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Controlling [unjustified futurist hype's] Growing Energy Needs Haven't seen a case study yet where a company outside of spammers and scammers increased their p

Controlling [unjustified futurist hype's] Growing Energy Needs Haven't seen a case study yet where a company outside of spammers and scammers increased their productivity using LLMs to do any kind of classification or unstructured-data-to-structured-data translation. I've tried having it build up a table of contact information from email signatures, llama3 hallucinates phone numbers when the one I wanted was in the prompt, would have been better off with regex. Looking up film developer recipes with Perplexity Pro/GPT4o, the answer comes back with a confident 1:119 ratio of HC110 for my P33 film, when I click through the source it pulled those numbers from a completely different film stock, since naturally the forum thread drifted from discussing one brand to another midway through conversation and doesn't matter how big your context window is, LLMs cant keep associations straight. I'm going to keep trying to find uses for these garbage generators because the appearance of omniscience is so seductive, but I'm more cynical by the day, the investments and nuke fast tracking seems to be coming straight out of faith that AGI is just around the corner. (Yea yea I know, I'm holding it wrong)

add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
> I'm going to keep trying to find uses for these garbage generators Is it really worth your time? Sometimes the simplest explanation is the right one. If you've already mastered your craft past a certain point and care about the quality of your work, this will only drag you down.
llm_trw 2y ago
I just wrote a multilinear algebra research paper using natural language to generate all the latex. This used to take me several hour of tedious mind numbing boiler plate. I finished in in 10 minutes today. People who aren't on board with llms as the biggest driver of growth since internet search were the type of people who still thought the yellow pages were safe from Google in 2004.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- bertylicious 2y ago
  How do you generate "all the latex" in a latex document with "natural language"? What specifically did you generate? The whole research paper? What "boilerplate" are you talking about?
  - llm_trw 2y ago
    Are you familiar with LaTeX? I was writing a lot of rather complex augmented matrices. Instead of having to manually type them in with all the formatting done by hand I literally gave ChatGPT a python nested list and told it what to subscript, what to bold, etc. In previous papers I have done this by hand if there's only a few matrices that I need to show, or by writing a script to auto-generate them in whatever format I need if there will be many. This time I just talked to a chat bot and got it working in minutes. Then it turns out I made a mistake at the start. The fix was just to tell it what the error was and propagate the changes. It did that flawlessly.
    - bertylicious 2y ago
      Yes, I'm familiar with latex. That's why I was asking. Using an LLM to reformat/restructure your matrix data makes sense to me and this was the missing detail from your original post. I would be too paranoid about hallucinations and opt for a script still, but that might just be personal preference.
      - llm_trw 2y ago
        The question is: how is more likely to make a stupid mistake and not spot it? Me or an LLM? My money is on me.
        Yoric 2y ago
        With a simple script? I'd bet on the LLM making more mistakes.
devjab 2y ago
Our engineers feed a LLM engineering plans as a quality control. Not as a replacement of any of the regular process, simply as an additional step. It discovered what would’ve been a fairly serious error in some component design for one of our energy plants that nobody else had caught. Similarity it “fact checked” one of our subcontractors on something with cable sizes that I honestly don’t understand. Finding a better option than what the subcontractor was suggesting. I say “fact checked” because you shouldn’t think of it as that since everything it outputs need to be actual fact checked. I mostly view LLMs as advanced auto-complete for what I do and haven’t been very impressed by them, but some of the examples our engineers show us are wild.
- jazzyjackson 2y ago
  Thanks. I actually do have a workflow that would benefit from feeding an LLM the data corresponding to 4 'stages' of an order in varying formats. Having a computer flag inconsistencies sounds feasible.
ta12653421 2y ago
For all tech people, LLM are an absolute boon: it brings productivity by 10x (at least!) onto the next level, esp. for develops. I developed an financial servic application with 1MB+ source of code (not including 3rd party libs) within 3 month - thats more than 1 million keystrokes that created a system that works perfectly fine and produces exactly the results as specified. (for comparison: my masterthesis had around 110.000 letters, and i wrote it over a couple of weeks, while the app is slightly more complicated: its a complex system where each part relies on each another, while the masterthesis is just a dumb document in which i could write in theory everything and nobody would care/check if the descript is just bs)
- consp 2y ago
  > I developed an financial servic application with 1MB+ source of code (not including 3rd party libs) within 3 month The timeframe + loc + financial sector seems .... Off (I'm not touching that).
  - ta12653421 2y ago
    Wanna join me for a code/QA flight, i'm open for external audits :) But actually you are somehow right: Without LLM this wouldnt have been possible, e.g. The platform uses Hibernate - for this, you need to create your entity class, a mapping class and a SQL script, and these things have to be somehow in line to each another to make it work; before LLM, you had to type those files. Its just about automating those things which you had to type earlier & timecostly on your own.
    - yallpendantools 2y ago
      > The platform uses Hibernate - for this, you need to create your entity class, a mapping class and a SQL script, and these things have to be somehow in line to each another to make it work; before LLM, you had to type those files. Do you really need an LLM for that? Sure LLMs can do that but they're overkill, no? My internship and first proper job (2011-2012) was at a consulting firm that used Hibernate. They managed to auto-generate all these things with an Excel macro. I'm willing to bet some JetBrains plugin can do that too without LLMs.
yallpendantools 2y ago
This reminded me of a conversation I recently had at work. Someone was turning over a project to me so he was explaining the context and history of the technical design decisions they've gone through. One stage of the project was basically linting through someone else's source code, evaluating possible code branches. "So, we want to know all the possible states this could go through. We gave that task to OpenAI with the following prompt." He shows me a sample prompt they would've sent to OpenAI. It started with the premise "You are a senior Ruby developer with ten years experience. Read through this source file and give me a list of all the code paths which involves global variables". "Really?" I said, amused. I knew ahead of time that this project they were turning over is LLM-heavy. I have misgivings about LLMs but I try to keep an open mind so it was really impressive that it was used at this stage. "How well did it work?" "It didn't. Instead we parsed it to a syntax tree and just performed static code analysis." (Usual disclaimer that details of the anecdote were changed/obfuscated but the spirit of the interaction has been preserved.)

