3 ms·

I don't understand how LangChain is in enough of an echo chamber that I'm reading RTs this AM from the titular lead cheering on someone open-sourcing "AGI" via

I don't understand how LangChain is in enough of an echo chamber that I'm reading RTs this AM from the titular lead cheering on someone open-sourcing "AGI" via the umpteenth implementation on LangChain of "monkeys on typewriters via N LLM responses" I don't complain actively about LangChain because this seems widely understood at this point, and apologize for being abrupt, but at some point, when this behavior is repeated, the assumption shifts from "lack of perspective on our own work", which we all suffer from, into "feigned naivete designed to mislead"

dcreater 2y ago
It's a sad reminder that as long as you have the "right" credentials you can appear legitimate. Stanford grad, SF based. I haven't used it much and I can already sense it's over-promise-under-deliverness. Hopefully langchain will get found out sooner rather than later.
- refulgentis 2y ago
  I pray 7 years at Google is enough to break through this with my own startup. Left a year ago. Before Google, I was a college drop out & waiter that sold a mildly successful startup. No one cared. Next best offers were $120K in NYC, or $50K in Buffalo. You know, thinking on it, the factor you mention gets it more likely to get you funding, and the funding is what lets you live in an echo chamber. Tis sort of close-minded navel-gazing happened all. the. time. at Google. I call it "rich people thinking" but it might just be the penultimate white collar thing. At some point the "success" of being there is widely considered enough, and anyone speaking up is either crazy or not a team player. Even when you've been watching the naked emperor together for 6 months. Even when "speaking up" is hilariously non-negative, ex. "just a thought exercise, is it possible the emperor does not have 1000 layers of clothes? if so, maybe possibly could I do some work to contribute to the team that could consider an action plan to account for any anticipated negative effect in the market if, possibly, it is shown they are lacking some clothes?" There's plenty of obviously coarse contrarians, I used to think complaining about this sort of thing was for chumps who couldn't communicate. It's not. Social problems tend to be well-known, drive ~all variability in results, and simple enough that a middle schooler would grok them.
sdrg822 2y ago
I think if you actually meet the people you'd realize they're pretty earnest and candid of these things' limitations, though it may not show in tweets and hackernews posts. This repo, for instance, makes no claims of AGI. It just claims to help bootstrap a starting point for a software project: "it will not attempt to write the logic to fill in the nodes and edges."
- refulgentis 2y ago
  Right, if we swap in something else for what I was actually talking about, it doesn't demonstrate what I said it does. I agree, my heart says they know they're lying too, but that seems worse than assuming they're suffering from self-blindness, since we all do and that bears less intention
  - sdrg822 2y ago
    Where is the lie in this repo?

dcreater 2y ago

It's a sad reminder that as long as you have the "right" credentials you can appear legitimate. Stanford grad, SF based. I haven't used it much and I can already sense it's over-promise-under-deliverness. Hopefully langchain will get found out sooner rather than later.

refulgentis 2y ago
I pray 7 years at Google is enough to break through this with my own startup. Left a year ago. Before Google, I was a college drop out & waiter that sold a mildly successful startup. No one cared. Next best offers were $120K in NYC, or $50K in Buffalo. You know, thinking on it, the factor you mention gets it more likely to get you funding, and the funding is what lets you live in an echo chamber. Tis sort of close-minded navel-gazing happened all. the. time. at Google. I call it "rich people thinking" but it might just be the penultimate white collar thing. At some point the "success" of being there is widely considered enough, and anyone speaking up is either crazy or not a team player. Even when you've been watching the naked emperor together for 6 months. Even when "speaking up" is hilariously non-negative, ex. "just a thought exercise, is it possible the emperor does not have 1000 layers of clothes? if so, maybe possibly could I do some work to contribute to the team that could consider an action plan to account for any anticipated negative effect in the market if, possibly, it is shown they are lacking some clothes?" There's plenty of obviously coarse contrarians, I used to think complaining about this sort of thing was for chumps who couldn't communicate. It's not. Social problems tend to be well-known, drive ~all variability in results, and simple enough that a middle schooler would grok them.

sdrg822 2y ago

I think if you actually meet the people you'd realize they're pretty earnest and candid of these things' limitations, though it may not show in tweets and hackernews posts. This repo, for instance, makes no claims of AGI. It just claims to help bootstrap a starting point for a software project: "it will not attempt to write the logic to fill in the nodes and edges."

refulgentis 2y ago
Right, if we swap in something else for what I was actually talking about, it doesn't demonstrate what I said it does. I agree, my heart says they know they're lying too, but that seems worse than assuming they're suffering from self-blindness, since we all do and that bears less intention
- sdrg822 2y ago
  Where is the lie in this repo?