Don't be pennywise and pound foolish...
The LLM coding agents might help you fire some swe to save a penny or two, but soon enough, it will also help your customers or suppliers to replace your business model.
My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
611–620 of 1001 posts
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#612I’m an AI skeptic. I’m probably wrong. This article makes me feel kinda wrong. But I desperately want to be right. Why? Because if I’m not right then I am convinced that AI is going to be a force for evil. It will power scams on an unimaginable scale. It will destabilize labor at a speed that will make the Industrial Revolution seem like a gentle breeze. It will concentrate immense power and wealth in the hands of pe…
"It will power scams on an unimaginable scale. It will destabilize labor at a speed that will make the Industrial Revolution seem like a gentle breeze."
I keep hearing this but have yet to find a good resource to study the issues. Most of what I've read so far falls into two buckets:
"It'll hijack our minds via Social Media" - in which case Social Media is the original sin and the problem we should be dealing with, not AI.
or
"It'll make us obsolete" - I use the cutting edge AI, and it will not, not anytime soon. Even if it does, I don't want to be a lamplighter rioting, I want to have long moved on.
So what other good theories of safety can I read? Genuine question.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#613I’m an AI skeptic. I’m probably wrong. This article makes me feel kinda wrong. But I desperately want to be right. Why? Because if I’m not right then I am convinced that AI is going to be a force for evil. It will power scams on an unimaginable scale. It will destabilize labor at a speed that will make the Industrial Revolution seem like a gentle breeze. It will concentrate immense power and wealth in the hands of pe…
Yep. It’s going to do all of those things you fear. And worse.
But you’ll be armed with AI also, if you choose to pick it up. The choice is yours.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#614Curious how he reconciles this: > If you build something with an LLM that people will depend on, read the code. In fact, you’ll probably do more than that. You’ll spend 5-10 minutes knocking it back into your own style. with Joel Spolsky's fundamental maxim: > It’s harder to read code than to write it. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
I can reconcile that. Joel is right. So is Thomas. If you're a professional programmer you should be able to do the harder thing.
Thomas was a bit more spicy about that:
> but you have no idea what the code is - Are you a vibe coding Youtuber? Can you not read code? If so: astute point. Otherwise: what the fuck is wrong with you?
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#615I’m an AI skeptic. I’m probably wrong. This article makes me feel kinda wrong. But I desperately want to be right. Why? Because if I’m not right then I am convinced that AI is going to be a force for evil. It will power scams on an unimaginable scale. It will destabilize labor at a speed that will make the Industrial Revolution seem like a gentle breeze. It will concentrate immense power and wealth in the hands of pe…
Why can't there be a middle ground? Why does it need to be either a completely useless fad or some terrible tool for evil that destabilizes the world? Its likely we'll just use it to write unit tests, allow natural language to be an interface to more complex systems and an alternative to search.
I do think that this wave of AI should show we(society, the world, etc...) are not actually prepared for real significant AI break through. Kind of like covid19 in hindsight wasn't as bad as it could of be and we all got really lucky because of that, we really weren't prepared to handle that well either.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#616I find it interesting that TFA claims that Go is the most LLM legible language.
I suspect C# Asp.Net Core not so much. Any thoughts?
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#617The argument that I've heard against LLMs for code is that they create bugs that, by design, are very difficult to spot. The LLM has one job, to make code that looks plausible. That's it. There's no logic gone into writing that bit of code. So the bugs often won't be like those a programmer makes. Instead, they can introduce a whole new class of bug that's way harder to debug.
For me it's mostly about the efficiency of the code they write. This is because I work in energy where efficiency matters because our datasets are so ridicilously large and every interface to that data is so ridicilously bad. I'd argue that for 95% of the software out there it won't really matter if you use a list or a generator in Python to iterate over data. It probably should and maybe this will change with cloud costs continious increasing, but we do also live in a world where 4chan ran on some apache server running a 10k line php file from 2015...
Anyway, this is where AI's have been really bad for us. As well as sometimes "overengineering" their bug prevention in extremely inefficient ways. The flip-side of this is of course that a lot of human programmers would make the same mistakes.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#618This is also where I am, and I guess it has been a source of mild and growing consternation since I first blagged an OpenAI GPT account when they were private, in an attempt to get ahead of what was coming -- both the positive and negative sides of the advances. Most people either ignored the advances, or quickly identified and connected to the negative side, and effectively filtered out the rest. As somebody who com…
Hey, thanks for this. It helps with some stuff I've been thinking about. I appreciate it a lot, gonna do more thinking.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#619I’m an AI skeptic. I’m probably wrong. This article makes me feel kinda wrong. But I desperately want to be right. Why? Because if I’m not right then I am convinced that AI is going to be a force for evil. It will power scams on an unimaginable scale. It will destabilize labor at a speed that will make the Industrial Revolution seem like a gentle breeze. It will concentrate immense power and wealth in the hands of pe…
> And we, the engineers, are in a unique position. Unlike people in any other industry, we can affect the trajectory of AI.
Oh boy it's over.
Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
#620This article does not touch on the thing which worries me the most with respect to LLMs: the dependence . Unless you can run the LLM locally, on a computer you own, you are now completely dependent on a remote centralized system to do your work. Whoever controls that system can arbitrarily raise the prices, subtly manipulate the outputs, store and do anything they want with the inputs, or even suddenly cease to opera…
Good thing it's a competitive market with at least 5 serious, independent players.