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The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

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Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#51

Post by vladms »

xg15 wrote: post #33
vladms wrote: post #31

> Whether something is a forgery is innate in the object and the methods used to produce it. It doesn't matter if nobody else ever sees the forged painting, or if it only hangs in a private home. It's a forgery because it's not authentic. On a philosophical level I do not get the discussions about paintings. I love a painting for what it is not for being the first or the only one. An artist that paints something that…

> An artist that paints something that I can't distinguish from a Van Gogh is a very skillful artist and the painting is very beautiful. There are a lot such artists who can do that after having seen Van Gogh's paintings before . Only Van Gogh (as far as we know) did paint those without having seen anything like it before - in other words, he had a new idea.

So, if we apply to software, should we quote Dijkstra each time we use his graph algorithm?

Should we also say "if you can implement Dijkstra's algorithm" it's irrelevant because "you did not have the idea"?

It's great to credit people that have an idea first. I fail to see how using an idea is that "bad" or "not worthy", ideas should be spread and used, not locked by the first one that had them (except some small time period maybe).

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#52

Post by vjerancrnjak »

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…

Libraries create boundaries, which are in most cases arbitrary, that then limit the way you can interact with code, creating more boilerplate to get what you want from a library.

Abstractions are the source of bloat. Without abstractions you can always reduce bloat, or you can reduce bloat in your glue, but you can't reduce glue.

It takes discipline to NOT create arbitrary function signatures and short-lived intermediate data structures or type definitions. This is the beginning of boilerplate.

So many advances in removing boilerplate are realizing your 5 function calls and 10 intermediate data structures or type definitions, essentially compute a thing that you can do with 0 function calls and 0 custom datatypes and less lines of code.

The abstraction hides how simple the thing you want is.

Problem is that all open source code looks like the bloat described above, so LLMs have no idea how to actually write code that is without boilerplate. The only place where I've seen it work is in shaders, which are usually written to avoid common pitfalls of abstraction.

LLMs are incapable of writing a big program in 1 function and 1 file, that does what you want. Splitting the program into functions or even multiple files, is a step you do after a lot of time, yet all open source looks nothing like that.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#53

Post by tovej »

raincole wrote: post #34

> Video games stand out as one market where consumers have pushed back effectively No, it's simply untrue. Players only object against AI art assets. And only when they're painfully obvious. No one cares about how the code is written. If you actually read the words used in Steam AI survey you'll know Steam has completely caved in for AI-gen code as well. It's specifically worded like this: > content such as artwork,…

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.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#54

Post by Otterly99 »

vladms wrote: post #31

> Whether something is a forgery is innate in the object and the methods used to produce it. It doesn't matter if nobody else ever sees the forged painting, or if it only hangs in a private home. It's a forgery because it's not authentic. On a philosophical level I do not get the discussions about paintings. I love a painting for what it is not for being the first or the only one. An artist that paints something that…

Art in general is a bit weird like that.

The value of a piece is definitely not completely tied to its physical attributes, but the story around it. The story is what creates its scarcity and generates the value.

It is similar for collectible items. If I had in my possession the original costume that Michael Jackson wore in thriller, I am sure I could sell it for thousands of dollars. I can also buy a copy for less than a hundred.

Same with luxury brands. Their price is not necessarily linked to their quality, but to the status they bring and the story they tell (i.e. wearing this transforms me into somebody important).

It can seem quite silly, but I think we are all doing it to some extent. While you said that a good forgery shouldn't affect one's opinion on the object (and I agree with you), what about AI-generated content? If I made a novel painting in the style of Van Gogh, you might find it beautiful. What if I told you I just prompted it and painted it? What if I just printed it? There are levels of involvement that we are all willing to accept differently.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#55

Post by tovej »

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…

We already have tools to generate boilerplate, and they work exceptionally well. The LLM just produces nondeterministic boilerplate.

I also don't know what work you do, but I would not characterize the codebases I work in as "small bits of novelty" on boilerplate. Software engineering is always a holistic systems undertaking, where every subcomponent and the interactions between them have to be considered.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#56

Post by lisper »

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…

> why hasn’t the boilerplate been automated as libraries or other abstractions?

Cue the smug Lisp weenies.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#57

Post by vladms »

jesterswilde wrote: post #48
vladms wrote: post #31

> Whether something is a forgery is innate in the object and the methods used to produce it. It doesn't matter if nobody else ever sees the forged painting, or if it only hangs in a private home. It's a forgery because it's not authentic. On a philosophical level I do not get the discussions about paintings. I love a painting for what it is not for being the first or the only one. An artist that paints something that…

Regarding art, what do you feel about museums? Why would you go see an original instead of simply looking at a jpg. Even if you aren't in the group, there is clearly a group of people who appreciate seeing the original, the thing that modified our collective artistic trajectory. Forgeries and master studies have a long history in art. Every classically trained worth their salt has a handful of forgeries under their b…

> Regarding art, what do you feel about museums? Why would you go see an original instead of simply looking at a jpg.

I go to a museum to see a curated collection with explanations in a place that prevents distractions (I can't open a new tab) and going with people that might be interested to talk about what they see and feel. It's as well a social and personal experience on top information gathering.

> there is clearly a group of people who appreciate seeing the original,

There are many people interested in many things, do you want to say that "because some people think it is important, it must be important"? There were many people with really weird and despicable ideas along history and while I am neutral to this one, they definitely don't convince me just by their numbers.

> simply looking at a jpg.

Technically a jpg would not work because is lossy compression. But a png at the correct resolution might do the trick for some things (paintings that you see from far), but not for others. Museum have multiple objects that would be hard to put in an image (statues, clothes, bones, tables, etc.). You definitely can't put https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comedian_(artwork) in a jpg - but the discussion surrounding it touches topics discussed here.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#58

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

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…

Programmers aren't paid to code.

FORTRAN ("formula translator") was one of the first programs ever written and it was supposed to make coding obsolete. Scientists will now be able to just type in formulas and the computer will just calculate the result, imagine that!

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#59

Post by GaryBluto »

I think it says a lot about this opinion piece that the people agreeing with it are posting short comments saying "So true!" and "Great!" whilst the people criticizing it are writing paragraphs of well-spoken criticism.
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