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The Rise of Whatever

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Re: The Rise of Whatever

#361

Post by fsflover »

rcxdude wrote: post #283
moritzwarhier wrote: post #114

Cool post, but: > And the only real hope I have here is that someday, maybe, Bitcoin will be a currency, and circulating money around won’t be the exclusive purview of Froot Loops. Christ PLEASE NO. The only thing this will lead to is people who didn't get rich with this scheme funding the returns of people who bought in early. Whatever BTC becomes, everyone who advocates for funneling public money of people who actu…

Yeah, I think for crypto to actually turn into something net-positive, Bitcoin needs to lose a lot of value. It would almost certainly be some other network that would actually solve this problem, given Bitcoin's essentially frozen in a half-completed state now (Ethereum still seems to be trying to make something that scales to a point that would be usable, but it is also the nexus of a lot of the scams for the same…

> Bitcoin needs to lose a lot of value

Why is that? You can just buy 0.00000001 BTC.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#362

Post by Miraltar »

maleno wrote: post #280
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…

I think it's interesting that practically every time this point is made (and it is made so very often), the examples that are used to prove the point are objective and easy to measure. A 100m sprint time or a calculation of Pi is not the same as a work of art, because they can be measured objectively while art cannot. There is no equivalent in art-making to running a 100m sprint. The evaluation of a 100m sprint is no…

The example might be bad but the argument still stands. Painting hasn't disappeared when photography was invented. Drummers still drum after the invention of drum machines.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#363

Post by f38zf5vdt »

open blog

> But yes, thanks: I was once offered this challenge when faced with a Ren’Py problem, so I grit my teeth and posed my question to some LLM. It confidently listed several related formatting tags that would solve my problem. One teeny tiny issue: those tags did not and had never existed. Just about anything might be plausible! It can just generate Whatever! I cannot stress enough that this is worse than useless to me.

The probabilistic machine generated a probabilistic answer. Unable to figure out a use for the probabilistic machine in two tries, I threw it into the garbage.

Unfortunately, humans are also probabilistic machines. Despite speaking English for nearly a lifetime, errors are constantly produced by my finger-based output streams. So I'm okay talking to the machine that might be wrong in addition to the human that might be wrong.

> It feels like the same attitude that happened with Bitcoin, the same smug nose-wrinkling contempt. Bitcoin is the future. It’ll replace the dollar by 2020. You’re gonna be left behind. Enjoy being poor.

I mean, you were left behind. I was left behind. I am not enjoying being poor. Most of us were left behind. If we invested in Bitcoin like it was the future in 2011 we'd all be surfing around on yachts right now given the current valuation.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#364

Post by teiferer »

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote: post #112
icameron wrote: post #16

Love this writing. One paragraph hit very close to home. I used to be the guy who could figure out obscure scripts by google-fu and rtfm and willpower. Now that skill has been completely obliterated by LLMs and everyone’s doing it- except it’s mostly whatever > I don’t want to help someone who opens with “I don’t know how to do this so I asked ChatGPT and it gave me these 200 lines but it doesn’t work”.

No one is losing that skill, as LLMs are wrong a lot of the time. No one is becoming a retard omniscient using LLMs and anyone saying they are is lying and pushing a narrative. Humans still correct things, humans understand systems have flaws, and they can utilize them and correct them. This is like saying someone used Word's grammar correction feature and accepted all the corrections. It doesn't make sense, and the…

[dead]

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#365

Post by [deleted] »

_w1tm wrote: post #304
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #184

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. 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?

[deleted]

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#366

Post by prmph »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #194

I think I share the conclusion, but coming at it from the other side. The point of doing things is the act of doing them, not the result. And if we make the result easily obtainable by using an LLM then this gets reinforced not destroyed. I'm going to use sketching as an example, because it's something I enjoy but am very bad at. But you could talk in the same way about playing a musical instrument, writing code, wri…

Are you not contradicting yourself? If the point of doing things is the doing itself, not the result, then how is it meaningful to just issue a low-effort prompt for the AI to do it?

