381–389 of 389 posts
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> I'm in the "haven't written any code in a while" boat ATM How long do you think it will be before you can't write any code because you're out of practice? One of the dangers of engineering management is that it can turn you into a person that can no longer do the thing. Does that even matter?
How long will it be until you can't spin the thread and fabricate your clothes stitch by stitch because you're out of practice?
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> Goods are usually (although not always) inferior when made by a machine. This is only true in the beginning, when machines are still primitive (e.g. first automatic looms). Nowadays machines mostly yield much better quality than any human can produce (e.g. automated welding, anything CNC controlled). Many things are only possible to build with machines (e.g. semiconductors). > A hand-crafted solid wood table is sti…
Even something as "simple" as a kitchen knife - the same basic concept found in ancient roman everyday kitchens - can't be made to the same quality by a machine as per hand. CNC can't do the tolerances needed behind the apex. Even ignoring the story attached to a specific maker and going solely by cutting ability the really top end hand-made stuff noticeably outperforms everything mass-produced.
Wonder if LLMs in autoreasearch loops would be able to complete tasks geohot has in mind in say 100x average token budget. If the answer is yes, the argument doesn’t matter: you just run the loop and wait for llm analog of moore’s law to get costs down.
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Even something as "simple" as a kitchen knife - the same basic concept found in ancient roman everyday kitchens - can't be made to the same quality by a machine as per hand. CNC can't do the tolerances needed behind the apex. Even ignoring the story attached to a specific maker and going solely by cutting ability the really top end hand-made stuff noticeably outperforms everything mass-produced.
John Grimsmo's knifemaking business has a Kern which is perfectly capable of doing the tolerances needed behind the apex. That's a very expensive CNC machine, but it's capable of precision & accuracy well beyond what's possible to achieve by hand.
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It's funny, but the more I know about the true Luddites, the more I see their point of view. " the original Luddites were primarily protesting against machinery used to "fraudulently and deceitfully" manufacture inferior goods, bypass labor standards, and strip skilled artisans of their livelihoods."
Goods are usually (although not always) inferior when made by a machine. A hand-crafted solid wood table is still superior to something from Ikea. Of course hand made tables are expensive. They service a sliver of the market. Ikea serves the rest of us who'd prefer not to eat off the floor. Fundamentally, Luddites didn't like being replaced by a machine. They were skilled workers, who used to have very desirable skil…
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Well again that is just a "vibes" explanation with nothing concrete. I feel like with LLMs, it's like a situation where you are close to some feature or project and have a pretty good idea in your head already of how you'd implement it yourself "I'd do this and have an API with that and a database table foo for storing bar with index on baz" and you're keen to get started on it ...but then someone else gets assigned…
> So long as the code works and meets all stated requirements and is secure and performant and uses good abstractions and is not full of hacks, then it's ok to let go That is the problem. The code often is full of hacks and bad abstractions. LLMs write code like a junior or mid-level engineer – perfectly overfitted to today’s request. Oh you need to work on this code tomorrow and there’s a laundry list of future requ…
Some people have suggested you write the unit tests by hand to basically "check" the LLM's work and keep it honest, but to write good unit tests you have to understand the underlying code, which takes time (since you didn't write it), so to me this is another bullet point that suggests LLMs will eventually be relegated to "StackOverflow+" duty - give me snippets, but I'll still write effectively all the code.
Part of my job is working on trying to make these models productive for the large corporation I work for. It's a lot of throwing tomatoes at a wall and to a degree I see the issue he is talking about output seemingly having a certain ceiling. At the same time in no part of his post is any code snippet or anything to latch on to of "the model performed poorly here when it should have done this" - this style of critici…
When people write blog posts about how LLMs failed for some particular task, the responses from boosters invariably fall along the lines of "just use this other model/just tweak your prompt like so/you're just not skilled enough—you can't make fundamental arguments about AI by citing specific examples." So we can't make arguments by citing specific examples, and also can't make arguments by not citing specific exampl…
We no longer have the luxury of welcoming bootcamp engineers into our field with open arms. We need to protect our craft. Call these fools out or they'll keep spreading hype/FOMO.
Not reviewing outputs, which is my main issue, is one-way to subpar experience. No amount of "make it right" will fix that. I hope that professionalism still matters as these new ways of doing things strikes me as unprofessional as f... Yeah, the next macOS will be worse... time to place bet on prediction market
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Two other similarities: they both rely on burning huge amounts of electricity, and have driven up costs of GPUs around the world.
The cognitive dissonance around this is astounding. First of all define productive. Would someone using AI to build software at a startup which is likely to fail be considered productive? What if there is already similar software available that solves the same problems? What about the broad use of LLMs to draft emails or make silly memes? It’s funny how everyone’s concerns around climate change just disappeared when…