451–460 of 537 posts
It's probably just me but I really struggle to read this whiney tone that became common around ten years ago. It's not about the subject matter itself, it's about the jokes that are always sad somehow, the font choice, the tone of the language. Some kind of perpetual-victim style of writing.
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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.…
> In the future the structure of the LLM may be modified or it become one module out of multiple that is required for agi. > The real answer is nobody knows. This is all just my opinion of course, but it's easy to expect that being an LLM that knows all there is to know about every subject written in books and the internet would be enough to do every office work that can be done with a computer. Yet strangely enough,…
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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.
What's your solution to the miners of West Virginia?
https://www.wvva.com/2025/06/25/coal-miners-face-layoffs-fed...
"As West Virginians face possible cuts to Medicaid and SNAP, they are also being hit hard in the job market."
"“I’m worried for the people that are laid off, and are they going to be able to find another job? You know, are they my age? How are you going to start over? You’ve got to find a job back in what you know, because you can’t start over at my age,” said Ricky Estes, a former Coal Mining Safety Representative, who was laid off. "
"Even before these possible cuts, affordable healthcare can be hard to find currently in the mountain state"
I mention mining -> programming because that was the hyped solution a decade ago, eg, https://www.wtrf.com/community/from-coal-to-coding-new-progr... .
How well did that work out?
I wasn't talking about the recent LLM fad, but rather the decades of mass government funding of STEM[1], and programming training in particular (like Joe Manchin's Mined Minds), with the carrot of a high-paying job at the end, leading to a surplus of coders who, as a result, flood the job market and lower salaries and individual employee power.
[1] STEM government funding doesn't seem to end up in, say, marine biology or sociology or the theory of unbounded operators or other fields of science and math that don't make companies a lot of money.
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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.
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"A couple" does not always mean two. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/couple - "(informal) a small number" FWIW, "Maximum accuracy for standard linear slide rules is about three decimal significant digits" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slide_rule While yes, "Astronomical work also required precise computations, and, in 19th-century Germany, a steel slide rule about two meters long was used at one observatory. It had…
"a couple" always means two. "A few" always means three. That wiki is wrong.
New Merriam-Webster dictionary, 1989, def. 4 "an indefinite small number" - https://archive.org/details/newmerriamwebste00spri/page/180/...
Pocket Oxford English dictionary, 2005, def. 3 "(informal) an indefinite small number" - https://archive.org/details/pocketoxfordengl0000unse_p5e4/pa...
The Random House college dictionary, 1975, def. 6, "a couple of, (Informal) a small number of, a few"
Speaking as a grump who recently chilled out, put reservations on hold and gave Claude a crack... it turns out that the anti-AI crowd (which still includes me in many regards) gets a lot wrong about the experience of using it, as demonstrated in TFA. You don't get reams of wishy-washy code unless you ask for it. If you're an experienced developer who Knows What They Want then you can wield it like a scalpel. None of…
> You don't get reams of wishy-washy code unless you ask for it. I've found that they get pretty wishy-washy when you correct them. As an example, yesterday I was working on porting a function from the open-source CUE4Parse project from C# to Python (for a hobby project), and the LLM (Gemini 2.5 Pro) suggested the following translation of a C# method: @staticmethod def from_name(name: str) -> 'FPackageId': # C# Encod…
Also, more importantly, they will ignore negative directives. So telling it: "don't do X" , will get ignored. You are better of using positive directives instead.
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The difference between GenAI and your examples is a theft component. They stole our data - your data - and used it to build a machine that diverts wealth to the rich. The only equitable way for GenAI to move forward is if we all own a share of it, since it would not exist in its current form without our data. GenAI should be a Universal Basic Asset.
There isn't any more theft in this than in artists copying the styles and techniques of popular artists to improve their craft. This is 100% just the mechanization of a cultural refinement process that has been going on since the dawn of civilization. I agree with you regarding how the bounty of GenAI is distributed. The value of these GenAI systems is derived far more from the culture they consume than the craft inv…
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The difference between GenAI and your examples is a theft component. They stole our data - your data - and used it to build a machine that diverts wealth to the rich. The only equitable way for GenAI to move forward is if we all own a share of it, since it would not exist in its current form without our data. GenAI should be a Universal Basic Asset.
I appreciate the idealism but your argument has some flaws. Firstly the "theft component" isn't exactly new. There have always been rich and poor. Secondly everyone is standing on the shoulders of giants. The Beatles were influenced by the works of others. Paul and John learned to write by mimicking other writers. That code you right is the pinicle of endless work dine by others. By Ada Lovelace, and Charles Babbage,…
The difference is that, for better or worse, our society chose to follow the model that artists own the rights to their work. That work was used for commercial purposes without the consent of the artists. Therefore it's theft.
I actually do believe all industries should be worker owned because the capitalists have proven they can't be trusted as moral and ethical stewards, but I'm specifically talking about GenAI here.
I think it's disingenuous to say that people have a choice to publish data or not in an economic system that requires them to publish or produce in order to survive. If an artist doesn't produce goods, then they aren't getting paid.
Also this is kind of a pedantic rebuttal but the GenAI software technically does first have to copy the data to then train on it :) But seriously, it can be prompted to reproduce copyrighted works and I don't think the rights holders particularly care how that happens, rather that it can and does happen at all.
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There’s an even deeper issue, not just for art, for all things. The majority of artists, and of all other groups, are in fact mediocre with mediocre virtues, so enough incentives would turn most of them into Whatever shillers like the post describes. So a non expert cannot easily determine, even if they do stumble upon “Serious art” by happenstance, whether it’s just another empty scheme or indeed someting more serio…
The opposite. We are all learning to hone our slop detectors now, real art is more valuable and necessary.
Anyone can claim to have “real art”.
I disagree with many of the points on LLMs (but broadly agree with 80% of the post). But regardless of agreeing or not, it was a pleasure to read this because it's beautifully written, the arguments are solid, it makes you think, and the website has a personality, which is rare nowadays. I clicked halfheartedly, started to read halfheartedly, and got sucked into a read that threw me back into the good old days of the…
Eevee writes well but this is not one of her better posts IMO. Too many micro-digs at people who are white or straight, too much of the Twitter/Bluesky tone where you drop a snark bomb on the heckin' evil du jour and then just move on. If anything I'd say this has a lot less personality than older posts I remember.
- there are zero digs of any kind about sexuality in this piece
- the only reference in the text I can possibly find that someone might have considered a "micro-dig at people who are white" is
> This is the driving force behind clickbait, behind thumbnails of white guys making 8O faces, behind red arrows, behind video essayists who just read Wikipedia at you three times a week like clockwork, [...]
To me this feels more like it's identifying a specific thing than a "micro-dig", but opinions may differ.