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I'd rather read the prompt

claytonwramsey.com

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Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#501

Post by lmm »

raincole wrote: post #267
pessimizer wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you used a wheelchair every day, your legs would atrophy. Regardless of the existence of other ways to exercise your legs which you also will not do, because you're a person with working legs who chooses to use a wheelchair.

Many people with working legs choose to drive. It doesn't mean they don't go to the gym. Actually people even drive to the gym! (surprise, I know)

Many people drive to the gym to play on their phones, sure. But the kind of person who drives generally won't do much actual working out.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#502

Post by godelski »

lmm wrote: post #489
godelski wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We are a society of ladder-pullers. I don't disagree, but often we complain about people pulling up ladders and when faced with the same decision we follow suit. Ultimately we can't change this behavior if no one is willing to defect from "conventional wisdom"

We can't fix the problem by making better choices as individuals, and exhorting people to do so saps energy and distracts. The system interprets integrity as damage and routes around it.

  > We can't fix the problem by making better choices as individuals
That's wildly inaccurate. Your logic necessitates that "the system" is not composed of individuals.

The problem itself was created through individual actions...

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#503

Post by lmm »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #367
colechristensen wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Memorizing things is somewhat helpful but being able to parrot back answers to questions is not at all the same thing as knowledge, skills, or experience. Memorizing a bunch of facts is an adequate way to fool someone into thinking you have those things. Testing for memorized facts is a good way to misidentify useful skills.

And yet there is still value in facts. For example, learning the ideal gas law in high school has enabled me to understand in my adult life how gases will react when compressed or when released. Yet the ideal gas law is a simple fact that you can memorize in minutes. In this case, memorizing that small fact about physics enabled me to apply it to gain understanding of other situations. I believe that the same holds t…

A law is an infinite family of facts, it's already several steps up from memorising a concrete fact like the density of oxygen at room temperature and pressure.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#504

Post by solaire_oa »

dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #490
kevinventullo wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something I’ve found very helpful is when I have a murky idea in my head that would take a long time for me to articulate concisely, and I use an LLM to compress what I’m trying to say. So I type (or even dictate) a stream of consciousness with lots of parentheticals and semi-structured thoughts and ask it to summarize. I find it often does a great job at saying what I want to say, but better. (See also the famous Pa…

Like the linked article, I’d rather read your original text, even if it’s less structured and rough

Agreed, the messiness of the original text has character and humanity that is stripped from the summarized text. The first text is an original thought, exchanged in a dialogue, imperfectly.

Elsewhere in this comment section, it's discussed about the importance of having original thought, which the summarized text specifically isn't, and has leeched away.

The parent comment has actually made the case against the summarized text being "better" (if we're measuring anything that isn't word count).

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#505

Post by godelski »

icelancer wrote: post #475
godelski wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm there for the degree Would you hire someone without a degree? When you're in a position to hire or influence hiring, will you consider those without degrees? I ask because I hear this sentiment a lot but we still have a system becoming more reliant on degrees. The universities may be the gatekeepers of those degrees but they're not the ones gatekeeping the jobs. They have no influence there. They were not the o…

I am generally education blind. Mostly I would say graduate school experience has been a net negative on my teams overall, if anything.

The second half seems to contradict the first. But I do condone the actions, as that's the only way things can change.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#506

Post by ookblah »

sn9 wrote: post #221

> I should hope that the purpose of a class writing exercise is not to create an artifact of text but force the student to think; a language model produces the former, not the latter. It's been incredibly blackpilling seeing how many intelligent professionals and academics don't understand this, especially in education and academia. They see work as the mere production of output, without ever thinking about how that…

knowledge gap and consolidation just gets wider, like before. the internet rotted peoples brains but also brought that knowledge to people who would have never had the opportunity to learn.

those who use the tools to accelerate their learning will do so and others who use it just to get by will see their skills atrophy and become irrelevant.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#507

Post by renewiltord »

smcg wrote: post #442
Mengkudulangsat wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If students find a way to get a diploma without doing the work, it will soon be worth less than the paper on which it is printed. Amen. I look forward to the era where we train professionals the old fashion way: apprenticeships. It sure worked for blacksmiths and artisans for hundreds of years.

Companies don't want to retain anyone longer than 2 years. They would never go for this unless forced to. By collective action.

It’s not that they can’t. It’s that I can always pay more by freeloading on their training.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#508

Post by lmm »

satisfice wrote: post #111
_qswe wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the author has a fair take on the types of LLM output he has experience with, but may be overgeneralizing his conclusion. As shown by his example, he seems to be narrowly focusing on the use case of giving the AI some small snippet of text and asking it to stretch that into something less information-dense — like the stereotypical "write a response to this email that says X", and sending that output instead o…

If you present your AI-powered work to me, and I suspect you employed AI to do any of the heavy lifting, I will automatically discount any role you claim to have had in that work. Fairly or unfairly, people (including you) will inexorably come to see anything done with AI as ONLY done with AI, and automatically assume that anyone could have done it. In such a world, someone could write the next Harry Potter and it wi…

> In such a world, someone could write the next Harry Potter and it will be lost in a sea of one million mediocre works that roughly similar. Hidden in plain sight forever. There would no point in reading it, because it is probably the same slop I could get by writing a one paragraph prompt. It would be too expensive to discover otherwise.

This has already been the case for decades. There are probably brilliant works sitting out there on AO3 or whatnot. But you'll never find them because it's not worth wading through the junk. AI merely accelerates what was already happening.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#509

Post by ziotom78 »

kergonath wrote: post #288
bost-ty wrote: post #4

I like the author's take: it isn't a value judgement on the individual using ChatGPT (or Gemini or whichever LLM you like this week), it's that the thought that went into making the prompt is, inevitably, more interesting/original/human than the output the LLM generates afterwards. In my experiments with LLMs for writing code, I find that the code is objectively garbage if my prompt is garbage. If I don't know what I…

> I'd love to hear any counterpoints from folks who have used LLMs lately to get academic or creative writing done They’re great at proofreading. They’re also good at writing conclusions and abstracts for articles, which is basically synthesising the results of the article and making it sexy (a task most scientists are hopelessly terrible at). With caveats: - all the information needs to be in the prompt, or they wil…

Point two is critical. I have found that the best way for me is to avoid using copy-and-paste. Instead, I put the browser on the right corner of the screen and my text editor on the left, then transcribe the text word by word by typing it using the keyboard. In this way, my natural laziness is less likely to accept words, expressions, and sentences that are perhaps okay-ish but not 100% following my taste.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#510

Post by Seattle3503 »

mikepurvis wrote: post #470
derefr wrote: post #13

> They are invariably verbose, interminably waffly, and insipidly fixated on the bullet-points-with-bold style. No, this is just the de-facto "house style" of ChatGPT / GPT models, in much the same way that that that particular Thomas Kinkade-like style is the de-facto "house style" of Stable Diffusion models. You can very easily tell an LLM in your prompt to respond using a different style. (Or you can set it up to…

I was surprised to see such world-weary criticism of the bullet-points-with-bold style in TFA— it's long been what I've reached for when writing for a technical audience, whether that's in a wiki page, a design doc, a README, a PR, or even a whole book. I feel like for most of my audiences it provides the proper anchor points for effective skimming while still giving me room to include further detail and explanation…

One of my issues with LLMs is how much they match the academic, technical, and corporate styles of speaking Ive learned over the years. Now when I write people ignore me because they assume I'm just pasting LLM output.
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