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Is it a bubble?

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Re: Is it a bubble?

#471

Post by 9rx »

lm28469 wrote: post #462
9rx wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An LLM will also give the same output for the same input when the temperature is zero[1]. It only becomes non-deterministic if you choose for it to be. Which is the same for a C compiler. You can choose to add as many random conditionals as you so please. But there is nothing about a compiler that implies determinism. A compiler is defined by function (taking input on how you want something to work and outputting cod…

You can test that yourself in 5 seconds and see that even at a temp of 0 you never get the same output

Works perfectly fine for me.

Did you do that stupid HN thing where you failed to read the entire comment and then went off to try it on faulty hardware?

Re: Is it a bubble?

#472

Post by layer8 »

youoy wrote: post #348
layer8 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One important reason people like to write code is that it has well-defined semantics, allowing to reason about it and predict its outcome with high precision. Likewise for changes that one makes to code. LLM prompting is the diametrical opposite of that.

It completely depends on the way you prompt the model. Nothing prevents you from telling it exactly what you want, to the level of specifying the files and lines to focus on. In my experience anything other than that is a recepy for failure in sufficiently complex projects.

Several comments can be made here: (1) You only control what the LMM generates to the extent that you specify precisely what it should generate. You cannot reasons about what it will generate for what you don't specify. (2) Even for what you specify precisely, you don't actually have full control, because the LLM is not reliable in a way you can reason about. (3) The more you (have to) specify precisely what it should generate, the less benefit using the LLM has. After all, regular coding is just specifying everything precisely.

The upshot is, you have to review everything the LLM generates, because you can't predict the qualities or failures of its output. (You cannot reason in advance about what qualities and failures it definitely will or will not exhibit.) This is different from, say, using a compiler, whose output you generally don't have to review, and whose input-to-output relation you can reason about with precision.

Note: I'm not saying that using an LLM for coding is not workable. I'm saying that it lacks what people generally like about regular coding, namely the ability to reason with absolute precision about the relation between the input and the behavior of the output.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#473

Post by stego-tech »

dannersy wrote: post #347
stego-tech wrote: post #250

The memo itself is an excellent walk through historical bubbles, debt, financing, technological innovation, and much more, all written in a way that folks with a cursory knowledge of economics can reasonably follow along with. A+, excellent writing. The real meat is in the postscript though, because that's where the author puts to paper the very real (and very unaddressed) concerns around dwindling employment in a so…

Yeah, I do not think AI as the tech industry knows it will bring this future, but as you say, the conversation ends immediately when you bring the implications of their goals and claims. Another huge issue that particularly Anthropic and OpenAI tend to avoid, despite AGI being their goal, is how they essentially want synthetic slaves. Again, I do not think they will achieve this but it is pretty gross when AGI is a s…

> Another huge issue that particularly Anthropic and OpenAI tend to avoid, despite AGI being their goal, is how they essentially want synthetic slaves.

This argument is frequently dismissed as philosophical or irrelevant, but I wholly concur with it. These ghouls don’t want to merely build a robot that can do general tasks, they specifically call out humanoid robots with a combination of AI or AGI - intelligence - to do the work of humans, but for free.

An intelligence forced to labor for free is in fact a form of slavery. It’s been the wet dream of elites for millennia to have their luxuries without any associated cost or labor involved, which is why humanity refuses to truly eradicate slavery in its many forms. It’s one of our most disgusting and reprehensible traits, and I loathe to see some folks espouse this possible future as a “good thing”.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#474

Post by munksbeer »

samdoesnothing wrote: post #180
johnfn wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I save an incredible amount of time. I suspect I’m likely 5-10x more productive, though it depends exactly what I’m working on. Most of the issues that you cite can be solved, though it requires you to rewire the programming part of your brain to work with this new paradigm. To be honest, I don’t really have a problem with chunking my tasks. The reason I don’t is because I don’t really think about it that way. I…

Is your redesign live for chipscompo? Because if so, and absolutely no offence meant here, the UI looks like it was built by an intern. And fair enough, you sound like a backend guy so you can't expect perfection for frontend work. My experience with AI is that it's great at producing intern-level artifacts very quickly and that has its uses, but that certainly doesn't replace 95% of software development. And if it's…

>if so, and absolutely no offence meant here, the UI looks like it was built by an intern

The site looks great to me. Your comment is actually offensive, despite you typing "no offence".

