5 ms·

LLMs are everything that it wrong in computing

62 points by lr0 2y ago

mandymoorefan 2y ago
are the grammatical and spelling errors on purpose?
- bottled_poe 2y ago
  Should have reviewed their content with chatgpt before posting. Maybe next time.
  - fzeroracer 2y ago
    I think you've managed to hit the nail on the head. Rather than accept the rather human nature of people writing in their own style and making mistakes, we'd prefer to filter it through a dispassionate void first. It's rather embarrassing how quickly we're willing to toss away the human elements of writing.
    - userbinator 2y ago
      Agreed. LLM writing style is disgustingly bland and "offensively inoffensive" like Corporate Memphis. Would rather have actual human style, mistakes and all.
- yawnxyz 2y ago
  I usually excuse typos, but when the post is literally about: > Software used to also be substantially better written I think he ends up tanking his own argument before he even started. Heck, there's a typo in the headline (which I guess is good bait, since I now clicked on and responded in this discussion...)
- userbinator 2y ago
  To show that it's a real human that wrote the article? Interesting idea.
  - polotics 2y ago
    It's been well know that spelling and grammatical errors are a good steganography channel, however I don't think this is what going on in The Fudged Article here.
- zetalyrae 2y ago
  The author is an ESL speaker.
- uludag 2y ago
  I think I've started to prefer text with spelling and grammatical errors now, to a certain degree at least.
primaprashant 2y ago
Tell me you know nothing about machine learning without telling me you know nothing about machine learning
rexpop 2y ago
> This [site] is my life and this is where I have any control. This is the only rebellion I am capable of. Jeeze, talk about defeatist! What a narrow view of the world. Is this cowardice, or mere naivete? Edit: I'll give credit where due— > aimed not at better software, but at better return of investment. We could have had much better working computers. True, yes, but we weren't—haven't been—able to pay for them. And, remember, software is only a means to an end! And that end is value for the humans invested in it! You know, a return value. This is a higher priority than "better software," because with ROI I can get done any number of things that are impossible for computers to accomplish. I want my return in the form of a fungible medium of exchange, not some programmer's idea of a good time! I say this as a programmer whose software has been REALLY GOOD and REALLY UNPOPULAR. If people knew what computers were capable of, maybe they'd pay us to build them. I'm hoping AI will at least rekindle that optimism, even if LLMs are a largely a bill of goods.
- manmal 2y ago
  A more favorable explanation would be that it’s resistance to let go of how things have been those last decades.
wewtyflakes 2y ago
The usage of hyperbole and absolute statements in the post are distracting, and make it difficult to read through. It also seems that the author is trying to jam a LLM-sized peg into a classical programming-sized hole and has become angry that it didn't work cleanly, and so now believes its the LLM's problem.
abss 2y ago
I believe there are indications that suggest the era of big LLMs will come to an end because they will hit a price and performance wall. There is a serious possibility that they will remain an NLP tool, and real thinking will be formalized as various types of software in different niches. Multi-agent systems will resemble the early web, with thousands or millions of variations and different types of expert agents, not a single "god-like" software capable of doing everything. It’s natural for major players to try to create a "digital god"; this is their monopolistic path. If this becomes possible, they will need to be privatized, and LLMs turned into infrastructure services for all of humanity, or else we risk ending up in a dystopia. However, there is a serious chance they won’t achieve a "digital god" and will instead, unintentionally, create a world with decentralized intelligence. It’s better to be optimistic—we have nothing to lose, even if it’s not realistic.
isaacfrond 2y ago
How quickly people turn blaise about the micracle that LLMs are. Just a few years ago, passing the Turing test seemed an unattainable goal now it is an irrelevance. Yet the author thinks ‘ChatGPT, LLMs and all that crap’. Unbelievable. I use LLMs everyday. It has not only boosted productivity, but most of all, it made workmore fun.
- MrSkelter 2y ago
  I am not sure the Turing test has been passed or understood. Cromulent answers aren’t human ones. LLMs enable me to write more code than I ever have and in languages I don’t know. It’s a wonder. That said I grew up with an 8-bit machine buying games on cassette. There were never updates and rarely ever a serious bug. Yes programs were tiny, but they were also handwritten in assembler. Quality has gone down in software with the advent of modern tools as surely as it has in furniture with the introduction of the table saw.
- Legend2440 2y ago
  They made a computer program that can follow instructions in plain english. That's been a goal of computer science since the 60s, and I wasn't sure I was going to see it in my lifetime. This is more incredible than people give credit.
  - alexchamberlain 2y ago
    I think GenAI is incredible in a lot of ways. I think for me it's frustrating that GenAI is currently being used in a way that largely regurgitates and hallucinates information, rather than aids a computer to follow instructions in plain English. For example, at least earlier versions of GenAI, when you asked it a question, it would make up an answer to that question using the knowledge in the training data. That's why we saw limitations on what events the AI knew about, for example. It would be great to see the AI understand the question, query a knowledge base for the answer and then rephrase that answer in English instead. I believe, though I've mostly kept out of the state of the art here, that's the direction it's going in, and I think if that's the case, the confidence in the AI will go up. If we can in parallel, decrease the horrendous amounts of energy being used to run the models, then maybe some of the detractors will start to turn?
wayfwdmachine 2y ago
"Hello? We have a cheese emergency."
- tonetegeatinst 2y ago
  Cheesed to meet you, may I offer you an egg in this trying time?
teruakohatu 2y ago
> Software also used to be: > much more open I am not sure that is the case. It is quite rare for people to be developing using closed source programming languages today outside of banking and finance, but it wasn’t the case not that long ago, such as before .NET (2014) and Java (2007) were open sourced.
- postpawl 2y ago
  Saying things were “much more open” before GitHub is wild.
- optimalsolver 2y ago
  Time was you used to have to pay for your compiler, and then manually crank it by hand. Kids these days have no idea.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
gherkinnn 2y ago
