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The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

simonwillison.net

351–360 of 631 posts

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#351

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Please do not cite Dunning–Kruger effect at random. Who needs to generate a dumb demo of a 97% done crud app? We had code generators for those, everytime I read claims like that and I ask to explain further I then discover it's people who were not productive before generating the so called "MVP level things to completion with ease". If you're trying to solve a HARD problem people REALLY have, it's a novelty that agen…

The obvious pushback to all of the slop is: coding was never hard. Learning resources were abundant and free. If these people had a burning desire to build things prior to LLMs and couldn’t put in the effort to learn to build them (which is also fun!) then why would they ever put the effort into anything to understand it and make it good??

Before steam was already full of games no one cares about or no one plays, like 80% won't make over 20 bucks.

It will be just garbage on top of garbage.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#352
post #259

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I've been a teacher (most of the time a college professor) for...a long time. Nowadays, when preparing a new course, I definitely work with AI: "Here's what I want, and who my audience is - give me a course outline". That gives me a starting point. Of course, I modify it. Maybe I bounce back and forth to the AI for further refinements and suggestions, but ultimately I have to be happy with the result. When prepping t…

> AI is a tool. Use it appropriately Yes, but no room is made for people who see no use for it. There is a forced-consensus that this technology is useful, which I have to combat against at work. We teach in a very different environment, but your use sounds typical of my colleagues. "I ask it for suggestions and pick one", but nobody seems to wonder about what is lost when we shrink the horizon of what we will teach…

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Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they haven’t in the past I don’t see why they would now.

Next generation is healing already and staying away from social media, etc.

My generation will be the new fox news boomers, but instead of Fox news it will be ChatGPT and Claude telling them that Israel is the greatest country in the world and if you disagree you must be an antisemite.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#354

Last 6 months is humanity losing control of LLMs. - Memory market cornering which mitigated the adoption of local AI despite great open model being released. - Fast penetration of IP exfiltrating tools in companies world-wide. - Developers producing more code that they can read. - Autonomous agents killing Open Source by siphoning the attention economy - Autonomous agents destroyed online communities (including HN) -…

> Widespread vulnerabilities discovered This is a good thing

That is a half-truth.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#355
post #65

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> Try to get the AI to draw the pelican form a very odd angle - like underneath, to the right, one wing extended, one wing not ... 0% chance. Proof by existence? https://gist.github.com/nlothian/50241d34a654fcf0caa280d4475... Looks pretty good to me. ChatGPT in "Thinking" model. Edit: I've added the Opus version on the same link.

Those are just awful compared to the side view of a pelican on a bike.

Have you seen a pelican from underneath? There's not much to show!

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#356
post #211

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It’s the opposite, non-creatives (if such roles even exist in those industries) should be worried. All those models offset technical skills, allowing to get from idea to implementation through a different route (which can be easier or harder depending on idea and model - good luck tweaking that pelican’s exact pose and movements to match your imagination precisely ). Nothing touches creativity, not even in the slight…

My mother has started watching 100% AI generated stories on YouTube. They are good enough to be entertaining even if they include random errors like messing up the main character’s name. The thing is the creative economy is all about people’s attention and pocketbooks, it doesn’t need to be great just good enough.

whats the appeal of that kind of content? its objectively worse than real content, and its not like there is a shortage of real content

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#357

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Yeah, so whatever you're doing to wrap Claude is broken. Because it's breaking the UI. "It's never bothered me". Cool. But your tool is bugged.

Feel free to open a bug report if it bothers you. Or a PR. Or feel free to avoid the tool entirely if this UI issue shakes your faith in its overall quality down to its very foundations. This is hardly a hill to die on.

You’re missing the point.

You claimed high quality and provided a repo.

Did you not expect someone to actually look and critique it?

Whether the visual bugs are a deal breaker or not isn’t the point.

The point is that’s not high quality code, it may work. But it’s not code I would ship at my job and therefore it’s not high enough quality for anyone serious

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#358
post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My mother has started watching 100% AI generated stories on YouTube. They are good enough to be entertaining even if they include random errors like messing up the main character’s name. The thing is the creative economy is all about people’s attention and pocketbooks, it doesn’t need to be great just good enough.

Deeply troubling for so many reasons. Please try to get her to stop.

What's the problem? If I enjoy some show, material or text, if it brings me value or a brief moment of happiness, I could care less if it was made by an AI or a human.

This racism against AI-generated stuff has to stop. If not, we'll have a butlerian jihad on our hands that will set back prosperity, development and science for decades, perhaps centuries.

People mention the artists... ohh, boohoo... either do it on your free time, improve your performance and selling skills or move to another job.

It's not my job to slave away only so that artists can day dream and produce stuff that no one cares about.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to offend (it's AI coded anyway :)) but that does not scream "high quality" to me. The headline gif on that repo just paints a terrible picture. It can't draw a box correctly, there's random underscores all over the screen. The UI itself is just incredibly incoherent. I don't even know what I'm looking at. Like, no it doesn't seem like very high quality work... It just seems like a vibe coded tool. Edit:…

Take it up with Anthropic. It's actually their billion-dollar TUI product you're commenting on. The problem with being such a naysayer is that you're entirely disconnected from what's going on. You haven't tried an agent like Claude Code and experienced it for yourself, so you don't recognise what it looks like when it's in front of you.

> Take it up with Anthropic. It's actually their billion-dollar TUI product you're commenting on.

That's like blaming the company making hammers because you're unable to build a lasting house with the hammer, it really isn't up to Anthropic, but all about how you use the tool you're holding.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#360
post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The polarization comes from the very disparate coding experiences and output quality that different people find when using these tools. For example, I've had the opposite experience of yours, generating very high quality work using Claude (such as https://github.com/kstenerud/yoloai ). Just in dealing with all the bugs and idiosyncrasies in the technologies I'm using, the agent has been a godsend in discovering and c…

While reading this thread, I literally just caught an agent putting in the following CSS selector in a rule: > .row > div > div, .alert This is fairly simple CSS, not multi-threaded systems development. A bar low enough that you could trip over it. I catch this kind of stuff all the time (literally every run), but only because I read every line. Most of it wouldn't be the end of the world for any particular task, but…

Or they don’t know CSS.

Amazing how the LLM is godly with things I don’t understand, and falls over completely when it works in my domain… I wonder why that is /s

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