group in the grand scheme of things. I recognize that's a lot of HN, but still bears considering in terms of the broader impact outside of that group.

I'm a small business owner, and AI has drastically increased my agency. I can do so much more - I've built so many internal tools and automated so many processes that allow me to spend my time on things I care about (both within the business but also spending time with my kids).

It is, fortunately, and unfortunately, the nature of a lot of technology to disempower some people while making lives better for others. The internet disempowered librarians.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#252

Post by SirMaster »

roesel wrote: post #245
SirMaster wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>No one cares about how the code is written. People definitely do care. Nobody wants vibe-coded buggy slop code for their game. They want well designed and optimized code that runs the game smoothly on reasonable hardware and without a bunch of bugs.

No one wants _buggy slop code_ for their game, but ultimately no one cares whether is has been hand crafted or vibe-coded. As proof, ask yourself which of the following two options you would prefer: 1. buggy code that was hand-written 2. optimized code that was vibe-coded I'll bet most people will choose 2.

I've never seen something as complex as a video game vibe coded that was actually well optimized. Especially when the person doing the prompting is not a software developer.

So I personally do care and I am someone, so the answer is not no one.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#253

Post by llm_nerd »

noemit wrote: 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…

>the Luddites were right

The Luddites were right in the sense that the social order had changed in a negative way. In a careless way.

In the same way that we look at America now that has effectively put a plutocracy in absolute control of the country, at the same time that there is going to be a massive devaluing of labour. Elon Musk likes to talk about the coming golden age of automation, but I hope Americans realize that unless they happen to be a billionaire, they will enjoy zero fruits of that advance. Quite contrary, plump yourself up to be Soylent Green because it turns out that giving a bunch of psychopaths/sociopaths absolute control of government isn't good for the average person.

>One of the claims of the Luddites is that quality would go down

Then people will choose the better quality items and it will be easy for them to compete? Right?

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#254

Post by phyzix5761 »

wolvesechoes wrote: post #155

I am bit tired of such discussions. I don't care if LLMs are good at coding or bad at it (in my experience the answer is "it depends"). I don't care how good are they at anything else. What matters in the end is that this tech is not to empower a common person (although it could). It is not here to make our lives better, more worthwhile, more satisfying (it could do these as well). It is there to reduce our agency, t…

At some point, if most people lose their jobs, you have no market to sell your services to. So, either, new jobs have to be created in order to keep the capitalism machine running, or you have to provide for the needs of every human being from whatever you're doing with your AI. Otherwise, a lot of hungry people revolt and you have violence against these businesses.

I think new jobs will be created because AI is always limited by hardware and its current capabilities. Businesses, in order to compete, want to do things their competitors aren't currently doing. Those business needs always go beyond the current technological capabilities until the tech catches up and then they lather, rinse, repeat.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#257

Post by layer8 »

forinti wrote: post #161
noemit wrote: 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…

Your comment made me think of the Japanese. They have a highly industrialised society, but they also value greatly hand-made products from food and clothes to woodwork and houses. And they also like to emphasise how long it takes for someone to become a master at a given trade.

Japan is struggling to get new blood into the traditional crafts, unfortunately. They are slowly losing that as well.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#258

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

fzeroracer wrote: post #132
porridgeraisin wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you make a function f(a, b, c) It is reusable only if simply changing a, b, c is enough to give the function that you want. Options object etc _parameterise_ that function. It is useful only if the variability in reuse you desire is spanned by the parameters. This is syntactic reuse. With LLMs, the parameterisation goes into semantic space. This makes code more reusable. A model trained on all of GitHub can reus…

There are two important failures I see with this logic: First, I am not arguing for reusability . Reusability is one of the most common mistakes you can make as a software engineer because you are over-generalizing what you need before you need it. Code should be written for your specific use case, and only generalized as problems appear. But if you can recognize that your specific use case fits a known problem, then…

> Second, when you're using an LLM to make your code more 'reusable' you are taking full responsibility for everything that LLM vomits out. You're no longer assembling a car from well known parts, taking care to tailor it to your use case as needed. You're now building everything in said car, from the tires to the engine and the rearview mirror.

If you are anything above a mid level ticket taker, your responsibility exceeds what you personally write. When I was an “architect” responsible for the implementation and integration work of multiple teams at product companies - mostly startups - and now a tech lead in consulting, I’m responsible for knowing how a lot of code works that I further write and I’m the person called to carpet by the director/CTO then and the customer now.

I was responsible for what the more junior developers “vomit out”, the outside consulting company doing the Salesforce integration or god forbid for a little while the contractors in India. I no more cars about whether the LLM decided to use a for loop or while loop than I cared about the OSQL (not a typo) that the Salesforce consultants used. I care about does the resulting implementation meet the functional and non functional requirements.

On my latest two projects, I understand the customer from talking to sales before I started, I understand the business requirements from multiple calls with the customer, I understand the architecture because I designed it myself from the diagrams and 8 years of working with and (in a former life at AWS) and reviewing it with the customer.

As far as reusability? I’ve used the same base internal management web app across multiple clients.

I built it (with AI) for one client. Extracted the reusable parts and removed the client specific parts and deployed a demo internally (with AI) and modified it and added features (with AI) for another client. I haven’t done web development since 2002 seriously except a little copy paste work. I didn’t look at a line of code. I used AWS Cognito for authentication. I verified the database user permissions.

Absolutely no one in the value chain cares if the project was handcrafted or written by AI - as long as it was done on time, on budget and meets requirements.

Before the gatekeeping starts, I’ve been working for 30 years across 10 jobs and before that I was a hobbyist for a decade who started programming in 65C02 assembly in 1986.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#259

Post by edgyquant »

foobarbecue wrote: post #130
Sharlin wrote: 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.

This was happening before llms in webdev

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#260

Post by morissette »

bombcar wrote: post #157
bartread wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Classic procedural generation is noteworthy here as a precedent, which gamers were already familiar with, because by and large it has failed to deliver. Yes, this is a wildly uneducated perspective. Procedural generation has often been a key component of some incredibly successful, and even iconic games going back decades. Elite is a canonical example here, with its galaxies being procedurally generated. Powermonge…

Procedural generation underlies the most popular game of all time (Minecraft) and is foundational for numerous other games of a similar type - Dwarf Fortress, et al. And it's used to power effect where you might not expect it (Stardew Valley mines). What procedural generation does NOT work at is generating "story elements" though perhaps even that can fall, Dwarf Fortress already does decently enough given that the p…

And here I thought the most popular game of all time was Soccer or Super Mario Bros 3
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