Live data from Hacker News

Bored of It

paulrobertlloyd.com

491–500 of 507 posts

Re: Bored of It

#491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m tired of “Well people get things wrong, too.” as a defense of these systems. They should stand or fall on their own merit. And yes, reducing everything in the world - nothing matters. Everything is relative. What even is truth, amirite? If that’s our slogan for the future then it is hella depressing.

> They should stand or fall on their own merit. And they do. They stand on the fact that they save time, raise productivity, and assist in learning. That's the merit. Demanding absolute perfection as the only measure of merit is bonkers. And if that's the standard you hold everything in your life too, you must be pretty disappointed with the world...

None of my comments say I’m demanding perfection. That’s a fallacy to reduce my position to absurdism, so it can be easily dismissed.

LLMs have not improved my productivity. When I have tried to use them, they have been a net negative. There are many other people who report a similar experience.

Re: Bored of It

#492
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

0. I want third-party advertising eliminated entirely and self-sdvertising advertising on one's own property more regulated than it currently is.

Be careful what you wish for. At least at the moment it is easy to use tools like uBlock to avoid ads but it gets more difficult if they are served as an integral part of the page from the same domain.

I think that'd be far less prolific than third party advertising currently is. And it'd be worth it to get rid of the big pile of perverse incentives, manipulation, and surveillance that is the current ad industry.

Re: Bored of It

#493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to participate, even if it gets solved. Feel free to die out. The idea is that people can't take new ideas in as they age makes zero sense to me.

> The idea is that people can't take new ideas in as they age makes zero sense to me. Hmm. My counter to this would be that I agree it isn't impossible, but would take such an enormous amount of voluntary effort that no one would spend it to completely update their information about the world. To give a non-controversial example, take dinosaurs. Almost everyone who grew up before about the year 2000 thinks of dinosau…

> that no one would spend it to completely update their information about the world.

You don't need to "completely update their information about the world" to take in a new idea.

Second time you're not making any sense.

Re: Bored of It

#494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully that can be solved with AI and modeling in digital representations of humans.

...are you serious?

We've been taught about this in bioinformatics 20 years ago. That's the eventual goal - to simulate human biochemistry close enough, so you can test novel drugs without using actual humans or animals. We're getting closer and closer to that every year, but yes, it's a very hard problem to solve.

Re: Bored of It

#495
post #17

> The best minds of my generation I’m tired of that line. I remember first seeing it on “the best minds of our generation being employed to sell you ads”. Making a computer go brrr doesn’t qualify anyone for a “best mind”. I’d hope a “best mind” would be, above all, empathetic. Concerned about the well being of their fellow humans. Philosophical about the state of the world. Patient. Curious. Wise and not just smart.…

Thank you. They act as if the “best minds” need not read or reason beyond logic and math. Having a “best mind” requires a lifelong dedication to understanding other people, ideas, and history above all else.

Re: Bored of It

#496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t that feel a little bit like saying that the hype around transistor-based logic gates is ridiculous because they’re designed to execute Boolean logic, and that’s exactly what they’re good at? The simple mechanism isn’t what’s exciting. The exciting part is composing that into a symphony of functionality, running fast and cheap, to better our lives.

no, because before transistors we had vacuum tubes so the functionality of a transistor was well understood and the breakthrough was in size and power consumption. the analogy would be more apt if tomorrow I could run ChatGPT 4o, the hosted model, on my wrist watch, and run it indefinitely for pennies.

3.5 turbo?

Re: Bored of It

#497
post #17

> The best minds of my generation I’m tired of that line. I remember first seeing it on “the best minds of our generation being employed to sell you ads”. Making a computer go brrr doesn’t qualify anyone for a “best mind”. I’d hope a “best mind” would be, above all, empathetic. Concerned about the well being of their fellow humans. Philosophical about the state of the world. Patient. Curious. Wise and not just smart.…

[deleted]

Re: Bored of It

#499
post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a literary conceit: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/there_is_no_there_there

I see, but the "to it" is what's grammatically incorrect. It is correct to write: there is a "there" there. It would also be correct to write: there is a "there" to it. But it is grammatically incorrect to write: there is a "there" there to it.

Eh, maybe? But English grammar is consensus based. This is arguably bad grammar because people not knowing the cliché of "there there" had trouble understanding the intent, not because it's "wrong" under some hard citeable rules.

Moreover I think you could argue the author is using the phrase as an abstract noun. Consider:

That there's a solidity to it.

That there's a "there" there to it.

The first turns naturally to my ear; the second is a bit forced but works IMO.

Re: Bored of It

#500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They should stand or fall on their own merit. And they do. They stand on the fact that they save time, raise productivity, and assist in learning. That's the merit. Demanding absolute perfection as the only measure of merit is bonkers. And if that's the standard you hold everything in your life too, you must be pretty disappointed with the world...

None of my comments say I’m demanding perfection. That’s a fallacy to reduce my position to absurdism, so it can be easily dismissed. LLMs have not improved my productivity. When I have tried to use them, they have been a net negative. There are many other people who report a similar experience.

You said:

> This is not a guarantee that the text it produces is a correct explanation

A guarantee of correctness is perfection. I don't know else to take it.

Not all jobs or tasks are helped by LLM's. That's fine. But many are, and hugely.

You dismissed it for everyone as "a mental trick like a psychic reading tea leaves". Implying it has no value for anyone.

Your words.

That's just wrong.

Now you say it doesn't have value for you and for some other people. That's fine. But that's not what you were saying above. That's not what I was responding to.

Post reply on HN