Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I'm Not Consulting an LLM

lr0.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 81 posts

Re: I'm Not Consulting an LLM

#51

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

n0on3 wrote: post #47
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #35

For myself, I’m very much a “results” guy. Have been, for all my career. I’ve been shipping (as opposed to “writing”) software for most of my adult life. People seem to like to stuff I make. I’m currently working on my first major project that incorporates heavy LLM contributions. It’s coming along great. I started with Machine Code and individual gate ICs, so my knowledge goes way down past the roots. I don’t miss i…

Would you be aware of it if that was the case? I don’t mean this to be hostile or anything but the senario in which one does not notice himself and it goes unnoticed or silently accepted externally does not seem too far fetched to me.

Probably, yes. If we don’t have a clear understanding of the fundamentals, it can make life difficult. Having that understanding, often helps us to verify new information. My personal experience has been “layers,” with the new layer building upon, and often subsuming, the substrate.

But it does mean that there’s limits. A lot of folks start at points higher than mine, and can go much further than me.

That’s fine; as long as I understand and accept my limitations, as well as my strengths.

It’s a long story, but I spent the majority of my career at some pretty demanding and high-functioning places. I had to learn to be self-critical, without being self-abusive.

Also, I have terrible memory. I suspect it comes from … experimentation … in my youth. Doesn’t make me stupid, but has given me a talent for leveraging reference materials.

Re: I'm Not Consulting an LLM

#52

Post by simianwords »

chrysoprace wrote: post #31
delusional wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true. Any journalist would tell you that picking the stories you chose to cover is just as much a bias as how you chose to cover them. Even then, the specific words you pick, how you ask the interviewees, how you place the story on the page, what you pick as the "related stories". All of that is Editorial and reflects an opinion. Good journalists are open about their angle. Bad journalists tell you they ar…

In the case of publications we luckily have such fantastic resources as mediabiasfactcheck[0] to keep their bias in check and to keep them factual. LLMs are much harder to fact-check because they can make anything up based on their training data and weights without sources. [0] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com

And biased journalism is still useful and informational.

Re: I'm Not Consulting an LLM

#53

Post by simianwords »

htnthrow11220 wrote: post #26
simianwords wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’ve used LLMs you’d know that they are way more correct than not.

Even a small % of incorrectness quickly produces compounding effects, if you view LLMs as an information source. True or false statements are made with equal confidence, because the LLM can’t distinguish true from false.

That’s the same as in normal journalism so I’m not sure why you pick LLMs as particularly bad

Re: I'm Not Consulting an LLM

#54

Post by demorro »

delusional wrote: post #20
mark_l_watson wrote: post #2

I understand the author’s sentiment but I would like to give a counter example: I like to read philosophy and after I read a passage and think about it, I find it useful to copy the passage into a decent model and ask for its interpretation, or if it is something old ask about word choice or meaning. I realize that I may not be getting perfect information, but LLM output gives me ideas that are a combination of live…

> I realize that I may not be getting perfect information, but LLM output gives me ideas that are a combination of live web searching and whatever innate knowledge the LLM holds in its weights. I don't mean to be judgemental. It's possible this is a personal observation, but I do wonder if it's not universal. I find that if I give an inch to these models thinking, I instantly become lazy. It doesn't really matter if…

Seconding this. Revelation happens subtly, often far removed from what you might later unpick as its "primary source". Immediate interpretation tend to be plastic and shallow.

Re: I'm Not Consulting an LLM

#55

Post by rsfern »

I like this analogy of always choosing “I’m feeling lucky” on Google, I feel like it clarifies a boundary between information retrieval and evaluation that gets blurred by language model summarizations. I’ve been frustrated with the LLM summary at the top of the Google search results for scientific topics because often the sources linked to don’t actually contain the information the summary is citing them for. Then I have a side quest of finding the right backing literature or deciding the summary was just wrong in the first place

Re: I'm Not Consulting an LLM

#56

Post by lostmsu »

xyzal wrote: post #7
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #5

Yawn. Just a post++ about white-horse attitudes regarding "muh expertise". And yet the top of the top experts in their fields (Terrence Tao, Karpathy, hell even Linus) are finding ways to make them useful for them . That's the crux imo. If you can't find a way to make these tools useful for you, you are the problem. Not the LLMs. THere's something there, even if currently not much, but there's something there for eve…

"If you can't find a way to make today's tech du jour useful for you, you are the problem". Hmmmmm.

You omitted the part where he said why it is for AI. Tao doesn't use React AFAIK

Re: I'm Not Consulting an LLM

#57

Post by maplethorpe »

> A tool can be efficient and still be intellectually corrosive, not because it lies all the time, but because it lies well enough. Its smoothness hides uncertainty, which is important unless you want intellect-rot.

I keep seeing sentiments like this, but to me they're still very much stuck in the past.

We once needed to develop our intellects in order to solve problems. It was a necessary part of the process. Solving a particular problem would flood our brains with dopamine, and we would feel good for achieving our goal, and thus continue to develop our intellect in the hope of achieving a similar rush in the future.

Now that we have a machine that can solve our problems for us, intellect just plain isn't necessary anymore. We can solve our problems immediately and skip the roundabout intellect-building process entirely. That's a liberating thing.

Re: I'm Not Consulting an LLM

#58

Post by simianwords »

delusional wrote: post #20
mark_l_watson wrote: post #2

I understand the author’s sentiment but I would like to give a counter example: I like to read philosophy and after I read a passage and think about it, I find it useful to copy the passage into a decent model and ask for its interpretation, or if it is something old ask about word choice or meaning. I realize that I may not be getting perfect information, but LLM output gives me ideas that are a combination of live…

> I realize that I may not be getting perfect information, but LLM output gives me ideas that are a combination of live web searching and whatever innate knowledge the LLM holds in its weights. I don't mean to be judgemental. It's possible this is a personal observation, but I do wonder if it's not universal. I find that if I give an inch to these models thinking, I instantly become lazy. It doesn't really matter if…

I don’t think you are wrong but isn’t it obvious to pick and choose cases where you might want to use LLMs vs doing the work? Seems obvious to me.

Sure if you want to read a novel, don’t ask an llm about it.

When you want to learn something quick then use LLMs. But you would know how much compression is going on. This is something we do routinely anyway. If I want to know something about taxes, I read the first google result and get the gist of it. But I’m still better off and didn’t require to take a full course.

Re: I'm Not Consulting an LLM

#59

Post by carrychains »

Same can be said of search engines, encyclopedias, or wikis compared to seeking out books, journals, and other source material. If you don't sit there for 8 hours in a library to find the same information on your own, you've missed out on the experience. It's a standard Luddite's argument. Tools of any kind that enhance efficiency have always actualized lazy outcomes. It has always been the human responsibility to, not only rely on their best effort, but to figure out what actually encompasses their best possible effort.

Re: I'm Not Consulting an LLM

#60

Post by hexaga »

maplethorpe wrote: post #57

> A tool can be efficient and still be intellectually corrosive, not because it lies all the time, but because it lies well enough. Its smoothness hides uncertainty, which is important unless you want intellect-rot. I keep seeing sentiments like this, but to me they're still very much stuck in the past. We once needed to develop our intellects in order to solve problems. It was a necessary part of the process. Solvin…

is this satire
Post reply on HN