This is just the TTP metric[1] all over again, isn't it?
[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/sensitive/memes/time-to-penis-ttp
The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying
411–420 of 500 posts
Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying
#412[flagged]
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"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." It's reliably a marker of bad comments and worse threads.
Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A fair question is: why hasn’t the boilerplate been automated as libraries or other abstractions? Because our ways of programming computers are still woefully inadequate and rudimentary. This is why we have a tons of technique for code reuse, yet we keep reinventing the wheel because they shatter in contact with reality. OOP was supposed to save us all in the 1990s, we've seen how it went. In other fields we've had…
Standardization and regulation forced a lot of the physical industries to change as the industrial revolution progressed. Before that point standards didn't really exist, especially over any large areas and technological progress suffered because of that. After that point solutions became much closer to drag and drop than what they were before. The question is, at what point of progress will it benefit the software i…
I was watching a film from 1959 where the main character just swaps headlights and tires from completely different cars like they were just nominally interchangeable.
It feels like the era of standardization already came and went. It seems like product designers are now being deliberately obtuse so that their product quirks create lock-in and therefore more revenue. I expect that genAI will put fuel on this fire.
Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
A big difference is cutting quality for the sake of mass production when it enables creating more necessities for people to live is a good thing. It is a good tradeoff. Cutting quality to make previously deterministic software more non deterministic does not improve anyones life except Sam Altman, Dario Amodei and the rest of the billionaire class. I have no doubt in the future there will be a class of vibe software…
Was software authorship ever deterministic? Whether it be human or AI, the output can vary wildly, and is constrained by the finite specifications provided.
Sure, technically nothing is. Adding AI reduces the level of determinism is my primary point.
Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying
#415Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the only danger is people... Simply put, no it is not. But on the reverse, the first danger with AI is people. Over the longer term it will look like this. The rich 'win' the world by using AI to enslave the rest of mankind and claim ownership over everything. This will suck and a lot of us will die. The problem is this doesn't solve the greed that cause the problem in the first place. The world will still be limit…
This is entirely assumptions about a future that has not happened. Ive worked in "AI" for 20 years, through 2 winters, and run an alignment shop and AIRT... The problem is people. People will use the problem as a scapegoat.
Dinosaurs lived 100 million years, before they didn't.
And walls between France and Germany were effective, until they weren't.
Hell, even the 'people' is the problem doesn't work well for things like Moloch problems. Which people? The problem can no longer be pointed at any individual but a super-organizational response. Once you have an issue that is abstracted from it's base components, then any agent capable of parsing the abstraction can be part of influencing it and becoming part of Moloch.
Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying
#416Earlier quoted context omitted.
An LLM has never saved me time. It has always produced something that doesn't quite work, has the rough shape of what I want, but somehow always gets all the details wrong. I can type up what I want much faster and be sure it's at least solving the right problem, even if it may have bugs. There are also tools to generate boilerplate that work much much better than LLMs. And they're deterministic.
If you do not plan out the architecture soundly, no amount of prompting will fix it if it is bad. I know this because my "handmade" project made with backward compatibility and horrible architecture keeps being badly fixed by LLM while the ones that rely on preemptive planning of the features and architecture, end up working right.
You're just strawmanning now. I've prompted extremely well-specced, contained features, and the LLM has failed nonetheless.
In fact, the more details I give it about a specific problem, the more it seems to hallucinate. Presumably because it is more outside the training set.
Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is magical thinking. LLMs are physically incapable of generating something “well thought out”, because they are physically incapable of thinking.
It is magical thinking to claim that LLMs are definitely physically incapable of thinking. You don't know that. No one knows that, since such large neural networks are opaque blackboxes that resist interpretation and we don't really know how they function internally. You are just repeating that because you read that before somewhere else. Like a stochastic parrot. Quite ironic. ;)
They really aren't that mysterious. We can confidently say that they function at the lexical level, using Monte Carlo principles to carve out a likely path in lexical space.
The output depends on the distribution of n-grams in the training set, and the composition of the text in it's context window.
This process cannot produce reasoning.
1) an LLM cannot represent the truth value of statements, only their likelihood of being found in its training data.
2) because it uses lexical data, an LLM will answer differently based on the names / terms used in a prompt.
Both of these facts contradict the idea that the LLM is reasoning, or "thinking".
This isn't really a very hit take either, I don't think I've talked to a single researcher who thinks that LLMs are thinking.
Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying
#418Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not true. Most people are interested in fostering a community, even when it means sacrifice. There _have_ however been studies that show that this attitude is prevalent in (neoclassical) economics students and others who are exposed to (neoclassical) economic thinking: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22148... It's very effective propaganda. And we have a good example of it here. (Mot say…
People are in it for themselves...when it comes to participating in our capitalist economic system. The 2nd part is often left unsaid.
Humans overwhelming group themselves with groups that provide themselves with the best value prop. When the individuals circumstances change, which causes the value prop of the group to change, people overwhelming move to a new group. It's not a capitalist or socialist thing.
Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying
#419Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course it is.
Then it is "wildly uneducated" to have, and express, strong opinions about ANY field of endeavour where you cannot substantiate your claims.
Honest question: are you enjoying this? I looked at your comment history and you don't seem like a troll. What is going on right now?
Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying
#420Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can assure you I give LLMs all the information they need. Including hints to what kind of solution to use. They still fail.
So how do you rectify your anecdotal experience against those made by public figures in the industry who we can all agree are at least pretty good engineers? I think that's important because if we want to stay ~anonymous, neither you nor I can verify the reputation of one another (and therefore, one another's relative master of the "Craft"). Here are some well known names who are now saying they regularly use LLM's f…
>Here are some well known names who are now saying they regularly use LLM's for development. For many of these folks, that wasn't true 1-2 years ago:
This is a huge overstatement that isn't supported by your own links.
- Donald Knuth: the link is him acknowledging someone else solved one of his open problems with Claude. Quote: "It seems that I’ll have to revise my opinions about “generative AI” one of these days."
- Linus Torvalds: used it to write a tool in Python because "I know more about analog filters—and that’s not saying much—than I do about python" and he doesn't care to learn. He's using it as a copy-paste replacement, not to write the kernel.
- John Carmack: he's literally just opining on what he thinks will happen in the future.