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#367

Post by lotsofpulp »

quonn wrote: post #182
dofubej wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We currently (as in the for the last months) have instant transfers but for the longest time we didn’t and had to use PayPal as well if we wanted to send somebody money instantly without paying the bank an extra for it. I’m confused as to what the article means. It’s possible the author is misinformed.

Instant transfers have been available for many years. they were not free, but most banks supported doing them.

In the US, I have been sending money electronically for free, and instantly, to my friends and family for almost 15 years.

Zelle, previously known as clearXchange, and whatever else, but if you had an account at one of the bigger bank, it has long been trivial to send money to each other.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zelle

> In April 2011, the clearXchange service was launched. It was originally owned and operated by Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo.[6][7] The service offered person-to-person (P2P), business-to-consumer (B2C), and government-to-consumer (G2C) payments.[8]

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#368

Post by MichaelZuo »

bsenftner wrote: post #316
maleno wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's interesting that practically every time this point is made (and it is made so very often), the examples that are used to prove the point are objective and easy to measure. A 100m sprint time or a calculation of Pi is not the same as a work of art, because they can be measured objectively while art cannot. There is no equivalent in art-making to running a 100m sprint. The evaluation of a 100m sprint is no…

There is at least three major art markets: 1) pretty pictures to fill in a void (empty walls, dress up an article...), 2) prestige purchases for those trying to fill that void in their imposter syndrome, and 3) fellow artists who are really philosophers working beyond language. The whole reason art is evaluated with vague notions like taste, context, history and so on is because the work of artists left their audienc…

There’s an even deeper issue, not just for art, for all things.

The majority of artists, and of all other groups, are in fact mediocre with mediocre virtues, so enough incentives would turn most of them into Whatever shillers like the post describes.

So a non expert cannot easily determine, even if they do stumble upon “Serious art” by happenstance, whether it’s just another empty scheme or indeed someting more serious.

Maybe if they spend several hours puzzling over the artist’s background, incentives, network, claims, past works, etc… they can be 99% sure. But almost nobody likes any particular piece of work that much upon first glance, to put in that much effort.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#369

Post by CuriouslyC »

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…

The transformation is to aesthetic awareness over raw technical facility, and to "freshness" over skillful adherence to norms.

The best artists will spot holes in the culture, and present them to us in a way that's expertly composed, artful and meticulously polished. The tools will let them do it faster, and to reach a higher peak of polish than in the past, but the artfulness will still be the artist's.

Futuristic tools aren't replacing art, they're creating a substrate for a higher order of art. Collages are art, and at its most crude, this higher order art reduces to digital collages of high quality generated assets with human intention. With futuristic tools, art becomes reductive rather than constructive. To quote Michelangelo's response to how he made David: "It is simple, I just removed everything that wasn't David"

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#370

Post by rglover »

resonious wrote: post #76

I agree with a lot of this at the outset, but don't really like the gloomy outlook. I don't think there's much to gain by writing off all this unfortunate stuff as people being stupid and greedy. I mean sure, that may be true, but you can flip it around and say that it's impressive that we have it as good as we do despite having to co-exist with stupidity and greed. Better yet, you can see it as a challenge to overco…

You can—except for the researchers and pioneers at the low-level—write most of the fervor off as mimetic behavior.

We live in a world now where people scare one another into making significant choices with limited information. Person A claims it's the future you don't want to miss, Person B takes that at face value and starts figuring out how to get in on the scam, and Person C looks at A and B and says "me too." Rinse and repeat.

That's why so much of the AI world is just the same app with a different name. I'd imagine a high percentage of the people involved in these projects don't really care about what they're working on, just that it promises to score them more money and influence (or so they think).

So in a way, for the majority, it is just stupid and greedy behavior, but perhaps less conscious.

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