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The Rise of Whatever

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Re: The Rise of Whatever

#301

Post by eddiewithzato »

wiseowise wrote: post #230
eddiewithzato wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs will not be doing that. I wish they could, but they just spit out whatever without verifying anything. Even in Cursor which has the agent tell you to run the test script they generated to verify the output, it just says “yep seems fine to me!”. AI at the current state in my workflow is a decent search engine and stackoverflow. But it has far greater pitfalls as OP pointed out (it just assumes the code is always…

That’s where you, human, come into the scene.

And that’s where I end up wasting more time investigating and fixing issues, rather than creating a solution ;)

I only use AI for small problems rather than let it orchestrate entire files.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#303

Post by lan321 »

fhe wrote: post #265
badpun wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should set the microwave to much lower power and let it heat for much longer, so that the heat gets to transfer evenly across the mass of the food. It even says so in the instruction manual. If you blast with full power, leave the food for at least 2 minutes after it's heated for the heat to balance out across the food (again, it's in the manual).

or turn the food over, or move it to a different position inside the microwave -- the way microwave works is that it heats up the food unevenly (there's a wave involved).

Yes, my point was that microwaves are advertised as a 'throw your lunch in and get it warm in 1-2 minutes' appliance, but kinda like an LLM, they require some manual effort to do it well (or decently, depending on your standards).

Like:

1- Put it on the edge of the plate, not in the middle

2- Check every X seconds and give it a stir

3- Don't put metal in

4- Don't put sealed things in

5- Adjust time for wetness

6- Probably don't put in dry things? (I believe you needed water for a microwave to really work? Not sure, haven't tried heating a cup of flour or making a caramel in the microwave)

7- Consider that some things heat weirdly, for example bread heats stupid quick and then turns into stone equally as quick once you take it out.

...

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#304

Post by _w1tm »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #184
raincole wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People will write lengthy and convoluted explanation on why LLM isn't like calculator or microwave oven or other technology before. (Like OP's article) But it really is. Humans have been looking for easier and lazier ways to do things since the dawn of civilization. Tech never ever prevents people who really want to hone their skills from doing so. World record of 100m sprint kept improving even since car was invente…

> People will write lengthy and convoluted explanation on why LLM isn't like calculator or microwave oven or other technology before. (Like OP's article) But it really is. No it's not (like OP's article says). With a calculator you punch in 10 + 9 and get 2 immediately, and this was 50+ years ago. With an LLM you type in "what is 10 + 9" and get three paragraphs of text after a few seconds. (this is false, I just tri…

> No it's not (like OP's article says). With a calculator you punch in 10 + 9 and get 2 immediately, and this was 50+ years ago.

Your calculator is broken.

> With an LLM you type in "what is 10 + 9" and get three paragraphs of text after a few seconds. (this is false, I just tried it and the response is "10 + 9 = 19" but I'm exaggerating for dramatic effect).

So you’re arguing against a strawman?

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#305

Post by andrepd »

raincole wrote: post #44
gyomu wrote: post #10

Broadly agreed with all the points outlined in there. But for me the biggest issue with all this — that I don't see covered in here, or maybe just a little bit in passing — is what all of this is doing to beginners, and the learning pipeline. > There are people I once respected who, apparently, don’t actually enjoy doing the thing. They would like to describe what they want and receive Whatever — some beige sludge th…

People will write lengthy and convoluted explanation on why LLM isn't like calculator or microwave oven or other technology before. (Like OP's article) But it really is. Humans have been looking for easier and lazier ways to do things since the dawn of civilization. Tech never ever prevents people who really want to hone their skills from doing so. World record of 100m sprint kept improving even since car was invente…

> People will write lengthy and convoluted explanation on why LLM isn't like calculator or microwave oven or other technology before. (Like OP's article) But it really is.

Well you sure showed them.

The TFA makes a very concrete point about how the Whatever machine is categorically different from a calculator or a handsaw. A calculator doesn't sometimes hallucinate a wrong result. A saw doesn't sometimes cut wavy lines instead of straight lines. They are predictable and learnable tools. I don't see anyone addressing this criticism, only straw manning.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#306

Post by pm215 »

eddiewithzato wrote: post #300
pm215 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I really don't think that prompt engineering is the same thing. Anything I put in the prompt may help this particular conversation, but a fresh instance of the LLM will be exactly the way it was before I started. Improvements in the LLM will happen because the LLM vendor releases a new model, not because I "taught" it anything.

You also don’t get the satisfaction of watching something grow. Teaching and being a mentor is entirely separate to massaging a prompt

Yeah. I do agree with lovich that there's a lot of stuff about management that's just not fun (and that's part of why I've always carefully avoided it!) -- and one thing about AI is not just that it's management but that it's management with a lot of the human-interaction, mentoring, etc upsides removed.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#308

Post by andrepd »

franciscop wrote: post #69
autumnstwilight wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned Japanese by painstakingly translating interviews and blog posts from my favorite artist 15+ years ago, dictionary in hand. I also live and work in Japan now. Today I can click a button under the artist's tweets and get an instant translation that looks coherent (and often is, though it can also be quite wrong maybe 1/10 times). In terms of the artist being accessible to overseas fans it's a great improvemen…

I am learning Japanese (again) now and it's such a stark improvement vs when I first tried. When I don't understand something, LLMs explain it perfectly well, and with a bit of prompting they give me the right practice bits I need for my level. For a specific example, when 2 grammar points seem to mean the same thing, teachers here in Japan would either not explain the difference, or make a confusing explanation in J…

> When I don't understand something, LLMs explain it perfectly well

But my man, how do you know if it explains perfectly well or is just generating plausible-sounding slop? You're learning, so by definition you don't know!

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#309

Post by alternatex »

zpeti wrote: post #129

> But the dream has died. It almost came true, and then it was immediately co-opted by a bunch of get-rich-quick grifters and a bunch of turbo-libertarians whose entire identities are defined by the Things that they Own and who want to cryptographically impose that on everyone else too because they’re mad that World of Warcraft nerfed warlock or something. Oh come on. As someone who works with plenty of entrepeneurs,…

Presumably the universe promoted by crypto enthusiasts. Which is to say the universe they don't actually care for, but act like they want because it can bring them more money in the current universe.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#310

Post by arcanemachiner »

silveraxe93 wrote: post #277
sunnybeetroot wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a nice read but something tells me it’s AI generated due to the frequent em dashes so I wouldn’t place all bets on it being entirely human written. Edit: I apologies, the author has pre-gpt posts that use em dashes so likely it’s part of their writing style.

I disagreed with a _lot_ of what they said. But I really hope the author doesn't suffer the indignity of reading this comment.

I've been accused of being an LLM before — I got over it pretty quickly.
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