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The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

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Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#491

Post by tptacek »

GreenWatermelon wrote: post #490
tptacek wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument can be used, and has been used, about every innovation in automation since the dawn of the industrial revolution.

Yeah, and for good reason. The invitation of the light bulb meant factory owners could force workers into 16 hours shifts. The main beneficiaries of new tech were always the capital owners. Workers had to literally fight and die for our 8-hour workdays and 5-days workweek. This is still going on today: the massive gains from automation are being hoarded by the wealthy capital owners, while workers struggle to make en…

Ok but also I want to light my house with lightbulbs, not with animal-fat candles.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#492

Post by casey2 »

forinti wrote: post #161
noemit wrote: post #106

Many people don't know this, but the Luddites were right. I studied Art History and this particular movement. One of the claims of the Luddites is that quality would go down, because their craft took half a lifetime to master (it was passed down from parent to chile.) I was able to feel wool scarves made in europe from the middle ages. (In museum storage, under the guidance of a curator) They are a fundamentally diff…

Your comment made me think of the Japanese. They have a highly industrialised society, but they also value greatly hand-made products from food and clothes to woodwork and houses. And they also like to emphasise how long it takes for someone to become a master at a given trade.

That's because they spent a couple hundred years with a society structured around low/no growth and enforced familial occupations. There isn't much to do in such a society other than refine your craft aesthetically and wait for the growth-structured countries to come knocking.

LLMs are yet another example of science and technology leading to growth. Which means it's STUPID to restructure society into a low/no growth model like the smelly Europeans degrowthers want. On our current trajectory the only time it makes sense to degrowth is few hundred years after we make a dyson sphere or until FTL travel becomes possible.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#493

Post by thesz »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #30
simianwords wrote: post #29

What the author and many others find hard to digest is that LLMs are surfacing the reality that most of our work is a small bit of novelty against boiler plate redundant code. Most of what we do is programming is some small novel idea at high level and repeatable boilerplate at low level. A fair question is: why hasn’t the boilerplate been automated as libraries or other abstractions? LLMs are especially good at fuzz…

Time to learn design, how to talk to customers, and how to discover unsolved problems. Used right LLMs should improve your software quality. Make stuff that matters that you can be proud of.

  > how to discover unsolved problems
There are plenty of them and LLMs will not help you much there because unsolved problems are, by definition, out-of-distribution samples.

Neural networks are interpolators, not extrapolators.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#494

Post by Lumping6371 »

vips7L wrote: post #297
slibhb wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What matters in the end is that this tech is not to empower a common person (although it could). How do you figure? 20 dollars/month is insanely cheap for what OpenAI/Anthropic/Google offer. That absolutely qualifies as "empowering a common person". It lowers barriers! A lot of the anti-AI sentiment on HN concerns people losing their jobs. I don't think this will happen: programmers who know what they're doing are…

> I don't think this will happen Block just laid off 40% of their company citing AI.

"Juan said his dad works at Nintendo"

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#495

Post by Lumping6371 »

oxag3n wrote: post #404
noemit wrote: post #106

Many people don't know this, but the Luddites were right. I studied Art History and this particular movement. One of the claims of the Luddites is that quality would go down, because their craft took half a lifetime to master (it was passed down from parent to chile.) I was able to feel wool scarves made in europe from the middle ages. (In museum storage, under the guidance of a curator) They are a fundamentally diff…

Software engineers are anything but Luddites. This labeling tactic became pretty common and tries to build a narrative that software engineers are going away. Artisan coders, craftsmen, First and foremost, wool craftsmen are not engineers (which doesn't make their work less valuable). Second, most software engineers, especially not in FAANG-like companies, don't engineer a shit. My spouse worked at a large telecom co…

So only FAANG does engineering now? Pretty elitist take. Would you happen to have a FAANG company in your resume, by any chance?

