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Average is all you need

rawquery.dev

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Re: Average is all you need

#51

Post by HWR_14 »

bluegatty wrote: post #50
HWR_14 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We make more homes, but I would say the construction of the average home is worse after the invention of the power saw than before it.

Good gosh no. That's like saying 'cars were better made in the 1950's because they used tons of steel'. Like they were 'heavier and more robust' - but that doesn't mean better. Foundations are way better, more robust, especially weatherized. Windows today are like magic compared to windows 100 years ago. What we do more poorly now is we don't use wood everywhere, aka doors, and certain kinds of workmanship are not th…

Yes, houses got better because materials got better. Windows are better. But the construction of the houses is worse.

The precision of how the wood or material meets is worse (when cut at the site). There is a huge amount of sloppy work in modern construction.

Re: Average is all you need

#52

Post by xg15 »

I think the author should be introduced to (or reminded of) the tale of the average from the US Air Force [1]. Social reality is high-dimensional and the "normal" thing is actually to be average in some dimensions, but strongly non-average in many others. So a "perfectly average" family would paradoxically be an outlier themselves.

I think this is important, because if his hypothesis is right, then LLMs behave differently here: They really are average in all dimensions. They are the pilots the Air Force thought they had before Daniels made the study.

So if he is right, we'd be changing from a mostly-non-average to a mostly-average society, which would really be a massive change - and probably not a good one IMO.

[1] https://noblestatman.com/uploads/6/6/7/3/66731677/cockpit.fl...

Re: Average is all you need

#53

Post by CodeyWhizzBang »

JackSlateur wrote: post #13
CodeyWhizzBang wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A car that starts 50% of the time isn't "average". The average new car starts more or less every time. (And if you said 'modal average', I'd say the modal average new car starts every time).

It is not average today because people in the past tried to do better, not average things

I think that's maybe the point of the article:

"Whereas before, average was expensive in terms of both time and effort, average became cheap."

Re: Average is all you need

#54

Post by sdevonoes »

throw310822 wrote: post #42

Why average? I've always taken pride in my work and developed things that went beyond the expectations of the management and of the final users. Now I'm using LLMs a lot and I've been able to do much more than I used to- I find them great coworkers, technically very knowledgeable, patient and fast. I provide the big picture, keep an eye on the architectural soundness and code quality, and design the features. The LLM…

Nobody cares

Re: Average is all you need

#55

Post by Ancapistani »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #46
drfloyd51 wrote: post #2

If average is all we need, then anyone can do it. What value do I add? How does an employee differentiate themselves? Why didn’t the boss ask the AI for the charts to begin with? Everyone’s income is going to be below average, because they got fired.

At any tech company with leveling guidelines that I have seen, promotions above mid level have never been based on “I codez real gud”. It’s always been based on scope, impact and dealing with ambiguity. It’s stated differently in different companies. No one has ever differentiated themselves based on how good of a ticket taker they are. Coding especially on the enterprise dev side where most developers work has been…

> At any tech company with leveling guidelines that I have seen, promotions above mid level have never been based on “I codez real gud”. It’s always been based on scope, impact and dealing with ambiguity. It’s stated differently in different companies.

I 100% agree here.

AI has been a huge boon for me personally, because I stopped spending most of my writing code years ago. I was reviewing code, writing procedures, handling incidents, and generally just looking for pain points across the entire company and solving them before they became critical.

Those skills have transferred directly to working with AI.

Re: Average is all you need

#56

Post by Ancapistani »

antihipocrat wrote: post #36
winterbloom wrote: post #15

how do you know those queries are actually correct without domain knowledge? Do you know enough about JOINs and how they work to be able to break those big queries down and figure out whether they are doing exactly what you're asking for in English?

You don't, and if businesses start using vibed reports for regulated reporting then I guess we'll see soon what the courts say about that

Litigation aside for a moment - I'm not sure vide-coded reporting could be much worse than what I've seen from early-career analysts in past companies.

Re: Average is all you need

#57

Post by Ancapistani »

chriswait wrote: post #47

I always find it a bit weird to see posts on the front page where all the comments disagree with the central premise of the article. In this case the post is an ad advocating for executing code you didn't write and handing the results to your manager. It makes me wonder if Hacker News has a silent majority of people who would actually use AI in this way without wanting to admit it, and a vocal minority of people who…

I'll admit that there are definitely times where I decide it's fine to roll with it blind. It's not often, not for critical paths, and definitely not where I don't have a good understanding of the blast radius if it fails spectacularly - but you'd be surprised how often it's easier and faster to fix it if it breaks than it would be to make sure it's not broken.

Re: Average is all you need

#58

Post by Axel2Sikov »

jihadjihad wrote: post #33

> You did not write a single line of SQL. You did not set up an attribution model. You asked a question, in English, and got a table. But nobody bothered to check if it was correct. It might seem correct, but I've been burned by queries exactly like these many, many times. What can often happen is that you end up with multiplied rows, and the answer isn't "let's just add a DISTINCT somewhere". The answer is to look a…

Ok but… nobody said you didn’t had to check either(?).

Re: Average is all you need

#59

Post by Axel2Sikov »

winterbloom wrote: post #15

how do you know those queries are actually correct without domain knowledge? Do you know enough about JOINs and how they work to be able to break those big queries down and figure out whether they are doing exactly what you're asking for in English?

You don’t. But you can still check ? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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