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I'm Not Consulting an LLM

lr0.org

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Re: I'm Not Consulting an LLM

#31

Post by chrysoprace »

delusional wrote: post #23
chrysoprace wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad journalists are biased. Good journalists will present a story as factually as possible and as void of bias as possible (of course it's impossible to not have any biases). Opinion pieces can have as much bias as they like as long as they're strictly marked as opinions.

That's not true. Any journalist would tell you that picking the stories you chose to cover is just as much a bias as how you chose to cover them. Even then, the specific words you pick, how you ask the interviewees, how you place the story on the page, what you pick as the "related stories". All of that is Editorial and reflects an opinion. Good journalists are open about their angle. Bad journalists tell you they ar…

In the case of publications we luckily have such fantastic resources as mediabiasfactcheck[0] to keep their bias in check and to keep them factual.

LLMs are much harder to fact-check because they can make anything up based on their training data and weights without sources.

[0] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com

Re: I'm Not Consulting an LLM

#32

Post by po1nt »

I don't think the argument is correct. Reasoning LLM will check itself and search multiple sources. It's essentially doing the same mental process as human would. Also consulting multiple LLMs completely breaks this argument.

Re: I'm Not Consulting an LLM

#33

Post by heeton »

po1nt wrote: post #32

I don't think the argument is correct. Reasoning LLM will check itself and search multiple sources. It's essentially doing the same mental process as human would. Also consulting multiple LLMs completely breaks this argument.

Author’s central point is that an LLM answer “is optimized for arrival, not for becoming” (to paraphrase from the Google “Lucky” part).

So a reasoning LLM that does the comparisons and checks “like a human” still fails the author’s test.

That said, this still feels like a skill issue. If you want to learn, see opposing views gather evidence to form your own opinions about, LLMs can still help massively. You just have to treat them research assistants instead of answer providers.

Re: I'm Not Consulting an LLM

#34

Post by antonvs »

To me this reads like “I don’t want to be able to learn faster.”

The downside of the internet is that we get to see people agonizing over their inability to adapt to change.

Re: I'm Not Consulting an LLM

#35

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

For myself, I’m very much a “results” guy. Have been, for all my career. I’ve been shipping (as opposed to “writing”) software for most of my adult life. People seem to like to stuff I make.

I’m currently working on my first major project that incorporates heavy LLM contributions. It’s coming along great.

I started with Machine Code and individual gate ICs, so my knowledge goes way down past the roots.

I don’t miss it, at all. Occasionally, my understanding of stuff has been helped by that depth of experience, but, for the most part, it’s been irrelevant. It’s a first-stage booster, dropping back into the atmosphere.

I will say that my original training as a bench tech has been very useful, as I’m good at finding and fixing bugs, but a lot of my experience is in the rear-view mirror.

I have been routinely googling even the most basic stuff, for many years. It hasn’t corroded my intellect (yet), and I’m doing the same kind of thing with an LLM.

Not being sneered at by some insecure kid is nice.

Re: I'm Not Consulting an LLM

#36

Post by jmfldn »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #35

For myself, I’m very much a “results” guy. Have been, for all my career. I’ve been shipping (as opposed to “writing”) software for most of my adult life. People seem to like to stuff I make. I’m currently working on my first major project that incorporates heavy LLM contributions. It’s coming along great. I started with Machine Code and individual gate ICs, so my knowledge goes way down past the roots. I don’t miss i…

I'm somewhere in between. I'm excited about building more things faster and extending my capabilities. But I also love thinking about the underlying language, runtime, algorithms, the wider system. I want LLMs to enhance this for me, I want my understanding to go up as I write less code. It's also key to my job as a lead that I maintain understanding of the system for debugging, security etc.

So if I can do both with these tools, then great. I want to cognitively offload in a way that allows me to focus on the important bits. And I'm writing instructions to the LLM to help me do that eg 'help teach me this bit'. A builder and tutor at once.

Re: I'm Not Consulting an LLM

#37

Post by XenophileJKO »

4ndrewl wrote: post #9
XenophileJKO wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean it can also depend on scale. I use hundreds of sub-agent instances to do analysis that I just would not be able to do in a reasonable timeframe. That is a TON of thinking done for me.

Is "not having to think" a good metric now?

I guess, how often do you pay someone to fix your car? Repair something in your house? Give you financial advice?

Those are all things many people outsource their thinking to other people with.

Re: I'm Not Consulting an LLM

#38

Post by stavros »

antonvs wrote: post #34

To me this reads like “I don’t want to be able to learn faster.” The downside of the internet is that we get to see people agonizing over their inability to adapt to change.

Agreed, all this "but if you don't need certain skills any more, you'll lose them!" is tiring, and even more tiring because it's missing the entire point: yes, because I don't need them any more!

It feels like I'm reading an article crying "if you buy a car, you will lose your horse-shoeing skills!" every day lately.

Re: I'm Not Consulting an LLM

#39

Post by v3xro »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #35

For myself, I’m very much a “results” guy. Have been, for all my career. I’ve been shipping (as opposed to “writing”) software for most of my adult life. People seem to like to stuff I make. I’m currently working on my first major project that incorporates heavy LLM contributions. It’s coming along great. I started with Machine Code and individual gate ICs, so my knowledge goes way down past the roots. I don’t miss i…

> Not being sneered at by some insecure kid is nice.

How very adult of you.

Re: I'm Not Consulting an LLM

#40

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

jmfldn wrote: post #36
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #35

For myself, I’m very much a “results” guy. Have been, for all my career. I’ve been shipping (as opposed to “writing”) software for most of my adult life. People seem to like to stuff I make. I’m currently working on my first major project that incorporates heavy LLM contributions. It’s coming along great. I started with Machine Code and individual gate ICs, so my knowledge goes way down past the roots. I don’t miss i…

I'm somewhere in between. I'm excited about building more things faster and extending my capabilities. But I also love thinking about the underlying language, runtime, algorithms, the wider system. I want LLMs to enhance this for me, I want my understanding to go up as I write less code. It's also key to my job as a lead that I maintain understanding of the system for debugging, security etc. So if I can do both with…

Great approach.

I usually use ChatGPT, as a chat (as opposed to an agent).

It explains everything quite well (if sometimes a bit verbose).

Today, I am going to do an experiment: I’ll be asking it to rewrite the headerdocs in one of my files (I tend to have about a 50% comment/code ratio), so it generates effective docc documentation. I suspect the result will be good.

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