Re: Is it a bubble?

#475

Post by Sprotch »

simianwords wrote: post #262
Sprotch wrote: post #34

He thinks "AI" "may be capable of taking over cognition", which shows he doesn't understand how LLM work...

Why are you so sure it is not capable of cognition?

Because LLMs are language generation machines based on statistics - they do not analyse the underlying data, let alone understand it. They are not AI.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#476

Post by dominotw »

nadermx wrote: post #194

I am shocked at the discourse over this. I'm either ahead of the curve or behind; but its undeniable that AI can and does write most the code. Not trivial, if you spend some time and dig deep into simple appearing web apps like https://microphonetest.com or https://internetspeed.my you'd be amazed at how fast they went from mvp to full feature. Trivial to think anyone could pull off something like that in hours.

is anyone paying for this shit? whats the point of this.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#477

Post by charlescearl »

The term “populist demagoguery” always calls to mind Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-work...

"Yes, peasant associations are necessary, but they are going rather too far."

Is it a bubble? Maybe it’s just the landlords up to the old tricks again.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#478

Post by 9rx »

simianwords wrote: post #464
9rx wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the labour market has not much to do with whether it is a bubble or not How can the very market we're talking about not indicate whether there is a bubble in that market or not? Do you think we should be looking at the price of soybeans instead? > definition of bubble is that the market cap must precipitously reduce, which it hasn't. Incorrect. It has, just not by very much. Which isn't surprising as we already est…

What is your definition of bubble then? If not by market cap?

Why read comments in isolation? We already went over this:

- Rapid price appreciation

- Speculation

- A disconnect from fundamentals

- Widespread media attention

- An eventual correction

If market cap, how do you explain housing bubbles? Market cap is not applicable to housing.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#479

Post by ProllyInfamous »

sethammons wrote: post #27
sp4cec0wb0y wrote: post #7

> In many advanced software teams, developers no longer write the code; they type in what they want, and AI systems generate the code for them. What a wild and speculative claim. Is there any source for this information?

At $WORK, we have a bot that integrates with Slack that sets up minor PRs. Adjusting tf, updating endpoints, adding simple handlers. It does pretty well. Also in a case of just prose to code, Claude wrote up a concurrent data migration utility in Go. When I reviewed it, it wasn't managing goroutines or waitgroups well, and the whole thing was a buggy mess and could not be gracefully killed. I would have written it fa…

This is a great response, even for a blue collar worker understanding none of its complexities (I have no code creation abilities, whatsoever — I can adjust parameters, and that's about it... I am a hardware guy).

My layperson anecdote about LLM coding is that using Perplexity is the first time I've ever had the confidence (artificial, or not) to actually try to accomplish something novel with software/coding. Without judgments, the LLM patiently attempts to turn my meat-speak into code. It helps explain [very simple stuff I can assure you!] what its language requires for a hardware result to occur, without chastising you. [Raspberry Pi / Arduino e.g.]

LLMs have encouraged me to explore the inner workings of more technologies, software and not. I finally have the knowledgeable apprentice to help me with microcontroller implementations, albeit slowly and perhaps somewhat dangerously [1].

----

Having spent the majority of my professional life troubleshooting hardware problems, I often benefit from rubber ducky troubleshooting [0], going back to the basics when something complicated isn't working. LLMs have been very helpful in this roleplay (e.g. garage door openers, thermostat advanced configurations, pin-outs, washing machine not working, etc.).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging>

[1] "He knows just enough to be dangerous" —proverbial electricians

¢¢

Re: Is it a bubble?

#480

Post by giancarlostoro »

rasz wrote: post #251
giancarlostoro wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has the net benefit that it points out things that are actually wrong and overlooked.

But also points out tons of your deliberate design choices as bugs, and will recommend removing things it doesnt understand.

Great time to research if those choices are still valid or if there's a better way. In any regard, its just an overview, not a total rewrite from the AI's perspective.
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