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The Rise of Whatever

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Re: The Rise of Whatever

#381

Post by simonw »

latexr wrote: post #351
simonw wrote: post #62

Looks like I was the inspiration for this post then. https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/post/3lt2xbayttk2... > Quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw. The reaction to that post has been interesting. It's mainly intended to be an argument against the LLM hype! I'm pushing back against all the people who ar…

> Looks like I was the inspiration for this post then. You were not, as is patently obvious from the sentence preceding your quote (emphasis mine): > Another Bluesky quip I saw earlier today, and the reason I picked up writing this post ( which I’d started last week ) The post had already been started, your comment was simply a reason to continue writing it at that point in time. Had your comment not existed, this po…

For your benefit I will make two minor edits to things I have said.

> Looks like I was the inspiration for this post then

I replace that with:

> Looks like I was the inspiration for finishing this post then

And this:

> Quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw.

I can rephrase as:

> Quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the introduction of the table saw.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#382

Post by sfn42 »

AnonymousPlanet wrote: post #197
nostrebored wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think happened in the rise of industrial agriculture?

We're talking about places that even after decades haven't recovered. What do you think is happening there right now? There's a common fallacy that tries to argue that it'll be alright over time, no matter what happens. Given enough time, you can also say that about atomic wars. But that won't help the generations that are affected.

If you live in a dead town with no opportunities then you either make your own opportunities or you move to a place with opportunities.

If you just sit on your hands complaining about the lack of opportunities then you won't get any sympathy from me. People aren't entitled to live wherever they want, humanity's entire thing is adaptability. So adapt. Life is what you make it.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#383

Post by Attrecomet »

intrasight wrote: post #270
ninetyninenine wrote: post #97

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. You generally don't need a lengthy explanation because it's common sense. When someone doesn't get it then people have to go into lengthy convoluted explanations because they are trying to elucidate common sense to someone who doesn't get it. I mean…

> The first thing is we don't understand it. Perhaps you do not understand it, but many software engineers do understand. Of the human brain we can still say that we don't understand it.

>Perhaps you do not understand it, but many software engineers do understand.

No, they do not. LLMs are by nature a black box problem solving system. This is not true about all the other machines we have, which may be difficult to understand for specific or even most humans, but allow specialists to understand WHY something is happening. This question is unanswerable for an LLM, no matter how good you are at Python or the math behind neural networks.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#384

Post by sfn42 »

eesmith wrote: post #267
JW_00000 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But isn't that the same as saying: what about all the horse carrier drivers who lost their jobs due to cars? What about all the bank tellers we lost after inventing the automated teller machine?

The number of bank tellers did not drop after ATMs starting in use. https://conversableeconomist.com/2015/03/03/atms-and-a-risin... That said, yes, what about them? These are people with real skin the the game - people who spent years learning their craft expecting it will be their life-long career. Do we simply exclaim "sucks to be you!"? Do we tell out-of-work coal miners to switch to a career in programming with t…

Yeah. If society no longer needs your job then you need to find something else to do. Doesn't have to be software, we mine other things than coal. We need builders, plumbers, electricians, lots of possibilities.

Software dev opportunities won't collapse any time soon, any half decent dev who's tried vibe coding will tell you that much. It's a tool developers can use, it's not a replacement.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#385

Post by vrighter »

gattr wrote: post #319
Ezhik wrote: post #195

I feel it. We can debate AI over and over and over but my ultimate problem is not even the tech itself but the "whatever" part. I'm a bit annoyed with LLMs for coding, because I care about the craft. But I understand the premise of using them when the end goal is not "tech as a craft" but "tech as a means". But that still requires having some reason to use the tech. Hell, I feel the "tech as a means to get money" par…

On a more positive note, LLMs (or their successors) could be used to create a perfect tutor. Taylored for every individual, automatically adjusting learning material difficulty, etc. But yeah, first we'll go through a few (?) years of the self-defeating "ChatGPT does my homework" and the necessary adjustments of how schools/unis function.