> I will keep this site althole-free, [...] This is my life and this is where I have any control. This is the only rebellion I am capable of. I might agree with some of the author's sentiments, but based on this post alone, he makes the impression that computing is all his life. And now his life is going through a shift. The problem here isn't LLMs.
- ianbutler 2y ago
  I’ve been thinking about writing a blog post but the gist of it is this realization. Developers who’s identities are wrapped up in the act of coding as it stands hate LLMs because it represents a drastic shift in the way programs are being written. If being the smart dev writing clever code is the core of your identity and you have nothing else anchoring you you’re probably going to have a bad time over the next few years because the game is changing.
- uludag 2y ago
  I think saying that the author is stuck in his ways and is just fighting change is a bit too simplistic. - All major tech companies becoming "AI first" - The websites we use are still slow and buggy - "AI" feature bloat everywhere - Noting that the end-goal of these companies are not to enhance some technical professional's workflow, but to become truly ubiquitous, inserted into everything (how else could such high valuations be made) - Prioritization of profits above good products (enshitification) These are all valid points to bring up. The author is just saying that he wants his personal website to remain free from LLM usage, probably out of a desire for agency more than anything.
becquerel 2y ago
My natural instinct when I encounter this kind of person is to lavish scorn on them, but I have to hold myself back from that. Partly because it's the mature thing to do, and partly because the coming years will be hard enough on them anyway. As a sidenote, it amuses me that this author specifically calls out LLMs for being non-deterministic as a grave sin. Despite it being untrue (they've never heard of temperature, I guess), it's funny to me that it should be asserted as a prime directive for computing. Determinism is certainly a useful property where you can get it, but there's a whole lot of useful systems where you can't get it.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- dns_snek 2y ago
  > calls out LLMs for being non-deterministic as a grave sin. Despite it being untrue (they've never heard of temperature, I guess) With all that grandstanding you've missed the author's point because temperature doesn't make them deterministic in any way that matters in the real world. It only makes their output deterministic for the exact sequence of input tokens (I've yet to see an application where this would be useful, just save the result if you want the exact same one!), but it doesn't make them deterministic for a different but semantically equivalent sequence of tokens, which is the core value proposition of LLMs. The answer to "How tall is the Eiffel tower?" shouldn't change based on whether I also add "and where is its nearest bakery?", but with more complex questions, that's what often happens.
  - DemocracyFTW2 2y ago
    exactly, and you can graphically watch the effect in image generators that do not only behave, in my experience, in a non-deterministic way, but chaotically in the sense that any small change to the input prompt can cause arbitrary changes in the output picture
- zkry 2y ago
  > My natural instinct when I encounter this kind of person is to lavish scorn on them, but I have to hold myself back from that. Partly because it's the mature thing to do, and partly because the coming years will be hard enough on them anyway. That's an awfully patronizing way of putting things. The coming years can be hard for anyone for a number of reasons: geopolitical conflict, economic depression, natural disasters, pandemics, etc. I doubt that harboring negative views towards the current usage of LLMs will make a difference.
mg 2y ago
Not sure the author's main point - that computers become slower and less reliable over time - holds. HN is snappy and rarely fails to function. I can't remember ever using a better group communication tool. The author's website is also snappy and worked perfectly to let them express their view and for me to read it. A lot of software I use today is software I wrote myself and that works in the browser. It is reliable and snappy too. And I write more and more of it with the help of LLMs. Just yesterday, I wrote an image editing tool with a very special feature set and was amazed how much faster I was able to implement features in perfectly elegant code via this approach: 1: Give the existing code to an LLM and instruct it to add a feature. 2: Test the feature to make sure it works. 3: Go through the changes via git diff in one window and clean them up in another window in VIM. 4: Test again. 5: Commit. 6: Goto 1 This way, the development of this new tool was multiple times faster than if I had written it manually. To me, the main questionmark about the future of computers is how browsers will develop. The one thing I am missing is that currently no mobile browser supports the File System Access API. On desktop, Chrome does. And that allows users to securely safe their data on their own device. So web software does not have to be like "All your data needs to be in the cloud". Chrome already works on bringing that to mobile. Then the current state of affairs on Desktop and Android will be perfect from my perspective. And all I hope for is that Safari follows. So that iOS users can comfortably use my software too.
DEEP-MELTDOWN 2y ago
[dead]
DemocracyFTW2 2y ago
> In unrelated news - SystemD now tries to convince people that having file-based logs is deprecated. And in few short years we will have Linux “administrators” who don’t know how to use grep(1). This is so in-character, railing about how everything is awful nowadays, then some drive-by ranting in the general direction of a popular target like SystemD. I wonder how this guy can justify the use of CSS and an image on their web page.
- oefrha 2y ago
  > I wonder how this guy can justify the use of CSS and an image on their web page. Probably because CSS was already a thing when they were young. Everything that came afterwards is moral decay.
preordained 2y ago
I think as-applied now, the author's take strikes a chord with me. LLMs are a technical marvel, but their results feel very cheap and tacky...it doesn't take much to catch at glimpse at the fallible man behind the curtain. They are lauded more for how impressive the illusion they render all things considered more than what they are actually GOOD FOR. Weird hallucinating search, smart but untrustworthy coding intern...people hold these things up in a way that suggests we've arrived instead of acknowledging their disappointment and saying "yes, there is a lot of power here, but we still haven't found the killer application or the thing that takes this from an impressive but flawed trick to indispensable".
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
Not much that the author has stated that I could disagree with. Not everyone is excited about LLMs.

