3 ms·

And look at the airplanes, they really can’t just land on a mountain slope or a tree without heavy maintenance afterwards. Those people weren’t all stupid, they

by wruza 2y ago

And look at the airplanes, they really can’t just land on a mountain slope or a tree without heavy maintenance afterwards. Those people weren’t all stupid, they questioned the promise of flying servicemen delivering mail or milk to their window and flying on a personal aircar to their workplace. Just like todays promises about whatever the CEOs telltales are. Imagining bullshit isn’t unique to this century. Aerospace is still a highly regulated area that requires training and responsibility. If parallels can be drawn here, they don’t look so cool for a regular guy.

skydhash 2y ago
This pretty much. Everyone knows that LLMs are great for text generation and processing. What people has been questioning is the end goals as promised by its builders, i.e. is it useful? And from most of what I saw, it's very much a toy.
- MVissers 2y ago
  What would you need to see to call it useful? To give you an example– I've used it for legal work such as an EB2-NIW visa application. Saved me countless of hours. My next visa I'll try to do without a lawyer using just LLMs. I would never try this without having LLMs at my disposal. As a hobby– And as someone with a scientific background I've been able to build an artificial ecosystem simulation from scratch without programming experience in Rust: https://www.youtube.com/@GenecraftSimulator https://www.youtube.com/@GenecraftSimulator I recently moved from fish to plants and believe I've developed some new science at the intersection of CS and Evolutionary Biology that I'm looking to publish. This tool is extremely useful. For now– You do require a human in the loop for coordination. My guess is that these will be benchmarks that we see within a few years: How good an AI coordinate multiple other AIs to build, deploy and iterate something that functions in the real world. Basically manager AI. Because they'll literally be able to solve every single one shot problem so we won't be able to create benchmarks anymore. But that's also when these models will be able to build functioning companies in a few hours.
  - skydhash 2y ago
    > ...me countless of...would never try this without having LLMs...is extremely useful...they'll literally be able to solve...will be able to... in a few hours. That's marketing language, not scientific or even casual language. So much outstanding claims, without even some basic explanations. Like how did it help you save these hours? Terms explanations? Outlining processes? Going to the post office for you? You don't need to sell me anything, I just want the how.
  - wruza 2y ago
    My issue with LLMs is that you require a review-competent human in the loop, to fix confabulations. Yes, I’m using them from time to time for research. But I’m also aware of the topics I research and see through bs. And best LLMs out there, right now, produce bs in just 3-4 paragraphs, in nicely documented areas. A recent example is my question on how to run N vpn servers on N ips on the same eth with ip binding (in ip = out ip, instead of using a gw with the lowest metric). I had no idea but I know how networks work and the terminology. It started helping, created a namespace, set up lo, set up two interfaces for inner and outer routing and then made a couple of crucial mistakes that couldn’t be detected or fixed by someone even a little clueless (in routing setup for outgoing traffic). I didn’t even argue and just asked what that does wrt my task, and that started the classic “oh wait, sorry, here’s more bs” loop that never ended. Eventually I distilled the general idea and found an article that AI very likely learned from, cause it was the same code almost verbatim, but without mistakes. Does that count as helping? Idk, probably yes. But I know that examples like this show that you cannot not only leave an LLM unsupervised for any non-trivial question, but have to leave a competent role in the loop. I think the programming community is just blinded by LLMs succeeding in writing kilometers of untalented react/jsx/etc crap that has no complexity or competence in it apart from repeating “do like this” patterns and literally millions of examples, so noise cannot hit through that “protection”. Everything else suffers from LLMs adding inevitable noise into what they learned from a couple of sources. The problem here, as I understand it, is that only specific programmer roles and s{c,p}ammers (ironically) write the same crap again and again millions of times, other info usually exists in only a few important sources and blog posts, and only a few of those are full and have good explanations.
Workaccount2 2y ago
What people always leave out is that society will bend to the abilities of the new technology. Planes can't land in your backyard so we built airports. We didn't abandon planes.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  Sure, but that also vindicates the GP's point that the initial claims of the boosters for planes contained more than their fair share of bullshit and lies.
- wruza 2y ago
  Yes but the idea was lost in the process. It became a faster transportation system that uses air as a medium, but that’s it. Personal planes are still either big business or an expensive and dangerous personal toy thing. I don’t think it’s the same for LLMs (would be naive). But where are promises like “we’re gonna change travel economics etc”? All headlines scream is “AGI around the corner”. Yeah, now where’s my damn postman flying? I need my mail.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    > It became a faster transportation system that uses air as a medium, but that’s it. On the one hand, yes; on the other, this understates the impact that had. My uncle moved from the UK to Australia because, I'm told*, he didn't like his mum and travel was so expensive that he assumed they'd never meet again. My first trip abroad… I'm not 100% sure how old I was, but it must have been between age 6 and 10, was my gran (his mum) paying for herself, for both my parents, and for me, to fly to Singapore, then on to various locations in Australia including my uncle, and back via Thailand, on her pension. That was a gap of around one and a half generations. * both of them are long-since dead now so I can't ask
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- ForHackernews 2y ago
  This is already happening. A few days ago Microsoft turned down a documentation PR because the formatting was better for humans but worse for LLMs: https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/WSL/pull/2021#issuecomment-2546627586 https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/WSL/pull/2021#issuecomment-... They changed their mind after a public outcry including here on HN.
throwaway4aday 2y ago
Your point is on the verge of nullification with the rapid improvement and adoption of autonomous drones don't you think?
- wruza 2y ago
  Sort of, but doesn’t that sit on a far-fetch horizon? I doubt that drone companies are all the same who sold aircraft retrofuturism to people back then.

by wruza 2y ago

skydhash 2y ago

This pretty much. Everyone knows that LLMs are great for text generation and processing. What people has been questioning is the end goals as promised by its builders, i.e. is it useful? And from most of what I saw, it's very much a toy.

