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LLM Inevitabilism

tomrenner.com

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Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#411
post #70

In the 90s a friend told me about the internet. And that he knows someone who is in a university and has access to it and can show us. An hour later, we were sitting in front of a computer in that university and watched his friend surfing the web. Clicking on links, receiving pages of text. Faster than one could read. In a nice layout. Even with images. And links to other pages. We were shocked. No printing, no shipp…

Hours of time saved, and you learned nothing in the process. You are slowly becoming a cog in the LLM process instead of an autonomous programmer. You are losing autonomy and depending more and more on external companies. And one day will come that, with all that power, they'll set whatever price or conditions they want. And you will accept. That's the future. And it's not inevitable.

these 3090s are mine. hands off!

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#412
I watched the Grok 4 video with Elon and crew last night. Elon kept making statements about what Grok would do in the next year. It hasn't invented anything yet, but it will advance technology in a year. There was some other prediction too.

These things are impressive and contain a ton of information, but innovating is a very different thing. It might come to be, but it's not inevitable.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#413
post #70

In the 90s a friend told me about the internet. And that he knows someone who is in a university and has access to it and can show us. An hour later, we were sitting in front of a computer in that university and watched his friend surfing the web. Clicking on links, receiving pages of text. Faster than one could read. In a nice layout. Even with images. And links to other pages. We were shocked. No printing, no shipp…

> This is the future. It is inevitable.

This is the exception.

I strugle with claude to write basic nginx configurations with just making up directives that don't exist and have to hold its hand all the time.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#414
post #70

In the 90s a friend told me about the internet. And that he knows someone who is in a university and has access to it and can show us. An hour later, we were sitting in front of a computer in that university and watched his friend surfing the web. Clicking on links, receiving pages of text. Faster than one could read. In a nice layout. Even with images. And links to other pages. We were shocked. No printing, no shipp…

Hours of time saved, and you learned nothing in the process. You are slowly becoming a cog in the LLM process instead of an autonomous programmer. You are losing autonomy and depending more and more on external companies. And one day will come that, with all that power, they'll set whatever price or conditions they want. And you will accept. That's the future. And it's not inevitable.

> Hours of time saved, and you learned nothing in the process

Point and click "engineer" 2.0

We all know this.

Eventually someone has to fix the mess and it won't be him. He will be management by then.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#415
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve tried to use AI for “real work” a handful of times and have mostly come away disappointed, unimpressed, or annoyed that I wasted my time. Given the absolutely insane hard resource requirements for these systems that are kind of useful, sometimes, in very limited contexts, I don’t believe its adoption is inevitable. Maybe one of the reasons for that is that I work in the energy industry and broadly in climate tec…

That's how people probably felt about the first cars, the first laptops, the first . People like you grumbled when their early car broke down in the middle of a dirt road in the boondocks and they had to eat grass and shoot rabbits until the next help arrived. "My horse wouldn't have broken down", they said. Technologies mature over time.

There is a weird combination of "this is literal magic and everybody should be using them for everything immediately and the bosses can fire half their workforce and replace them with LLMs" and "well obviously the early technology will be barely functional but in the future it'll be amazing" in this thread.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#417
post #70

In the 90s a friend told me about the internet. And that he knows someone who is in a university and has access to it and can show us. An hour later, we were sitting in front of a computer in that university and watched his friend surfing the web. Clicking on links, receiving pages of text. Faster than one could read. In a nice layout. Even with images. And links to other pages. We were shocked. No printing, no shipp…

You've gotta augment that with a good testing strategy. And maybe output the results of the tests back to the llm.

> You've gotta augment that with a good testing strategy.

It's OK. The LLM will also write those and all will be good.

You'll be lucky if it even compiles, but who cares?

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#418
post #353
post #70

In the 90s a friend told me about the internet. And that he knows someone who is in a university and has access to it and can show us. An hour later, we were sitting in front of a computer in that university and watched his friend surfing the web. Clicking on links, receiving pages of text. Faster than one could read. In a nice layout. Even with images. And links to other pages. We were shocked. No printing, no shipp…

Compare these positive introductory experiences with two technologies that were pushed extremely hard by commercial interests in the past decade: crypto/web3 and VR/metaverse. Neither was ever able to offer this kind of instant usefulness. With crypto, it’s still the case that you create a wallet and then… there’s nothing to do on the platform. You’re expected to send real money to someone so they’ll give you some of…

The question I have for your observation (which I think is correct btw) is:

Do you think it's inherent to the technology that the use cases are not useful or is it our lack of imagination so far that we haven't come up with something useful yet?

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#419
post #70

In the 90s a friend told me about the internet. And that he knows someone who is in a university and has access to it and can show us. An hour later, we were sitting in front of a computer in that university and watched his friend surfing the web. Clicking on links, receiving pages of text. Faster than one could read. In a nice layout. Even with images. And links to other pages. We were shocked. No printing, no shipp…

Hours of time saved, and you learned nothing in the process. You are slowly becoming a cog in the LLM process instead of an autonomous programmer. You are losing autonomy and depending more and more on external companies. And one day will come that, with all that power, they'll set whatever price or conditions they want. And you will accept. That's the future. And it's not inevitable.

Did you build the house you live in? Did you weave your own clothes or grow your own food?

We all depend on systems others built. Determining when that trade-off is worthwhile and recognizing when convenience turns into dependence are crucial.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#420
The company name was changed from Facebook to Meta because Mark thought the metaverse was inevitable, it's ironic that you use a quote from him
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