62 points by lr0 2y ago

mandymoorefan 2y ago

are the grammatical and spelling errors on purpose?

bottled_poe 2y ago
Should have reviewed their content with chatgpt before posting. Maybe next time.
- fzeroracer 2y ago
  I think you've managed to hit the nail on the head. Rather than accept the rather human nature of people writing in their own style and making mistakes, we'd prefer to filter it through a dispassionate void first. It's rather embarrassing how quickly we're willing to toss away the human elements of writing.
  - userbinator 2y ago
    Agreed. LLM writing style is disgustingly bland and "offensively inoffensive" like Corporate Memphis. Would rather have actual human style, mistakes and all.
yawnxyz 2y ago
I usually excuse typos, but when the post is literally about: > Software used to also be substantially better written I think he ends up tanking his own argument before he even started. Heck, there's a typo in the headline (which I guess is good bait, since I now clicked on and responded in this discussion...)
userbinator 2y ago
To show that it's a real human that wrote the article? Interesting idea.
- polotics 2y ago
  It's been well know that spelling and grammatical errors are a good steganography channel, however I don't think this is what going on in The Fudged Article here.
zetalyrae 2y ago
The author is an ESL speaker.
uludag 2y ago
I think I've started to prefer text with spelling and grammatical errors now, to a certain degree at least.

primaprashant 2y ago

Tell me you know nothing about machine learning without telling me you know nothing about machine learning

rexpop 2y ago

> This [site] is my life and this is where I have any control. This is the only rebellion I am capable of. Jeeze, talk about defeatist! What a narrow view of the world. Is this cowardice, or mere naivete? Edit: I'll give credit where due— > aimed not at better software, but at better return of investment. We could have had much better working computers. True, yes, but we weren't—haven't been—able to pay for them. And, remember, software is only a means to an end! And that end is value for the humans invested in it! You know, a return value. This is a higher priority than "better software," because with ROI I can get done any number of things that are impossible for computers to accomplish. I want my return in the form of a fungible medium of exchange, not some programmer's idea of a good time! I say this as a programmer whose software has been REALLY GOOD and REALLY UNPOPULAR. If people knew what computers were capable of, maybe they'd pay us to build them. I'm hoping AI will at least rekindle that optimism, even if LLMs are a largely a bill of goods.

