It’s like VR. Once you use it you just know it’s the future of entertainment. Just the exact pathing is unknown.
I first used VR back in 1995, it's sure taking its sweet time. Or maybe what you "just know" is actually what you "just believe".
LLM Inevitabilism
961–970 of 1001 posts
Re: LLM Inevitabilism
#962Earlier quoted context omitted.
LLMs are nowhere near the first step. This is Python, an almost 35 year old language: for apple in sorted(bag): snake.eat(apple) The whole point of high-level programming languages is we can write code that is close enough to natural language while still being 100% precise and unambiguous.
My 65yr old mother will never use python. What she wants is to tell her phone to switch it's background to the picture she took last night of the family. That is the inevitabilism. Forget about the tiny tech bubble for a moment and see the whole world.
> What she wants is to tell her phone to switch it's background to the picture she took last night of the family.
Which is kind of absurd. If you were asking a friend to hang a picture would you verbally describe the picture to them or just show them which one to hang?
There is a lot of "if all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail" going on.
Re: LLM Inevitabilism
#963There may be an "LLM Winter" as people discover that LLMs can't be trusted to do anything. Look for frantic efforts by companies to offload responsibility for LLM mistakes onto consumers. We've got to have something that has solid "I don't know" and "I don't know how to do this" outputs. We're starting to see reports of LLM usage having negative value for programmers, even though they think it's helping. Too much eff…
We may be underestimating the effort that goes into cleaning up LLM messes. LLMs learn to program from code bases written by humans. Not just written by humans, maintained by humans. So the bugs that humans spot and remove are under-represented in the training data. Meanwhile, the bugs that evade human skill at debugging lurk indefinitely and are over-represented in the training data.
We have created tools to write code with bugs that humans have difficulty spotting. Worse, we estimate the quality of the code that our new tools produce on the basis that they are inhuman and have no special skill at writing bugs that we cannot spot, despite the nature of their training data.
Re: LLM Inevitabilism
#964One of the negative consequences of the “modern secular age” is that many very intelligent, thoughtful people feel justified in brushing away millennia of philosophical and religious thought because they deem it outdated or no longer relevant. (The book A Secular Age is a great read on this, btw, I think I’ve recommended it here on HN at least half a dozen times.) And so a result of this is that they fail to notice t…
> many very intelligent, thoughtful people feel justified in brushing away millennia of philosophical and religious thought because they deem it outdated Why lump philosophy and religion together? I distinguish between philosophical thought and religious thought, to the extent the former is conditionally framed.
They're intertwined but at the same time different tools. It's okay to lump them together in this context, imo.
Re: LLM Inevitabilism
#965People like communicating in natural language. LLMs are the first step in the movement away from the "early days" of computing where you needed to learn the logic based language and interface of computers to interact with them. That is where the inevitabilism comes from. No one* wants to learn how to use a computer, they want it to be another entity that they can just talk to. *I'm rounding off the <5% who deeply lov…
> LLMs are the first step in the movement away from (...) the logic based language This dumb thing again.. The logic based language was and remains a major improvement [0] in being able to build abstractions because it allows the underlying implementations to be 'deterministic'. The natural language misses that mark by such a wide margin that it is impossible to explain in nicer language. And if one wants to make the…
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Re: LLM Inevitabilism
#966Earlier quoted context omitted.
What tasks is it better at doing than other technologies we have available to us? I'm not being sarcastic, I generally want to know in which areas you think it is better. I can't think of anything off the top of my head that isn't just doing the things that make it a generative AI. (It's better at generating an image that I describe to it, etc, but that's not something that another technology does.)
Google search + LLM based search is far more effective than Google search alone. Google's stated mission has been to organize the world's information. Being able to ask a far more nuanced question about the kind of information you are looking for - and getting mostly useful responses - is more useful. Just one example among many. Simple natural language interaction with computer systems is huge. Just look at what LLM…
Is it better than google search 20 years ago, when most web content was authoritative and not SEO crap?
Is it better than google search 20 year ago, when "google-fu" was a thing (look it up, google-fu refers to the ability to "ask a far more nuanced question about the kind of information you are looking for").
Re: LLM Inevitabilism
#967Disclaimer - I am building an AI web retriever (Linkup.so) so I have a natural bias - LLMs aren’t just a better Google, they’re a redefinition of search itself. Traditional search is an app: you type, scroll through ads and 10 blue links, and dig for context. That model worked when the web was smaller, but now it’s overwhelming. LLMs shift search to an infrastructure, a way to get contextualized, synthesized answers…
> shift search to an infrastructure, a way to get contextualized, synthesized answers directly, tailored to your specific need
what if my specific need involves the answer being correct?
or by "specific need" did you mean my dopamine addiction and/or my need to be affirmed and pandered to?
Re: LLM Inevitabilism
#968[dead]
Re: LLM Inevitabilism
#969Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Look for frantic efforts by companies to offload responsibility for LLM mistakes onto consumers. Not just by companies. We see this from enthusiastic consumers as well, on this very forum. Or it might just be astroturfing, it's hard to tell. The mantra is that in order to extract value from LLMs, the user must have a certain level of knowledge and skill of how to use them. "Prompt engineering", now reframed as "con…
Simple thought I had reading this: I've used a tool to do a task today. I used a suction sandblasting machine to remove corrosion from a part. Without the tool, had I wanted to remove the corrosion, I would've spent all day (if not more) scraping it with sandpaper (is that a tool too? With the skin of my hands then?) - this would have been tedious and could have taken me all day, scraping away millimeter by millimete…
If every time you pulled the trigger of the sandblaster, there was a 50/50 chance of it spraying paint instead of sand, the worth of the machine would be deniable. Sure, over sufficiently long spans of time, maybe the probabilities of sand outweigh the paint that it puts back on the part. Only your patience determines at which point along that timeline you give up and use a more reliable tool
Re: LLM Inevitabilism
#970One of the negative consequences of the “modern secular age” is that many very intelligent, thoughtful people feel justified in brushing away millennia of philosophical and religious thought because they deem it outdated or no longer relevant. (The book A Secular Age is a great read on this, btw, I think I’ve recommended it here on HN at least half a dozen times.) And so a result of this is that they fail to notice t…
Before it jumped to technology, it had a pit stop in political economy viz-a-viz Marxism (and liberalism).