So you suggest training a model for each individual student? Because LLM "inference" sure as hell isn't capable of tailoring anything to anything, or change in any way.

And also, how is personalized bullshit better than generic bullshit? We'd need to solve the bullshit problem in the first place, which is mathematically guaranteed NOT to be possible with these types of architectures.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#386

Post by Muromec »

kqr wrote: post #353
zpeti wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you use a GPS? That sometimes gets the route wrong, but overall gets you to where you want to go in less traffic than if you didn't use it? And occasionally really delights you with new routes? (thanks Rory Sutherland for this analogy)

Wait, do people generally use GPS routes to go places? I find GPS to be great to locate myself when I can't figure it out from landmarks, but I very rarely use it to select a route – I can just look at the map in the same app and figure out a route on my own.

I used GPS routing today to cycle to from a station to a place I never been to before. Used it before for driving on highways in a weird place. Its very helfull when you dont know the area very well

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#388

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

eesmith wrote: post #232
rob_c wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would if you were able to do basic mental maths and you learned to engage and run basic sanity checks. That's still much faster than grabbing the slide rule. (And it's not like people are infallible) Obviously if one product hallucinated and one doesn't it's a no brainer (cough Intel FPUs). But in a world where the only calculators were available hallucinated at the 0.5% level you'd probably have one in your pock…

I've seen my accountant's fingers flawlessly fly using a calculator to track expenses down to the penny. Few people have those mental skills even in the days before calculators - either mechanical or digital. Slide rule are good for only a couple of digits of precision. That's why shopkeepers used abacuses not slide rules. I have a hard time understanding your hypothetical. What does it mean to hallucinate at the 0.5…

> Slide rule are good for only a couple of digits of precision. That's why shopkeepers used abacuses not slide rules.

Shopkeepers did integer math, not decimal. They had no need for a slide rule, an abacus is faster at integer math, a slide rule is used for dealing with real numbers.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#389

Post by ninetyninenine »

indigoabstract wrote: post #133
ninetyninenine wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to realize that we're only a couple years into wide spread adoption of LLMs as agentic coding partners. It's obvious too everyone, and you that LLMs currently cannot replace coders. People are talking about the trendline, what AI was 5 years ago versus what AI is today points to a different AI 5 years down the line. Whatever AI will be 5 years from now it is immensely possible that LLMs may eliminate program…

I don't know what will come in the future, but to me it's obvious that any variation of LLMs, no matter how advanced won't replace a skilled human who knows what they're doing. Through no fault of their own, but they're literally blind. They don't have eyes to see, ears to hear or fingers to touch and feel & have no clue if what they've produced is any good to the original purpose. They are still only (amazing) tools…

LLMs produce video and audio data and can parse and change audio and visual data. They hear, see and read and the only reason they can’t touch is because we don’t have the training data.

You do not know if LLMs I the future can’t replace humans. You can only say right now they can’t replace humans. In the future the structure of the LLM may be modified or it become one module out of multiple that is required for agi.

These are all plausible possibilities. But you have narrowed it all down to a “no”. LLMs are just tools with no future.

The real answer is nobody knows. But there are legitimate possibilities here. We have a 5 year trend line projecting higher growth into the future.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#390

Post by ninetyninenine »

intrasight wrote: post #270
ninetyninenine wrote: post #97

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. You generally don't need a lengthy explanation because it's common sense. When someone doesn't get it then people have to go into lengthy convoluted explanations because they are trying to elucidate common sense to someone who doesn't get it. I mean…

> The first thing is we don't understand it. Perhaps you do not understand it, but many software engineers do understand. Of the human brain we can still say that we don't understand it.

Why do we keep getting people who say we understand LLMs.

Let me put it plainly. If we understood LLMs we would understand why hallucinations happen and we would subsequently be able to control and stop hallucinations from happening. But we can’t. We can’t control the LLM because of lack of understanding.

All the code is available on a computer for us to modify every single parameter. We have full access and we can’t control the LLM because we don’t understand or KNOW what to do. This is despite the fact that we have absolute control over the value of every single atomic unit of an LLM

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