7 ms·

No AI December Reflections

54 points by sandruso 2y ago

000ooo000 2y ago
Last time I asked AI something, it started its response with "Yes, it's certainly possible to x with y." and closed its response with "in conclusion, unfortunately, it's not possible to x with y". In the same session, it told me one must press shift to get the number 1. I'm simultaneously amazed at its ability to generate what it can and disappointed at how it falls short so routinely. It'll get there eventually I'm sure, but I'm pretty dubious when people say they get a lot of value out of it.
- DanHulton 2y ago
  People keep saying "it will get there eventually," or some variety thereof, and I just gotta keep reminding - that is an as-yet unproven claim. It may never get there! Just because we've seen some pretty astounding leaps in capabilities so far, _does not mean_ that we will continue to see them, nor that we'll ever hit the fabled land of "no more mistakes," or hell, even "no more obvious mistakes." I'm not saying I think it won't (though I _suspect_ it won't), I'm just saying we don't have any actual proof that it _will,_ we're all just running on assumptions right now.
  - malfist 2y ago
    To me, I see LLMs as the same type of revolution that dragon naturally speaking was to voice to text. A huge leap forward over existing models, but we've spent the last two (three?) decades trying to close the remaining gap left by dragon in the voice to text problem space, and haven't much progress to show. I think LLMs are likely to be like that. They are a huge jump over previous models of NLP, but I don't see them improving enough to matter to indicate they'll ever make it to AGI
    - kohee 2y ago
      The limitation lies in Transformer architecture itself, therefore AGI was never a possibiblity. It's wonderful, but not miraculous; And that's okay. At this point big techs are just milking the hype of what already reached it's boundaries.
      - zamadatix 2y ago
        I dunno I'm confident enough to say transformer based architectures have really reached their boundaries quite yet but I would agree the hype milks a bit past where it seems transformers alone will take things.
      - HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
        What do you think of Google's new architecture?
    - thaumasiotes 2y ago
      > but we've spent the last two (three?) decades trying to close the remaining gap left by dragon in the voice to text problem space, and haven't much progress to show. Who says it's possible to close the gap? Humans are certainly not capable of doing perfect speech-to-text. You can sit someone down with a song recording and the ability to replay it as much as they want and there's no guarantee they'll ever be able to tell you what the lyrics are.
      - malfist 2y ago
        Human speech recognition is not perfect but it's way higher than the 90% accuracy of current gold standard systems
- the_snooze 2y ago
  LLMs remind me of this line from Borat: >Filtration system a marvel to behold >It remove 80% of human solid waste I mean, yeah, it's impressive. But it fails noticeably often enough to be unusable, especially in repeat cases.
- zamadatix 2y ago
  People are used to Googling something and reading whole threads about how something can/can't be done before an actual sound conclusion, how to do something but it's actually completely wrong, and other similar behaviors so it's not really that big a leap to do the same with an LLM giving you a single response. That said, single pass LLMs tend to do this kind of thing but a lot of the more useful things are best done on chain of thought type ones, where they are given some time to reflect on options before they have to start generating the start of the final response.
  - AnonymousPlanet 2y ago
    Those comment sections have dates, sometimes even version numbers, and often caveats like "this worked for me, don't know if it will for you" or "it'll work until the next update". During my interactions with LLMs so far none of them offered any if these caveats or specifics about what version of the software this will work in, even when asked explicitly.
- layer8 2y ago
  > one must press shift to get the number 1 This is true for French keyboards: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AZERTY https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AZERTY ;)
  - 000ooo000 2y ago
    TIL, thank you
vladde 2y ago
To me, the problem always seemed like people who use ChatGPT and alike default into the "I don't care" mode, and copy-paste blindly. Personally I think this is the root cause of most sloppy AI code. If you just look at the code that was generated, and you don't think "I would've come up with that", then probably the code is wrong.
- askonomm 2y ago
  One thing is to see senior engineers turning to brainrot, and seemingly overnight forgetting how to do basic programming, to the point where if ChatGPT is down they suddenly have no idea how to do work, and another thing is having an entire generation of junior engineers never having learned programming in the first place, because they finished uni via prompting, somehow got a job via prompting, and now are all getting fired en-masse for obvious reasons, creating a huge void in the job market, and very disappointed seniors (those who haven't succumbed to brainrot just yet). I'm not sure how to feel about any of this. On the one hand it clearly shows yet again how gullible people are. I wonder if senior engineers (those who can actually solve novel problems) value in the job market will go up as a result of this? Or will the market be saturated with so much AI-enabled waste that it brings the entire fields salary down as a whole? I feel bad for the end consumer who has to tolerate lower and lower quality products year over year, as the general software engineering practice seemingly burns to the ground, and becomes a chinese sweatshop churning out counterfeit sneakers.
  - bruce511 2y ago
