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The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

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Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#601

Post by saghm »

grey-area wrote: post #438
Henchman21 wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because there is no appreciable difference between outputs. Most of the work that most of us do isn't important. It's busywork byproducts of making widgets that most people don't even need. So if your job is already pointless why not make it easier using LLMs?

Sounds a little sad. I think I’d rather find another job.

Sure, but I'd also rather have so much money I never needed to work for money again and could just do whatever I actually enjoyed all of the time. Back in reality, lots of people work because they have to, and choosing a job is a balance between what they'd rather do and what actually is available for them to be able to afford food and a place to live.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#602

Post by alxndr »

zozbot234 wrote: post #358
DavidPiper wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that being further along the Vibe end of the spectrum is the issue. Some of the other ways I use Claude don't have the same problems. > If the result is something you can't explain than slow down and follow the steps it takes as they are taken. The problem is I can explain it. But it's rote and not malleable. I didn't do the work to prove it to myself. Its primary form is on the page, not in my head, as it we…

> I can explain it. But it's rote and not malleable. The AI can help with that too. Ask it "How would one think about this issue, to prove that what was done here is correct?" and it will come up with somethimg to help you ground that understanding intuitively.

This is the approach I’m taking, along with being much more verbose than my normal style with comments in the code and commit messages (including snippets of the prompts/insights that inspired the change).

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#603

Post by xijolaf268 »

boxomcfoxo wrote: post #590
simianwords wrote: post #54

> Frank Herbert (yeah, I know I'm a nerd), in God Emperor of Dune, has a character observe: "What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking; there's the real danger." Herbert was writing science fiction. I'm writing about my office. The distance between those two things has gotten uncomfortably small. The author is a bit naive here: 1. Soc…

The post was written by Claude. The semicolon in the Dune quote proves it: the only possible reason for that to be there is if the 'author' regex replaced all of the em dashes to obfuscate the source. https://boxobarks.leaflet.pub/3misaejnoqs2k

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Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#604

Post by gbro3n »

ipaddr wrote: post #195
duskdozer wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Soon enough we'll have ads playing in our cars at stoplights.

We have that now for most people, the radio. But hopefully we will be in a llm self driving car and can get ads for the entire trip.

That is a very possible reality. Pay extra for no ads or a reduced cost trip if you consent to having your eyeballs held open while separate ads are played to each eyeball.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#605

Post by yibewe6232 »

boxomcfoxo wrote: post #590
simianwords wrote: post #54

> Frank Herbert (yeah, I know I'm a nerd), in God Emperor of Dune, has a character observe: "What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking; there's the real danger." Herbert was writing science fiction. I'm writing about my office. The distance between those two things has gotten uncomfortably small. The author is a bit naive here: 1. Soc…

The post was written by Claude. The semicolon in the Dune quote proves it: the only possible reason for that to be there is if the 'author' regex replaced all of the em dashes to obfuscate the source. https://boxobarks.leaflet.pub/3misaejnoqs2k

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Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#606

Post by ninalanyon »

boothby wrote: post #433
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At the type of place where I taught until recently—a small, selective, private liberal-arts college—administrators can go quite far in limiting AI use, if they have the guts to do so. They should commit to a ruthless de-teching not just of classrooms but of their entire institution. Get rid of Wi-Fi and return to Ethernet, which would allow schools greater control over where and when students use digital technologi…

> If students want to type notes in class or papers in the library, they can use digital typewriters, which have word processing but nothing else. Only, replacing the guts of such a machine to contain a local LLM is damn easy today. Right now the battery mass required to power the device would be a giveaway, but inference is getting energetically cheaper. > Colleges that are especially committed to maintaining this t…

Just return to old fashioned styles of universities with tutorials, lectures, offline handwritten exams, and viva voce.

It's very hard to hide the fact that someone else did an assignment when you have to defend it in front your tutor and a small group of fellow students and it's next to impossible to pass a final viva without knowing and understanding what you are talking about.

The problem is we have all become addicted to cheap 'education' and a the traditional methods are expensive.

But I think the institutions and the students need to ask themselves what the university is for. Is it to hand out diplomas or is it there so that the students can learn? A student who only wants the diploma has an incentive to cheat, one who wants to learn does not because the only person cheated is themself.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#607

Post by b112 »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #138
b112 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worse, soon fewer and fewer people will taste good food, including even higher and higher scale restaurants just using pre-made. As fewer know what good food tastes like, the entire market will enshitify towards lower and lower calibre food. We already see this with, for example, fruits in cold climates. I've known people who have only ever bought them from the supermarket, then tried them at a farmers when they're i…

Ironically, apples are one of the fruits where tree ripening isn't a big deal for a lot of varietals. You should have used tomato as the example, the difference there is night and day pretty much across the board. If humans can prove that bespoke human code brings value, it'll stick around. I expect that the cases where this will be true will just gradually erode over time.

If humans can prove that bespoke human code brings value, it'll stick around.

Value to who, and which type of value?

Will that defining value be purely economic in nature? While it be purely defined by mega-corps, and their perception of value? The market moves, the money flows to those which control its direction.

We already see it today, with some firms literally forcing people to use LLM coding tools. The stories abound, of simply being forced to use whatever it spits out. Value, is often designed by cost, and code maintainability 5 years later isn't an immediate, quarter-profit induced concern.

It feels like you're glossing over a lot of my point.

In terms of new coding languages, it's rare to see new coding languages gain any traction, rust is the only recent one I know, and it's had a larger backer behind it since its release 15 years ago. It was supported in house for almost a decade before even seeing the light of day.

Will that happen now? And created (or at least managed) by a human? If not, what would a new language look like? Would it be human maintainable? Understood?

To me, this goes right back to the classic "buying a car with the hood welded shut". No way to maintain, repair, or even evaluate the quality of the thing under you.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#608

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

danorama wrote: post #576
Izkata wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trump was in part a response to that realization, an outsider from both parties that used the Republicans to get in the door. Bernie Sanders was supposed to be the same, and when he dropped out a lot of us switched to Trump because they represented the same thing. Tearing down entrenched establishments that don't work for the people is what people were voting for in 2016 and were disappointed he didn't do it. They're…

"Bernie Sanders was supposed to be the same, and when he dropped out a lot of us switched to Trump because they represented the same thing." That is definitely an opinion.

It was a pretty widely shared one in 2016, if I remember correctly.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#609

Post by jamiemallers »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #227

> Schwartz's experiment is the most revealing, and not for the reason he thinks. What he demonstrated is that Claude can, with detailed supervision, produce a technically rigorous physics paper. What he actually demonstrated, if you read carefully, is that the supervision is the physics. Claude produced a complete first draft in three days. It looked professional. The equations seemed right. The plots matched expecta…

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Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#610

Post by calf »

AlexWilkins12 wrote: post #72

Ironically, this article reeks of AI-generated phrases. Lot's of "It's not X, it's Y". eg: - "The failure mode isn't malice. It's convenience", - "You haven't saved time. You've forfeited the experience that the time was supposed to give you." - "But the real threat isn't either of those things. It's quieter, and more boring, and therefore more dangerous. The real threat is a slow, comfortable drift toward not unders…

Those X-Y sentences are like nails on chalkboard to me, but I genuinely wonder why it is so pervasive in LLM arguments. It is like trying very hard to think in binary terms yet failing.
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