manmal 2y ago
A more favorable explanation would be that it’s resistance to let go of how things have been those last decades.

wewtyflakes 2y ago

The usage of hyperbole and absolute statements in the post are distracting, and make it difficult to read through. It also seems that the author is trying to jam a LLM-sized peg into a classical programming-sized hole and has become angry that it didn't work cleanly, and so now believes its the LLM's problem.

abss 2y ago

I believe there are indications that suggest the era of big LLMs will come to an end because they will hit a price and performance wall. There is a serious possibility that they will remain an NLP tool, and real thinking will be formalized as various types of software in different niches. Multi-agent systems will resemble the early web, with thousands or millions of variations and different types of expert agents, not a single "god-like" software capable of doing everything. It’s natural for major players to try to create a "digital god"; this is their monopolistic path. If this becomes possible, they will need to be privatized, and LLMs turned into infrastructure services for all of humanity, or else we risk ending up in a dystopia. However, there is a serious chance they won’t achieve a "digital god" and will instead, unintentionally, create a world with decentralized intelligence. It’s better to be optimistic—we have nothing to lose, even if it’s not realistic.

isaacfrond 2y ago

How quickly people turn blaise about the micracle that LLMs are. Just a few years ago, passing the Turing test seemed an unattainable goal now it is an irrelevance. Yet the author thinks ‘ChatGPT, LLMs and all that crap’. Unbelievable. I use LLMs everyday. It has not only boosted productivity, but most of all, it made workmore fun.

MrSkelter 2y ago
I am not sure the Turing test has been passed or understood. Cromulent answers aren’t human ones. LLMs enable me to write more code than I ever have and in languages I don’t know. It’s a wonder. That said I grew up with an 8-bit machine buying games on cassette. There were never updates and rarely ever a serious bug. Yes programs were tiny, but they were also handwritten in assembler. Quality has gone down in software with the advent of modern tools as surely as it has in furniture with the introduction of the table saw.
Legend2440 2y ago
They made a computer program that can follow instructions in plain english. That's been a goal of computer science since the 60s, and I wasn't sure I was going to see it in my lifetime. This is more incredible than people give credit.
- alexchamberlain 2y ago
  I think GenAI is incredible in a lot of ways. I think for me it's frustrating that GenAI is currently being used in a way that largely regurgitates and hallucinates information, rather than aids a computer to follow instructions in plain English. For example, at least earlier versions of GenAI, when you asked it a question, it would make up an answer to that question using the knowledge in the training data. That's why we saw limitations on what events the AI knew about, for example. It would be great to see the AI understand the question, query a knowledge base for the answer and then rephrase that answer in English instead. I believe, though I've mostly kept out of the state of the art here, that's the direction it's going in, and I think if that's the case, the confidence in the AI will go up. If we can in parallel, decrease the horrendous amounts of energy being used to run the models, then maybe some of the detractors will start to turn?

wayfwdmachine 2y ago

"Hello? We have a cheese emergency."

tonetegeatinst 2y ago
Cheesed to meet you, may I offer you an egg in this trying time?

teruakohatu 2y ago

> Software also used to be: > much more open I am not sure that is the case. It is quite rare for people to be developing using closed source programming languages today outside of banking and finance, but it wasn’t the case not that long ago, such as before .NET (2014) and Java (2007) were open sourced.

postpawl 2y ago
Saying things were “much more open” before GitHub is wild.
optimalsolver 2y ago
Time was you used to have to pay for your compiler, and then manually crank it by hand. Kids these days have no idea.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

gherkinnn 2y ago

> I will keep this site althole-free, [...] This is my life and this is where I have any control. This is the only rebellion I am capable of. I might agree with some of the author's sentiments, but based on this post alone, he makes the impression that computing is all his life. And now his life is going through a shift. The problem here isn't LLMs.

ianbutler 2y ago
I’ve been thinking about writing a blog post but the gist of it is this realization. Developers who’s identities are wrapped up in the act of coding as it stands hate LLMs because it represents a drastic shift in the way programs are being written. If being the smart dev writing clever code is the core of your identity and you have nothing else anchoring you you’re probably going to have a bad time over the next few years because the game is changing.
uludag 2y ago
I think saying that the author is stuck in his ways and is just fighting change is a bit too simplistic. - All major tech companies becoming "AI first" - The websites we use are still slow and buggy - "AI" feature bloat everywhere - Noting that the end-goal of these companies are not to enhance some technical professional's workflow, but to become truly ubiquitous, inserted into everything (how else could such high valuations be made) - Prioritization of profits above good products (enshitification) These are all valid points to bring up. The author is just saying that he wants his personal website to remain free from LLM usage, probably out of a desire for agency more than anything.