add-sub-mul-div 2y ago

> I'm going to keep trying to find uses for these garbage generators Is it really worth your time? Sometimes the simplest explanation is the right one. If you've already mastered your craft past a certain point and care about the quality of your work, this will only drag you down.

llm_trw 2y ago

I just wrote a multilinear algebra research paper using natural language to generate all the latex. This used to take me several hour of tedious mind numbing boiler plate. I finished in in 10 minutes today. People who aren't on board with llms as the biggest driver of growth since internet search were the type of people who still thought the yellow pages were safe from Google in 2004.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
bertylicious 2y ago
How do you generate "all the latex" in a latex document with "natural language"? What specifically did you generate? The whole research paper? What "boilerplate" are you talking about?
- llm_trw 2y ago
  Are you familiar with LaTeX? I was writing a lot of rather complex augmented matrices. Instead of having to manually type them in with all the formatting done by hand I literally gave ChatGPT a python nested list and told it what to subscript, what to bold, etc. In previous papers I have done this by hand if there's only a few matrices that I need to show, or by writing a script to auto-generate them in whatever format I need if there will be many. This time I just talked to a chat bot and got it working in minutes. Then it turns out I made a mistake at the start. The fix was just to tell it what the error was and propagate the changes. It did that flawlessly.
  - bertylicious 2y ago
    Yes, I'm familiar with latex. That's why I was asking. Using an LLM to reformat/restructure your matrix data makes sense to me and this was the missing detail from your original post. I would be too paranoid about hallucinations and opt for a script still, but that might just be personal preference.
    - llm_trw 2y ago
      The question is: how is more likely to make a stupid mistake and not spot it? Me or an LLM? My money is on me.
      - Yoric 2y ago
        With a simple script? I'd bet on the LLM making more mistakes.

devjab 2y ago

Our engineers feed a LLM engineering plans as a quality control. Not as a replacement of any of the regular process, simply as an additional step. It discovered what would’ve been a fairly serious error in some component design for one of our energy plants that nobody else had caught. Similarity it “fact checked” one of our subcontractors on something with cable sizes that I honestly don’t understand. Finding a better option than what the subcontractor was suggesting. I say “fact checked” because you shouldn’t think of it as that since everything it outputs need to be actual fact checked. I mostly view LLMs as advanced auto-complete for what I do and haven’t been very impressed by them, but some of the examples our engineers show us are wild.

jazzyjackson 2y ago
Thanks. I actually do have a workflow that would benefit from feeding an LLM the data corresponding to 4 'stages' of an order in varying formats. Having a computer flag inconsistencies sounds feasible.

ta12653421 2y ago

For all tech people, LLM are an absolute boon: it brings productivity by 10x (at least!) onto the next level, esp. for develops. I developed an financial servic application with 1MB+ source of code (not including 3rd party libs) within 3 month - thats more than 1 million keystrokes that created a system that works perfectly fine and produces exactly the results as specified. (for comparison: my masterthesis had around 110.000 letters, and i wrote it over a couple of weeks, while the app is slightly more complicated: its a complex system where each part relies on each another, while the masterthesis is just a dumb document in which i could write in theory everything and nobody would care/check if the descript is just bs)

consp 2y ago
> I developed an financial servic application with 1MB+ source of code (not including 3rd party libs) within 3 month The timeframe + loc + financial sector seems .... Off (I'm not touching that).
- ta12653421 2y ago
  Wanna join me for a code/QA flight, i'm open for external audits :) But actually you are somehow right: Without LLM this wouldnt have been possible, e.g. The platform uses Hibernate - for this, you need to create your entity class, a mapping class and a SQL script, and these things have to be somehow in line to each another to make it work; before LLM, you had to type those files. Its just about automating those things which you had to type earlier & timecostly on your own.
  - yallpendantools 2y ago
    > The platform uses Hibernate - for this, you need to create your entity class, a mapping class and a SQL script, and these things have to be somehow in line to each another to make it work; before LLM, you had to type those files. Do you really need an LLM for that? Sure LLMs can do that but they're overkill, no? My internship and first proper job (2011-2012) was at a consulting firm that used Hibernate. They managed to auto-generate all these things with an Excel macro. I'm willing to bet some JetBrains plugin can do that too without LLMs.

yallpendantools 2y ago

This reminded me of a conversation I recently had at work. Someone was turning over a project to me so he was explaining the context and history of the technical design decisions they've gone through. One stage of the project was basically linting through someone else's source code, evaluating possible code branches. "So, we want to know all the possible states this could go through. We gave that task to OpenAI with the following prompt." He shows me a sample prompt they would've sent to OpenAI. It started with the premise "You are a senior Ruby developer with ten years experience. Read through this source file and give me a list of all the code paths which involves global variables". "Really?" I said, amused. I knew ahead of time that this project they were turning over is LLM-heavy. I have misgivings about LLMs but I try to keep an open mind so it was really impressive that it was used at this stage. "How well did it work?" "It didn't. Instead we parsed it to a syntax tree and just performed static code analysis." (Usual disclaimer that details of the anecdote were changed/obfuscated but the spirit of the interaction has been preserved.)