MVissers 2y ago
What would you need to see to call it useful? To give you an example– I've used it for legal work such as an EB2-NIW visa application. Saved me countless of hours. My next visa I'll try to do without a lawyer using just LLMs. I would never try this without having LLMs at my disposal. As a hobby– And as someone with a scientific background I've been able to build an artificial ecosystem simulation from scratch without programming experience in Rust: https://www.youtube.com/@GenecraftSimulator https://www.youtube.com/@GenecraftSimulator I recently moved from fish to plants and believe I've developed some new science at the intersection of CS and Evolutionary Biology that I'm looking to publish. This tool is extremely useful. For now– You do require a human in the loop for coordination. My guess is that these will be benchmarks that we see within a few years: How good an AI coordinate multiple other AIs to build, deploy and iterate something that functions in the real world. Basically manager AI. Because they'll literally be able to solve every single one shot problem so we won't be able to create benchmarks anymore. But that's also when these models will be able to build functioning companies in a few hours.
- skydhash 2y ago
  > ...me countless of...would never try this without having LLMs...is extremely useful...they'll literally be able to solve...will be able to... in a few hours. That's marketing language, not scientific or even casual language. So much outstanding claims, without even some basic explanations. Like how did it help you save these hours? Terms explanations? Outlining processes? Going to the post office for you? You don't need to sell me anything, I just want the how.
- wruza 2y ago
  My issue with LLMs is that you require a review-competent human in the loop, to fix confabulations. Yes, I’m using them from time to time for research. But I’m also aware of the topics I research and see through bs. And best LLMs out there, right now, produce bs in just 3-4 paragraphs, in nicely documented areas. A recent example is my question on how to run N vpn servers on N ips on the same eth with ip binding (in ip = out ip, instead of using a gw with the lowest metric). I had no idea but I know how networks work and the terminology. It started helping, created a namespace, set up lo, set up two interfaces for inner and outer routing and then made a couple of crucial mistakes that couldn’t be detected or fixed by someone even a little clueless (in routing setup for outgoing traffic). I didn’t even argue and just asked what that does wrt my task, and that started the classic “oh wait, sorry, here’s more bs” loop that never ended. Eventually I distilled the general idea and found an article that AI very likely learned from, cause it was the same code almost verbatim, but without mistakes. Does that count as helping? Idk, probably yes. But I know that examples like this show that you cannot not only leave an LLM unsupervised for any non-trivial question, but have to leave a competent role in the loop. I think the programming community is just blinded by LLMs succeeding in writing kilometers of untalented react/jsx/etc crap that has no complexity or competence in it apart from repeating “do like this” patterns and literally millions of examples, so noise cannot hit through that “protection”. Everything else suffers from LLMs adding inevitable noise into what they learned from a couple of sources. The problem here, as I understand it, is that only specific programmer roles and s{c,p}ammers (ironically) write the same crap again and again millions of times, other info usually exists in only a few important sources and blog posts, and only a few of those are full and have good explanations.

Workaccount2 2y ago

What people always leave out is that society will bend to the abilities of the new technology. Planes can't land in your backyard so we built airports. We didn't abandon planes.

PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
Sure, but that also vindicates the GP's point that the initial claims of the boosters for planes contained more than their fair share of bullshit and lies.
wruza 2y ago
Yes but the idea was lost in the process. It became a faster transportation system that uses air as a medium, but that’s it. Personal planes are still either big business or an expensive and dangerous personal toy thing. I don’t think it’s the same for LLMs (would be naive). But where are promises like “we’re gonna change travel economics etc”? All headlines scream is “AGI around the corner”. Yeah, now where’s my damn postman flying? I need my mail.
- ben_w 2y ago
  > It became a faster transportation system that uses air as a medium, but that’s it. On the one hand, yes; on the other, this understates the impact that had. My uncle moved from the UK to Australia because, I'm told*, he didn't like his mum and travel was so expensive that he assumed they'd never meet again. My first trip abroad… I'm not 100% sure how old I was, but it must have been between age 6 and 10, was my gran (his mum) paying for herself, for both my parents, and for me, to fly to Singapore, then on to various locations in Australia including my uncle, and back via Thailand, on her pension. That was a gap of around one and a half generations. * both of them are long-since dead now so I can't ask
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
ForHackernews 2y ago
This is already happening. A few days ago Microsoft turned down a documentation PR because the formatting was better for humans but worse for LLMs: https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/WSL/pull/2021#issuecomment-2546627586 https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/WSL/pull/2021#issuecomment-... They changed their mind after a public outcry including here on HN.

throwaway4aday 2y ago

Your point is on the verge of nullification with the rapid improvement and adoption of autonomous drones don't you think?

wruza 2y ago
Sort of, but doesn’t that sit on a far-fetch horizon? I doubt that drone companies are all the same who sold aircraft retrofuturism to people back then.