The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying • Hacker News Board

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#391

Post by dannersy » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 6:40 PM UTC

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #215

dannersy wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're cherry picking. The open world games aren't as compelling anymore since the novelty is wearing off. I can cherry pick, too. For example, Starfield in all its grandeur is pretty boring. And the users may not care about code directly, but they definitely do indirectly. The less optimized and more off-the-shelf solutions have seen a stark decrease in performance but allowing game development to be more approachab…

Startfield is boring because of the bad writing and they made a space exploration game where there are loading screens between the planet and space and you don’t actually explore space. They fundamentally misunderstood what they were promising, it’s the same as making a pirate game where you never steer the ship or drop anchor. You can prove people are not bored with the concept as new gamers still start playing fall…

I think my point stands. Procedural generation is a tool that usually works best when it is supplementary. What makes New Vegas an amazing game is all the hand built narratives and intricate storylines. So yeah, I agree, Starfield is boring because of the story. But if the procedural vastness was interesting enough to not be boring, then we wouldn't be talking about this to begin with.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#392

Post by dannersy » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 6:41 PM UTC

Zarathruster wrote: post #333

dannersy wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're cherry picking. The open world games aren't as compelling anymore since the novelty is wearing off. I can cherry pick, too. For example, Starfield in all its grandeur is pretty boring. And the users may not care about code directly, but they definitely do indirectly. The less optimized and more off-the-shelf solutions have seen a stark decrease in performance but allowing game development to be more approachab…

Yeah I mean, I think procgen is cool tech, but there's a reason we don't talk about Daggerfall the same way we talk about Morrowind

Agreed.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#393

Post by angry_octet » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 6:43 PM UTC

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.

Rogue-like games use the most simple randomisation to generate the next room, and I burnt hundreds of hours in Mines of Moria before I forced myself to quit.

Now with an LLM I could have AD&D-like campaigns, photorealistic renders of my character and the NPCs. I could give it the text of an AD&D campaign as a DM and have it generate walking and talking NOCs.

The art of those great fantasy artists is definitely being stolen in generated images, and application of VLMs should require payment into some sort of art funding pool. But modern artists could well profit by being the intermediary between user and VLM, crafting prompts, both visual and textual, to give a consistent look and feel to a game.

The essay author is smoking crack.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#394

Post by bunderbunder » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 6:49 PM UTC

slibhb wrote: post #369

bunderbunder wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also, for example, the studies finding that when companies adopt AI employees' jobs get worse. More multitasking, more overtime, more burnout, more skills you're expected to learn (on your own time if necessary), more interpersonal conflict among colleagues. And this is not being offset by anything tangible like an increase in pay. $20/month in return for measurable reductions in quality of life is not an amazin…

> It's also, for example, the studies finding that when companies adopt AI employees' jobs get worse. More multitasking, more overtime, more burnout, more skills you're expected to learn (on your own time if necessary), more interpersonal conflict among colleagues. And this is not being offset by anything tangible like an increase in pay. Can you share those studies? I'm pretty skeptical of this effect. I find that A…

https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies...

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#395

Post by harambae » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 6:51 PM UTC

theshrike79 wrote: post #11

> This sort of protectionism is also seen in e.g. controlled-appelation foods like artisanal cheese or cured ham. These require not just traditional manufacturing methods and high-quality ingredients from farm to table, but also a specific geographic origin. Maybe "Artisanal Coding" will be a thing in the future?

> Maybe "Artisanal Coding" will be a thing in the future?

Steve Gibson was hand-coding assembly (often beautifully and making for very compact binaries) long after almost everyone else had switched to C language or higher in abstraction. This is the closest analogy I can think of it.

It had it's own cult following, but I wouldn't say it was a massive movement.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#396

Post by GeoAtreides » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 6:51 PM UTC

salad-tycoon wrote: post #181

hermannj314 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

only code anyone will be touching in a museum in 800 years will be the good code. I hope they don't talk about what great craftsmen we all were because someone saw an original Fabrice Bellard at the Louvre. Survivor bias plays a role in glorifying the past.

Agreed, I think the good gained by wool mills is greater in that little Timmy is less likely to lose a leg to frostbite than the bad loss of my scarf not passing through a ring. Long term though, I’ve always wondered if the Amish turn out to be the only survivors.

oh man wait until you find out what happened to little timmy in the textile mills...

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#397

Post by mexicocitinluez » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 6:54 PM UTC

dannersy wrote: post #390

mexicocitinluez wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Starfield in all its grandeur is pretty boring. And yet "No Mans Sky" is massively popular. > ny software engineer worth their salt knows intimately that more immediate results is usually at the expense of long term sustainability. And any software engineer worth their salt realizes there are 100s if not 1000s of problems to be solved and trying to paint a broad picture of development is naive. You have only seen 1…

No Man's Sky got better as they were more intentional with their content. The game has more substance and a lot of that had to be added by hand. It is dropped in procedurally but they had to touch it up, manually, to make it interesting. Let's not revise history. I don't think it has anything to do with ego. There are studies on the topic of AI and productivity and I assume we have a way to go before we can say anyth…

You said:

> LLMs saving engineers and developers time is an unfounded claim

By whom exactly? If I say it saves me time, and another developer says the same, and so on, than it is categorically not unfounded. In fact, it's the opposite.

You've completely missed the point if you don't understand how telling other people that their own experience in such a large field is "unfounded" simply because it doesn't line up with your experience.

> we have a way to go before we can say anything concretely

No YOU do. It's quite apparent to me how it can save time in the myriad of things I need to perform as a software developer (and have been doing).

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#398

Post by 3371 » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 6:54 PM UTC

tovej wrote: post #348

3371 wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's pretty much WIP but if you are interested here is the repo. https://github.com/No3371/zoh

The points you brought up all are valid. Lexer, parser and general concepts are not language-specific, yes, and I wasn't talking about how the implementation is different.

When I said "you can tell they sometimes get confused and have trouble to comply to the foreign language spec and design", I was thinking about the many times they just fail to write in my language even when provided will full language specs. LLMs don't "think" and boilerplate is easy for LLMs because highly similar syntax structure even identical code exist in their training data, they are kind of just copying stuff. But that doesn't work that well when they are tasked to write in a original language that is... too creative.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#399

Post by GeoAtreides » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 6:57 PM UTC

simianwords wrote: post #29

What the author and many others find hard to digest is that LLMs are surfacing the reality that most of our work is a small bit of novelty against boiler plate redundant code. Most of what we do is programming is some small novel idea at high level and repeatable boilerplate at low level. A fair question is: why hasn’t the boilerplate been automated as libraries or other abstractions? LLMs are especially good at fuzz…

what i find hard to digest is not being able to pay rent and dying of old age in a ditch in poverty

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#400

Post by Vegenoid » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 7:01 PM UTC

vips7L wrote: post #274

MagicMoonlight wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before mass production, the women of the household would be forced to spend every free moment of their day, outside of their other work, making fabric. Before mechanised farming, the men were forced to spend all day in the fields. Never again.

And yet many of us would prefer to be in a field instead of behind a laptop screen all day.

This is just unrealistic day dreaming. You can go be in a field picking produce for work - we have a shortage of these laborers. Most people don’t actually want to do that, they want a cushy office job that doesn’t wear down their body and that offers them the ability to increase their skill and value over time.

The software engineer who thinks they’d be happier working in a field is largely just a grass is always greener phenomenon. It turns out that for most people, they don’t like work whatever it is, because work is done not by choice but by necessity.