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The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

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Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#271

Post by dec0dedab0de »

raincole wrote: post #34

> 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,…

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.

This reminded me of a conversation about AI I had with an artist last year. She was furious and cursing and saying how awful it is for stealing from artists, but then admitted she uses it for writing descriptions and marketing posts to sell her art.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#272

Post by aeon_ai »

rglover wrote: post #222
aeon_ai wrote: post #217

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 ch…

> you won't be rewarded magic beans for churning out crappy dashboards any more

The days of being treated like a wizard for making buttons and widgets hit an endpoint were good while they lasted.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#273

Post by Jooror »

mikkupikku wrote: post #117
Jooror wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m curious about how you landed “git gud; prompt better” and not “maybe the domain I work in is a better fit for LLM code”. Or, to be a bit less generous, consider the possibility that the code you’re generating is boilerplate, marshaling, and/or API calls. A facade of perceived complexity over something that’s as complex as a filter-map or two.

> I’m curious about how you landed “git gud; prompt better” and not “maybe the domain I work in is a better fit for LLM code”. 1. Personal experience. Lazy prompting vs careful prompting. 2. They're coincidentally good at things I'm good at, and shit at things I don't understand. 3. Following from 2, when used by somebody who does understand a problem space which I do not, they easily succeed. That dog vibe coding ga…

Irrespective of the domain you specifically listed in 3 (game dev is, believe it or not, one of the “more complex” domains), you have completely failed to miss the point.

> 2. They're coincidentally good at things I'm good at, and shit at things I don't understand.

This may well be! In the perfect world this would be balanced with the knowledge that maybe “the things you’re good at” are objectively* easier than “things you don’t understand”. Speaking for myself, I’m proficient in many more easy things than hard things.

*inasmuch as anything can be “objectively” easier

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#274

Post by vips7L »

MagicMoonlight wrote: post #221
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…

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.

And yet many of us would prefer to be in a field instead of behind a laptop screen all day.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#275

Post by b0rsuk »

techpression wrote: post #172
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…

I’m a hard core rogue-like player (easily over a thousand hours at least in all the games I’ve played) but even so I can admit that hey have nothing compared to a well crafted world like you’d find in From Software titles or Expedition 33, or classic Zelda games for that matter. Making a great world is an incredibly hard task though and few studios have the capabilities to do so.

[dead]

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#276

Post by Aurornis »

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…

> Another interesting thing is that we do not know how they made them so fine. The technique was never recorded or documented in detail, as it was passed down from parent to child. So the knowledge is actually lost forever.

This is a rather extreme failure on their part. There’s nothing admirable about hoarding knowledge and forcing it to only be passed down in person.

I don’t see this as the Luddites being right at all because they were clearly incredibly wrong about their chosen method of knowledge storage. This was a highly predictable and preventable outcome. If we were talking about a company today that forgot how to manage their servers because they refused to document anything and only passed it down from person to person we wouldn’t be speaking in awe and wonder, we’d be rightly criticizing their terrible decision making.

That aside, every time I hear that knowledge has been lost forever it turns out to be an exaggeration from those trying to amplify the mystique of the past. If we wanted to make ultra-thin scarves we could do it. We could study those ultra thin museum pieces with our endless array of modern tools and then use our vast quantities of modern wool to experiment until we got something similar.

But you missed the reason why we wouldn’t want to: An ultra-thin scarf isn’t going to work as well as a thicker one for keeping someone warm. It will be less durable. It would be a fundamentally inferior product. It’s interesting to see as a museum antique that has to be treated with utmost delicacy, but not so much as a practical garment.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#277

Post by pixl97 »

spacecadet wrote: post #159
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…

Demand full automation. Demand universal basic income. Notice how the later is nearly absent from the conversation. Another distraction is AGI that which is a danger to humanity- the only danger is people...

> the only danger is people...

Simply put, no it is not.

But on the reverse, the first danger with AI is people.

Over the longer term it will look like this. The rich 'win' the world by using AI to enslave the rest of mankind and claim ownership over everything. This will suck and a lot of us will die.

The problem is this doesn't solve the greed that cause the problem in the first place. The world will still be limited in a resources of something which will end with the rich in a dick measuring contest and to win that contest they will put more and more power in AI and they connive and fight each other. Eventually the AI has enough power that it kills us all, intentionally or not.

We'll achieve nearly unlimited capability long before we solve the problem of unlimited greed and that will spell our end.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#279

Post by Jooror »

3371 wrote: post #92
Jooror wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m curious about how you landed “git gud; prompt better” and not “maybe the domain I work in is a better fit for LLM code”. Or, to be a bit less generous, consider the possibility that the code you’re generating is boilerplate, marshaling, and/or API calls. A facade of perceived complexity over something that’s as complex as a filter-map or two.

Sharing my 2 cents. In the past 2 months I've been using all the SOTA models to help me design a new DSL for narrative scripting (such as game story telling) and a c# runtime implementation o the script player engine. The language spec and design is about 95% authored by me up to this point; I have the LLMs work on the 2nd layer: the implementation specs/guidelines and the 3rd layer: concrete c# implementation. Since…

I wonder if my intuition here is correct; I would posit that “PL implementation” is a far more popular and well-explored field than it seems. How many toy/small/labor-of-love langs make it to Show HN? How many more simply don’t?

I’ve never personally caught the language implementation bug. I appreciate your perspective here.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#280

Post by pixl97 »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #83
simianwords wrote: post #29

What the author and many others find hard to digest is that LLMs are surfacing the reality that most of our work is a small bit of novelty against boiler plate redundant code. Most of what we do is programming is some small novel idea at high level and repeatable boilerplate at low level. A fair question is: why hasn’t the boilerplate been automated as libraries or other abstractions? LLMs are especially good at fuzz…

Most of the people doing the most rote and monotonous work were and are doing so in some of the least productive circumstances, with clear ways of increasing speed and productivity. If development velocity was truly an important factor in these businesses, we'd migrated away from that gang of four ass Java 8 codebase, given these poor souls offices, or at least cubicles to reduce the noise, we wouldn't make them spen…

>all the inertia and inefficiencies of the organization

Honestly you can probably use this as a means to measure the amount of regulation, graft, and corruption in an economy.

In a wild west free for all code velocity would likely be very fast with software popping up, changing rapidly, and some quickly disappearing.

But in an economy that doesn't care what you make, then who you pay or what laws you buy is far more important.

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