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Average is all you need
81–90 of 111 posts
Re: Average is all you need
#82Why 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…
Just want to add this is my experience as well. Just solid coworkers. Of course they mess up sometimes, but easier to fix up than with humans and their politic and egos. I find I can actually reason for once instead of always fighting and deferring to whomever has The Biggest Opinion and not rarely just the loudest voice.
I think many people here work at nice, large places with reasonable and knowledgeable colleagues that are cooperative and mostly rational and try to do the right thing. In my experience that is not a common or widespread thing. Of course I only have small to medium business experience, but that's still a pretty good chunk of the economy. LLMs are an absurd, ridiculous win in those kinds of environments.
Re: Average is all you need
#83i fail to understand how text2sql on quite simple data sources is anything to write home about 3 years after it came onto the market? can someone elaborate?
where it gets interesting is when you have a custom system that your LLM surely never saw (custom ERP) that has 50 sometime cryptic tables, unclear look up tables and unexplained flags.
something no text2sql solution solved for us.
we built a second mcp that lets the agent look up business logic (generated from source code) and then does better queries. that i think is something i never read in a blog post about a text2sql solution.
Re: Average is all you need
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
this is not true in my experience. prefab kits of all sizes (from sheds to houses to barns, like were once possible to order from a Sears catalog) have worse tolerances than a carpenter working on site. you can measure 3 times and cut perfectly, and still end up with a few mm gap (or sometimes worse) after tiny errors accumulate as you assemble piece after piece. it _requires_ measuring as you go and cutting on site to handle this small amount of drift and to really produce something of high quality. it doesn't come in a box
Re: Average is all you need
#85I 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 differ…
Interesting link! What was the solution? How did they end up redesigning the cockpit?
From what I understood, it was the beginning of user-adjustable design. Instead of mounting the seat in a fixed height with fixed distance to the pedals, etc, they designed the cockpit so the pilot could adjust everything himself. Basically, what is standard in every car today.
Re: Average is all you need
#86> 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…
Yes. The correct answer is to ask an SQL expert to write the query. An LLM will make the expert much faster at writing the script, maybe.
Re: Average is all you need
#87I flat out disagree. If we want things that are better than average, we will need to be making things that are not average. The machine doesn't learn yet.
Re: Average is all you need
#88The real risk is not that "LLM SQL" is wrong, it is in fact that a man who asked for it can't recognize when it is wrong. Writing a query and knowing when JSON silently doubled your rows are different skills and LLMs are able to give you only one of them (I'm not sure if they really can)
Re: Average is all you need
#89If 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.
The power saw makes average cuts, it didn't disemploy carpenters, we just made better homes.
No, it doesn't. The power saw makes perfect cuts. That's why carpenters use them.
Re: Average is all you need
#90> 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…
Yes. The correct answer is to ask an SQL expert to write the query. An LLM will make the expert much faster at writing the script, maybe.
It doesn't.
I can write that script faster than I can write the text asking the AI to write the script as SQL is concise and my IDE has auto-complete.