Yes, non tech companies tend to care less about the technical end of things. They, we, "don't do engineering" in the sense of dealing with large scale systems, optimization, etc. Still have to understand the product, and translate business requirements into code and systems, often running with budget constraints. If that's not engineering, I don't know what is.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#496

Post by Lumping6371 »

bdangubic wrote: post #98
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which claim, exactly? That "coding will be made obsolete"? Yes, it is. Literally every programming innovation claims to "make coding obsolete". I've seen a half dozen in my own lifetime.

it is like knocking down the vending machine, you have to rock it back and forth a lot before it falls down

"Programmers are obsolete, but like, for real this time guys!"

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#497

Post by Lumping6371 »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #449

"It's undeniable there's a metric gigaton of hype surrounding the technology." Why does the hype (cf. "LLMs") need to be defended For example, it's unlikely to see HN replies that go something like, "Yeah the hype sucks, but..." Instead, there will almost always be attempts to defend against any criticism of _the hype_ A comment such as "I do not use LLMs", i.e., I don't believe the hype, is likely to be challenged T…

There's a lot of money injected into astroturfing and propaganda by big LLM in my opinion. I'm unsure who it is, specifically, but it is undeniable it's there; from reddit posts talking about how "I havent written code in 60 years" to "I have 30 YoE, FAANG experience, impeccable track record, and I can't get a job....Drumroll It's due to AI!".

Even here it can get pretty negative in the comments, in waves. I've noticed a lot of articles about LLMs, making wild claims about its reach tend to get a lot of pro-LLM, supportive comments at first and then on less generalizing, fear-mongering comments are added, arguing against LLMs or limiting their predictions of it.

I'm guessing a lot of people aren't necessarily technical, and fully believe the big-llm promises and make broad assumptions about our profession; that or they're bots.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#498

Post by dntrshnthngjxct »

tovej wrote: post #416
dntrshnthngjxct wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

because you need to consider the context window, thus separate the prompts by task. Separating by tasks and planning things out is still your own work, no AI can replace that. assuming you do that properly, AI-generating the code may save you up to 15% of your full work time. Please reread my comment: "If you do not plan out the architecture soundly", planning includes breaking the task down and make multiple prompts.

Our job is to break problems down into simpler ones until they are easily solvable, and if a machine simplifies the last steps, it is fine.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#499

Post by oxag3n »

Lumping6371 wrote: post #495
oxag3n wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software engineers are anything but Luddites. This labeling tactic became pretty common and tries to build a narrative that software engineers are going away. Artisan coders, craftsmen, First and foremost, wool craftsmen are not engineers (which doesn't make their work less valuable). Second, most software engineers, especially not in FAANG-like companies, don't engineer a shit. My spouse worked at a large telecom co…

So only FAANG does engineering now? Pretty elitist take. Would you happen to have a FAANG company in your resume, by any chance? Yes, non tech companies tend to care less about the technical end of things. They, we, "don't do engineering" in the sense of dealing with large scale systems, optimization, etc. Still have to understand the product, and translate business requirements into code and systems, often running w…

> So only FAANG does engineering now?

No, my opinion is that most engineering is done in startups. Few people I know went to startups and had to engineer real systems end-to-end. These weren't usually FAANG-scale monsters and single node could handle all projected load.

> Would you happen to have a FAANG company in your resume, by any chance?

No, I went to academia instead. But my spouse and brother in law are in FAANG (two different companies), and my husband admits he hadn't engineered a shit for years (and he's not a manager), but there was a glimpse of real engineering over the years, especially pre-2020.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#500

Post by bdangubic »

oxag3n wrote: post #404
noemit wrote: post #106

Many people don't know this, but the Luddites were right. I studied Art History and this particular movement. One of the claims of the Luddites is that quality would go down, because their craft took half a lifetime to master (it was passed down from parent to chile.) I was able to feel wool scarves made in europe from the middle ages. (In museum storage, under the guidance of a curator) They are a fundamentally diff…

Software engineers are anything but Luddites. This labeling tactic became pretty common and tries to build a narrative that software engineers are going away. Artisan coders, craftsmen, First and foremost, wool craftsmen are not engineers (which doesn't make their work less valuable). Second, most software engineers, especially not in FAANG-like companies, don't engineer a shit. My spouse worked at a large telecom co…

> most software engineers, especially not in FAANG-like companies, don't engineer a shit.

true for FAANG as well

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