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I hate AI side projects

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Re: I hate AI side projects

#81

Post by btrettel »

selridge wrote: post #79
btrettel wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a daily journal where I put every online post I make. I include anything I send to a LLM on my own time in there. (I have a separate work log on their computer, though I don't log my work prompts.) Likely I miss a few posts/prompts, but this should have the vast majority. A few caveats: I'm not a heavy LLM user (this is probably what you're getting at) and the following is a low estimate. Often, I'll save the…

No the same question CANNOT be asked of source code because it can execute. You might as well ask for a record of the conversations between two engineers while code was being written. That's what the chat is. I have a pre-pre-alpha project which already has potentially hundreds of "prompts"--really turns in continuing conversations. Some of them with 1 kind of embedded agent, some with another. Some with agents on th…

> maybe you don't have the necessary perspective to understand what you're asking for.

I disagree. Thinking about this more, I can give an example from my time working as a patent examiner at the USPTO. We were required to include detailed search logs, which were primarily autogenerated using the USPTO's internal search tools. Basically, every query I made was listed. Often this was hundreds of queries for a particular application. You could also add manual entries. Looking at other examiners' search logs was absolutely useful to learn good queries, and I believe primary examiners checked the search logs to evaluate the quality of the search before posting office actions (primary examiners had to review the work of junior examiners like myself). With the right tools, this is useful and not burdensome, I think. Like prompts, this doesn't include the full story (the search results are obviously important too but excluded from the logs), but that doesn't stop the search logs from being useful.

> You might as well ask for a record of the conversations between two engineers while code was being written.

No, that's not typically logged, so it would be very burdensome. LLM prompts and responses, if not automatically logged, can easily be automatically logged.

Re: I hate AI side projects

#82

Post by selridge »

btrettel wrote: post #78
selridge wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I log every prompt to a LLM that I make. How many do you have in the log total?

I have a daily journal where I put every online post I make. I include anything I send to a LLM on my own time in there. (I have a separate work log on their computer, though I don't log my work prompts.) Likely I miss a few posts/prompts, but this should have the vast majority. A few caveats: I'm not a heavy LLM user (this is probably what you're getting at) and the following is a low estimate. Often, I'll save the…

I can't reply to the other comment, but here goes:

This is one (1) conversation: https://chatgpt.com/share/69991d7e-87fc-8002-8c0e-2b38ed6673...

It has 9 "prompts" On just the issue of path re-writing, that's probably one of a dozen conversations, NOT INCLUDING prompts fed into an LLM that existed to strip spaces and newlines caused by copying things out of a TUI.

It's ok for things to be different than they used to be. It's ok for "prompts" to have been a meaningful unit of analysis 2 years ago but pointless today.

Re: I hate AI side projects

#83

Post by argee »

alphazard wrote: post #26

This is exposing a problem that already existed, AI is just throwing gas on the fire. Most engineers, including the readership of this site, have terrible taste in software. What I mean by that is: after reading through a brief description of a project, or a conceptual overview, they are no better than noise at predicting whether it will be worthwhile to try out, or rewarding to learn about, or have a discussion abou…

> What I mean by that is: after reading through a brief description of a project, or a conceptual overview, they are no better than noise at predicting whether it will be worthwhile to try out, or rewarding to learn about, or have a discussion about, or start using day-to-day.

You could criticize a Michelin inspector the same way. The poor bastards have to actually taste the dish and can't decide merit based on menu descriptions alone.

Re: I hate AI side projects

#85

Post by sodapopcan »

selridge wrote: post #70
khalic wrote: post #8

It’s funny because I hate these “I hate stuff” articles.

Yeah we’re drowning in complaints about slop.

So many people are complaining about police brutality, but there are like some really good people on our force! Can't we just focus on them?

Re: I hate AI side projects

#88

Post by erelong »

I've been seeing a lot of posts like this and I don't tend to agree with the "anti-AI sentiment", but I think some of the problems identified might be like this:

People may lack ideas of interesting projects to work on in the first place; so we need to think about how to help people to think of useful and interesting projects to work on

Related to that idea, people may need to develop skills for building more "complex" ideas and we may need to think about how to make that more possible in the era of AI usage... even if some AI agent can take care of a technical side of things, it still takes a kind of "complexity of thought" to dream up more complicated / useful / interesting projects (I get the impression that there may be a need for some kind of training of the mind necessary for asking for an "automobile" rather than a "faster horse", by analogy... and that conception was often found through manually tinkering with intermediate devices like the bicycle. Hence an AI could "one shot" something interesting but what that thing is is limited by the imagination of the user, which may be limited by technical inability - in other words, the user may need to develop more technical ability in order to be able to dream up more interesting things to create, even if this "technical ability" is a more "skilled usage of AI tools")

There needs to be some way to filter through "noise". That's not a new issue and... a lot of these questions or complaints often feel very "meta", as in - you could just ask AI how to make side projects more interesting or useful, or how to create good filters in the age of AI. In sports, there are hierarchical levels of competition - likewise here you might have forums that are more closed off to newcomers if you want to "gatekeep" things, and they have to compete in "local pools" of attention and if they "win" there, then their "qualified authority / leader" submits the project to a higher level, and so on. AI suggests using qualified curators to create newsfeeds or to act as filters of the "slop".

Re: I hate AI side projects

#90

Post by xigoi »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #62
vermilingua wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, because becoming totally reliant on a technology only made possible by weaponising the entire global economy looks nothing like corporate feudalism.

Local models exist. Decouple your dislike of the companies from the technology they're trying to leverage.

Who trained those local models?
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