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The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

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Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#341

Post by dkersten »

bartread wrote: post #146
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,…

> 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…

Almost every 3D game in the past 20 years uses procedural foliage generation (eg SpeedTree and similar). Many use procedural terrain painting. Many use tools like Houdini.

So procedural generation is extremely prevalent in most AAA games and has been for a long time.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#342

Post by bee_rider »

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.

It’s a different type of thing, really. I like rogue-likes because they are a… pretty basic… story about my character, rather than a perfectly crafted story about somebody else’s.

Even when I play a game like Expedition 33 or Elden Ring, my brain (for whatever reason) makes a solid split between the cutscene versions of the characters and the gameplay version. I mean, in some games the gameplay characters is a wandering murderer, while the cutscene characters have all sorts of moral compunctions about killing the big-bad. They are clearly different dudes.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#343

Post by tovej »

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 am prompting better. It doesn't help the LLM be more productive than me on a regular tuesday.

Sure, I can get the task done by delegating everything to an agentic workflow, but it just adds a bunch of useless overhead to my work.

I still need to know what the code does at the end of the day, so I can document it and reason about it. If I write the code myself, it's easy. If an LLM does it, it's a chore.

And even without those concerns, the LLM is still slower than me. Unless it's trivial boilerplate, in which case other tools serve me better and cheaper.

I'll note that a compiler is one of the most well understood and implemented software projects, much of it open source, which means the LLM has a lot of prior art that it can copy.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#344

Post by margalabargala »

antonyh wrote: post #326
teolandon wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think asking any LLM in the next 100 years to "write a Python script that generates an OS" will work?

Yes, for some definition of OS. It could build a DOS-like or other TUI, or a list of installed apps that you pick from. Devices are built on specifications, so that's all possible. System API it could define and refine as it goes. General utilities like file management are basically a list of objects with actions attached. And so on... the more that is rigidly specified, the better it will do. It'll fail miserably at…

Given 100 years though? 100 years ago we barely had vacuum tubes and airplanes.

Given a century the only unreasonable part is oneshotting with no details, context, or follow up questions. If you tell Linus Torvalds "write a python script that generates and OS", his response won't be the script, it'll be "who are you and how did you get into my house".

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#345

Post by WarmWash »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #271
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.

Everyone is in it for themselves.

The world makes waay more sense when you really internalize that. It doesn't necessarily mean people are selfish, large groups often have aligned interests, but when an individuals interest alignment changes, then their group membership almost always changes too.

I'd bet she has a bunch of pirated content and anti-copyright remarks from the golden age of piracy as well.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#346

Post by Retr0id »

> Classic procedural generation is noteworthy here as a precedent, which gamers were already familiar with, because by and large it has failed to deliver.

With the notable exception of Minecraft terrain generation, which I think most would say was successful in what it set out to achieve.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#347

Post by Gagarin1917 »

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…

>It is there to reduce our agency

Complete bullshit.

The individual has never had as much ability to take on large projects as they do now. They’ve never been able to learn as easily as they can now.

>to make it easier to fire us

As of now, the technology increases productivity in the average user. The companies that take advantage of that and expand their offering will outperform the ones that simply replace workers and don’t expand or improve offerings.

More capable employees make companies more money in general. Productivity increases lead to richer societies and yes, even more jobs, just as it always has.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#348

Post by tovej »

3371 wrote: post #288
Jooror wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I totally agree, and I was fully aware of how common people make language for fun when I replied. But I feel like the rationale would still stands: Considering LLMs' natures, common boilerplate tasks are easy because they can kind of just "decompress" from training data. But for a new language design, unless the language is almost identical to some other captured by the model, "decompression" would just fail.

As someone who has implemented a fair few DSLs, lexical and syntactic analysis is pretty much the same anywhere, and the structure of the lexer/parser does not really depend on the grammar of the language.

And even semantic analysis is at least very similar in most PLs. Even DSLs. Assuming you're using concepts like variables and functions.

When it comes to codegen / interpreter runtimes, things start to diverge. But this also depends on the use case. More often than not a DSL is a one-to-one map to an existing language, with syntactic sugar on top.

I'm curious, what's the DSL you're working on?

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#349

Post by tovej »

rybosworld wrote: post #126
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.

When web search first arrived, the same thing happened. That is, some people didn't like using the tool because it wasn't finding what they wanted. This is still true for a lot of folks today, actually. It's less "git gud; prompt better", and more, "be able to explain (well) what you want as the output". If someone messages the IT guy and says "hey my computer is broken" - what sort of helpful information can the IT…

I can assure you I give LLMs all the information they need. Including hints to what kind of solution to use. They still fail.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#350

Post by remich »

foobarbecue wrote: post #130
Sharlin wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah, exactly. And LLM help developers save time from writing the same thing that has be done by other developers for a thousand times. Before LLMs we did already have a way to "save developers time from writing the same thing that has been done by other developers for a thousand times", you know? A LLM doing the same thing the 1001st time is not code reuse. Code reuse is code reuse.

Hard agree. Before LLMs, if there was some bit of code needed across the industry, somebody would put the effort into writing a library and we'd all benefit. Now, instead of standardizing and working together we get a million slightly different incompatible piles of stochastic slop.

Yeah and then when that library stops being maintained or gets taken over, everything breaks.
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