281–290 of 537 posts
Aside from the old-man-in-a-wooden-rocking-chair-on-a-porch tone, it seems to me that the author's beef is mainly about back-patting, and how the "Whatever" machines are flooding the pat-me-on-the-back platforms with "Content" that makes their own stick out less, resulting in fewer back-pats. The last line of the article summarizes it perfectly.: > Do things. Make things. And then put them on your website so I can se…
hmmm
LLM output is crap. It’s just crap. It sucks, and is bad. Still don't get it. LLM outputs are nondeterministic. LLMs invent APIs that don't exist. That's why you filter those outputs through agent constructions, which actually compile code. The nondeterminism of LLMs don't make your compiler nondeterministic. All sorts of ways to knock LLM-generated code. Most I disagree with, all colorable. But this article is based…
Seems like 40 years of effort making deterministic computing work in a non-deterministic universe is being cast aside because we thought nondeterminism might work better. Turns out, we need determinism after all.
Following this out, we might end up with alternating layers of determinism and nondeterminism each trying to correct the output of the layer below.
I would argue AI is a harder problem than any humans have ever tried to solve, how does it benefit me to make every mundane problem into the hardest problem ever? As they say on the internet ...and now you have two problems, the second of which is always the hardest one ever.
Cool post, but: > And the only real hope I have here is that someday, maybe, Bitcoin will be a currency, and circulating money around won’t be the exclusive purview of Froot Loops. Christ PLEASE NO. The only thing this will lead to is people who didn't get rich with this scheme funding the returns of people who bought in early. Whatever BTC becomes, everyone who advocates for funneling public money of people who actu…
Agree with the sense that we're at a weird moment though.
I agree with a lot of this at the outset, but don't really like the gloomy outlook. I don't think there's much to gain by writing off all this unfortunate stuff as people being stupid and greedy. I mean sure, that may be true, but you can flip it around and say that it's impressive that we have it as good as we do despite having to co-exist with stupidity and greed. Better yet, you can see it as a challenge to overco…
I have a feeling that line of thinking is going to be of diminishing consolation as the world veers further into systemic and environmental collapse.
Aside from the old-man-in-a-wooden-rocking-chair-on-a-porch tone, it seems to me that the author's beef is mainly about back-patting, and how the "Whatever" machines are flooding the pat-me-on-the-back platforms with "Content" that makes their own stick out less, resulting in fewer back-pats. The last line of the article summarizes it perfectly.: > Do things. Make things. And then put them on your website so I can se…
I had an interesting discussion with a piano teacher once. Some of his students, he told me, would play for themselves but never for any kind of audience. As the saying goes: if a musician plays a piano in a closed room with no one to hear it, does it make a sound?
Obviously there's nothing wrong with extremely personal art that never gets released to the wider public - not every personal diary should be a blog. But there's also the question of what happens to art when none of it gets shared around, and vibrant art communities are, in my opinion (and I think also the author's), something to encourage.
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Microwave oven does quite unexpected things when you cook a shelled egg or a dish on metal plate. We teach our kids about microwave oven safety for this reason.
On the contrary, those things are quite predictable. Once you know those issues exist, you can reliably avoid them. But with LLMs you can't reliably avoid hallucinations. The unreliability is baked into the very nature of the tool.
Well they even call them "content creators", is there anything more whatever? It's literally "whatever" content needed to load the ads around it. It's not painters or musicians or documentarians, it's content creators.
I'm delighted to see the point about "content" in the blog post, finally someone saying that (I also think so and have thought so).
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> You don't get reams of wishy-washy code unless you ask for it. I've found that they get pretty wishy-washy when you correct them. As an example, yesterday I was working on porting a function from the open-source CUE4Parse project from C# to Python (for a hobby project), and the LLM (Gemini 2.5 Pro) suggested the following translation of a C# method: @staticmethod def from_name(name: str) -> 'FPackageId': # C# Encod…
It's pretty difficult to have a useful back and forth with an LLM, because they're really heavily finetuned to be agreeable (and also they're not particularly smart, just knowledgeable, so their 'system 1' is a lot better than their 'system 2', to analogize with 'thinking fast and slow'). Generally speaking if they don't get a useful answer in one shot or with relatively simple, objective feedback, they're just going…
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Sounds great in theory, but doesn't seem very realistic. There will always be people that want power over other people, and having more than others will give them that power. And universally, if you have nothing, you lead a very poor life. You life in a minimal house (trailer park, slums, or housing without running water nor working sewage). You don't have a car, you can't travel, education opportunities are limited.…
You have equated a basic income with equality. That's a misunderstanding. I'm not suggesting equality or communism. I'm suggesting a bottom threshold where you get enough even if you don't work. Actually Norway gets most of that from investments, not oil. They did sell oil, but invested that income into other things. The sovereign wealth fund now pays out to all citizens in a sustainable way. Equally your understandi…
Living on welfare in the Netherlands is not a good life, and definitely not something we should accept for the majority of the people.
Being retired on only a state pension is a bad life, you need to save for retirement to have a good life. And saving takes time, that's why you can't retire at 25.