becquerel 2y ago

My natural instinct when I encounter this kind of person is to lavish scorn on them, but I have to hold myself back from that. Partly because it's the mature thing to do, and partly because the coming years will be hard enough on them anyway. As a sidenote, it amuses me that this author specifically calls out LLMs for being non-deterministic as a grave sin. Despite it being untrue (they've never heard of temperature, I guess), it's funny to me that it should be asserted as a prime directive for computing. Determinism is certainly a useful property where you can get it, but there's a whole lot of useful systems where you can't get it.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
dns_snek 2y ago
> calls out LLMs for being non-deterministic as a grave sin. Despite it being untrue (they've never heard of temperature, I guess) With all that grandstanding you've missed the author's point because temperature doesn't make them deterministic in any way that matters in the real world. It only makes their output deterministic for the exact sequence of input tokens (I've yet to see an application where this would be useful, just save the result if you want the exact same one!), but it doesn't make them deterministic for a different but semantically equivalent sequence of tokens, which is the core value proposition of LLMs. The answer to "How tall is the Eiffel tower?" shouldn't change based on whether I also add "and where is its nearest bakery?", but with more complex questions, that's what often happens.
- DemocracyFTW2 2y ago
  exactly, and you can graphically watch the effect in image generators that do not only behave, in my experience, in a non-deterministic way, but chaotically in the sense that any small change to the input prompt can cause arbitrary changes in the output picture
zkry 2y ago
> My natural instinct when I encounter this kind of person is to lavish scorn on them, but I have to hold myself back from that. Partly because it's the mature thing to do, and partly because the coming years will be hard enough on them anyway. That's an awfully patronizing way of putting things. The coming years can be hard for anyone for a number of reasons: geopolitical conflict, economic depression, natural disasters, pandemics, etc. I doubt that harboring negative views towards the current usage of LLMs will make a difference.

mg 2y ago

Not sure the author's main point - that computers become slower and less reliable over time - holds. HN is snappy and rarely fails to function. I can't remember ever using a better group communication tool. The author's website is also snappy and worked perfectly to let them express their view and for me to read it. A lot of software I use today is software I wrote myself and that works in the browser. It is reliable and snappy too. And I write more and more of it with the help of LLMs. Just yesterday, I wrote an image editing tool with a very special feature set and was amazed how much faster I was able to implement features in perfectly elegant code via this approach: 1: Give the existing code to an LLM and instruct it to add a feature. 2: Test the feature to make sure it works. 3: Go through the changes via git diff in one window and clean them up in another window in VIM. 4: Test again. 5: Commit. 6: Goto 1 This way, the development of this new tool was multiple times faster than if I had written it manually. To me, the main questionmark about the future of computers is how browsers will develop. The one thing I am missing is that currently no mobile browser supports the File System Access API. On desktop, Chrome does. And that allows users to securely safe their data on their own device. So web software does not have to be like "All your data needs to be in the cloud". Chrome already works on bringing that to mobile. Then the current state of affairs on Desktop and Android will be perfect from my perspective. And all I hope for is that Safari follows. So that iOS users can comfortably use my software too.

DEEP-MELTDOWN 2y ago

[dead]

DemocracyFTW2 2y ago

> In unrelated news - SystemD now tries to convince people that having file-based logs is deprecated. And in few short years we will have Linux “administrators” who don’t know how to use grep(1). This is so in-character, railing about how everything is awful nowadays, then some drive-by ranting in the general direction of a popular target like SystemD. I wonder how this guy can justify the use of CSS and an image on their web page.

oefrha 2y ago
> I wonder how this guy can justify the use of CSS and an image on their web page. Probably because CSS was already a thing when they were young. Everything that came afterwards is moral decay.

preordained 2y ago

I think as-applied now, the author's take strikes a chord with me. LLMs are a technical marvel, but their results feel very cheap and tacky...it doesn't take much to catch at glimpse at the fallible man behind the curtain. They are lauded more for how impressive the illusion they render all things considered more than what they are actually GOOD FOR. Weird hallucinating search, smart but untrustworthy coding intern...people hold these things up in a way that suggests we've arrived instead of acknowledging their disappointment and saying "yes, there is a lot of power here, but we still haven't found the killer application or the thing that takes this from an impressive but flawed trick to indispensable".

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

Not much that the author has stated that I could disagree with. Not everyone is excited about LLMs.