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Slop Terrifies Me

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Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#331

Post by djoldman »

franga2000 wrote: post #325
djoldman wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an interesting counter balance to this consumer tendency: the business. Businesses/organizations in a lot of ways act much more "rationally" than the individual consumer. So you'll see generally better car/truck maintenance in fleets than by consumers. Then there is a cool feedback/blowoff valve where more expensive + higher quality "pro" tools get discovered by consumers, drive up demand, the price falls, a…

Don't forget the second half of that feedback loop: other manufacturers come out with their poor approximations of those features at lower prices, consumption shifts to that because quality isn't clear from the labels, the quality manufacturers don't move enough volume to hit similar prices, so they end up either killing them or cutting corners.

:( Yes, I think this is definitely the case.

So then it becomes a cycle. It's risky to make a high quality initial product that's expensive because it requires the buyer to understand and trust why they should pay more.

Eventually the market demands the higher quality and the pro series gains adoption, only for the the cheap stuff to come in again.

Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#332

Post by cindyllm »

1potatonagger wrote: post #314
RalfWausE wrote: post #53

[dead]

You don't want a global authoritarian jewish utopia run by a digital sanhedran? How else will the elite people get robot blowjobs in their flying cars on their way to their transhuman surgery appointments? Won't somebody please think of the juden?!

[dead]

Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#333

Post by rglynn »

whaleidk wrote: post #285

Hopefully this does not count as being uncivil, I just want to cut through what feels like insanity to put my (and at least a few others’) feelings plainly: If you are one of those devs who heavily uses LLMs at work and you are in a position of relative authority, either as senior+ or something else, and you hand off your LLM code to others to review or “build off of”… we hate you. We don’t want to be your voluntold…

I think it's beneficial to hear this, as I've definitely been on the other side of this before now. So, thanks for sharing.

As much as we can fault the technology and the hype around it, this as much a people problem as anything else. Before AI, this same problem happened with architecture/PoC to implementation hand-offs.

AI is a new tool that a lot of us are still figuring out, but that doesn't excuse poor communication.

Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#334

Post by drzaiusx11 »

drzaiusx11 wrote: post #54

I have deep concerns surrounding LLM-based systems in general, which you can see discussed in my other threads and comments. However in this particular article's case, I feel the same fears outlined largely predate mass LLM adoption. If you substitute "artificial intelligence" with offshored labor ("actually indo-asians" meme moniker) you have some parallels: cheap spaghetti code that "mostly works", just written by…

EDIT: it has been rightfully pointed out that my above comment can easily be read as a racially charged overgeneralization of overseas workers of indo-asian descent. The "cheap spaghetti code" was meant as shorthand for "wildly variable code output with respect to quality and consistency, with no overarching architecture or plan", and was intended to target offshoring _agency_ output along with cheap labor systems that US companies created. These systems attempt to exploit workers at these agencies to avoid paying US salaries and are NOT a reflection on the actual individuals working in the aforementioned cube farms themselves. These workers are already subjected to a number of dehumanizing labor issues entirely outside of their control and I did not intend to further dehumanize. I apologize for my terse, careless wording.

I've worked with, trained and lived alongside workers overseas for months at a time and can say that there's no meaningful difference across racial divides, save for some variation on cultural norms. I would have assumed a more charitable interpretation of my words, but we live in uncharitable times. I'll do better going forward.

Cheers

Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#335

Post by senordevnyc »

coldtea wrote: post #119
glitchc wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Versus what exactly? Communism? Where the rich got richer faster and people got fucked faster?

They taught you the only two altenatives are 1917 style communism or 2026 style capitalism? Talk about a crap educational system.

What is happening in capitalist countries since 1970s (when they abandoned all pretense) is that the rich get way richer and everybody else is fucked.

So then what has been happening in non-capitalist countries since the 1970s, so we can compare?

Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#336

Post by JKCalhoun »

SkyeCA wrote: post #210
JKCalhoun wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you about magic money . Frequently downvoted when I put it forward but by and large I think that the human psyche needs to have a daily sense of having "accomplished something". Otherwise I suspect many of us will (reluctantly) drift off into lives that center around drinking alcohol, playing video games…

I have a decent job, get paid an acceptable amount, and at the end of the day I never get the feeling that I've "accomplished something". I'm extremely jealous of anyone who feels a sense of reward from their job.

That describes much of my career as well. Curiously (or not) the job I had that felt the most satisfying was when I was paid to mow lawns as a youth. Beginning with a ragged lawn and leaving it looking clean and evenly cut was satisfying.

Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#337

Post by drzaiusx11 »

drzaiusx11 wrote: post #305
kbelder wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that it's a voluntary arrangement instead of forced makes a significant difference.

Employing servants only recently fell out of favor in the years between WWI and WWII. Prior to WWI having servants was still in fashion for the wealthy. Naturally I meant paid servants. Enslaved and to some extent indentured servants obviously have little to no choice. That said many of those employered in service industries and to some extent the gig economy have limited options and their participation is barely "vo…

Aside: seeing myself refer to the 1940s as "recent" is really highlighting my age. Soon I'll be relegated to a "grampa yelling at clouds" meme (but just the computer cloud variety)

Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#338

Post by drzaiusx11 »

jezzamon wrote: post #122
beardyw wrote: post #10

I think this is far too nuanced. I am terrified by what the civilization we have known will become. People living in less advanced economies will do OK, but the rest of us not so much. We stand on the brink of a world where some wealthy people will get more wealthy, but very many will struggle without work or prospects. A society where a large percent have no income is unsustainable in the short term, and ultimately…

It's no coincidence that populism is rising. That's the non-violent way out - electing leaders that are willing to change the dynamics a lot.

History shows that populism often leads to fascism, we should tread carefully.

Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#339

Post by thesz »

danaris wrote: post #60
Der_Einzige wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at the rapid acceleration of progress and conclude this way, well, de nile ain't just a river in egypt. Also yes LLMs are indeed AGI: https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-is-... This was Peter Norvig's take. AGI is a low bar because most humans are really stupid.

What rapid acceleration? I look at the trajectory of LLMs, and the shape I see is one of diminishing returns. The improvements in the first few generations came fast, and they were impressive. Then subsequent generations took longer, improved less over the previous generation, and required more and more (and more and more ) resources to achieve. I'm not interested in one guy's take that LLMs are AGI, regardless of hi…

These diminishing returns are exponentially diminishing returns [1].

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.04125

" We consistently find that, far from exhibiting "zero-shot" generalization, multimodal models require exponentially more data to achieve linear improvements in downstream "zero-shot" performance, following a sample inefficient log-linear scaling trend. This trend persists even when controlling for sample-level similarity between pretraining and downstream datasets, and testing on purely synthetic data distributions. Furthermore, upon benchmarking models on long-tailed data sampled based on our analysis, we demonstrate that multimodal models across the board perform poorly."

Re: Slop Terrifies Me

#340

Post by thesz »

danaris wrote: post #52
Der_Einzige wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that people see that basically the singularity is happening but can't imagine that humanoid robots get good rapidly is why most people here are bad futurists.

> the singularity is happening [Citation needed] No LLM is yet being used effectively to improve LLM output in exponential ways. Personally, I'm skeptical that such a thing is possible. LLMs aren't AGI, and aren't a path to AGI. The Singularity is the Rapture for techbros.

You are right about "LLM improving themselves" is impossible. In fact, LLM make themselves worse, it is called knowledge collapse [1].

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.03502

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