    This past year or so I've had ChatGPT open a lot. It's been super useful as a explore a "new" [1] field in a lot more depth. Interestingly though I don't get it to write code. It's no good at the language I write in, so useless there. As a "tutor" though it's been really useful. I'm asking a lot of (probably simple) questions, and the answers are "right enough". Occasionally I'm not sure why something is failing, and it's usually helpful there too. So, less brain-rot and more "helpful senior who helps me along". [1] the work I'm doing is related to SQL, which I've used here and there before, but not to the depth or degree I am now. I don't need it to write SQL, but rather to answer more general questions and to compare SQL databases, discuss effeciency and so on.
zamadatix 2y ago
I think there is a 3rd mode "I know exactly what I want, I just need this thing to autocomplete 90%+ of it in one shot so I don't have to type it all". Like when you're building out a class and you know it needs to have certain variations of constructor, certain types, certain public and private methods, certain ways to iterated and deep copy, certain ways to pretty print and build up the plumbing to tie those to the default printing methods of the language, and so on. It's not really the "I don't care" mode as you care very much it matches specifically what you want to build out rather than "something which seems to work as a class if I paste it in". It's also not really "I want to learn something here" as you already know exactly what you want and you're not looking for it to deviate, you're just looking to have it appear a couple times faster than if you typed it out. This is, more or less, "I want faster autocomplete for this task" usage.
- OccamsMirror 2y ago
  I do this a lot for React components. I could type it all out myself but that would essentially be busy work. Nothing is being solved by the AI other than me having to do less typing. Once you start hoping the AI is going to solve your problems that is when you're asking for trouble.
  - bluefirebrand 2y ago
    How is describing it to the AI in detail any faster than writing it yourself, or copy + pasting from a template?
    - mathieuh 2y ago
      If you use something like Copilot a lot of the time you don’t explicitly have to tell it to do anything, you just start typing the signature and it autocompletes it. In my use I almost never use the conversation feature of Copilot, I’m just typing e.g. function signatures or the start of a for loop or switch statement etc.
    - mercer 2y ago
      tbh I can see even some benefit from just the need to think ahead and put it into 'regular' words, and then not having to type all the non-ergonomic markup-soup that isn't entirely avoidable. EDIT: On the least-spectacular end of things, I guess it would just be a template with enough magic to not need the inevitable adjustments.
deadbabe 2y ago
Give a fuck about what you’re doing. You get paid a lot of money to write quality software. No engineer’s default mode should ever be “I don’t care I just want the end result”. We’re talking about pressing some keys on a keyboard. Do you want other engineering professions to take similar attitudes? Want to trust your life on some machine or structure designed by someone who just threw some prompts into an LLM and skimmed the results briefly before submitting to production? Don’t rot your brain on this AI autocomplete stuff, learn how to apply AI to do things that were previously impossible or unfeasible, not as a way to just save time or do things cheaper as so many are tempted to.
noodletheworld 2y ago
Zero memory of chat conversations resonates to me. At a practical level, this is a good reason to run your own AI plugin, even if it just a wrapper around some api. You can log your requests and the responses, and then use a similarity score to periodically see what sorts of things you’re asking. I may even update mine to hassle me and be like “you’re asking this a lot, maybe you should remember it…” (If, you can be bothered, rather just reaching for copilot)
muglug 2y ago
I’ve been using O1 for some question/answering stuff around CMake and symbol resolution — stuff I know little about, yet stuff the internet knows a ton about. O1 has been really useful, but just the practice of putting my convoluted question into words has often helped me figure out the answer without even clicking submit.
- torlok 2y ago
  This practice is called Rubber Duck Debugging.
  - kridsdale3 2y ago
    Or the Socratic method of teaching.
aicoding 2y ago
"This site was made with some AI tools on November 27, 2024"
- sandruso 2y ago
  Yes, that supposed to be funny. The text was written by us humans.
NooneAtAll3 2y ago
For a reflection on the period /without/ ai, this text spent a looot of time about time /with/ ai I understand that your goal was to review the "default" you got into, but I'd love to know a lot more about struggles (and counters to them) you experienced in the NAD itself

54 points by sandruso 2y ago

Last time I asked AI something, it started its response with "Yes, it's certainly possible to x with y." and closed its response with "in conclusion, unfortunately, it's not possible to x with y". In the same session, it told me one must press shift to get the number 1. I'm simultaneously amazed at its ability to generate what it can and disappointed at how it falls short so routinely. It'll get there eventually I'm sure, but I'm pretty dubious when people say they get a lot of value out of it.

DanHulton 2y ago
People keep saying "it will get there eventually," or some variety thereof, and I just gotta keep reminding - that is an as-yet unproven claim. It may never get there! Just because we've seen some pretty astounding leaps in capabilities so far, _does not mean_ that we will continue to see them, nor that we'll ever hit the fabled land of "no more mistakes," or hell, even "no more obvious mistakes." I'm not saying I think it won't (though I _suspect_ it won't), I'm just saying we don't have any actual proof that it _will,_ we're all just running on assumptions right now.
- malfist 2y ago
  To me, I see LLMs as the same type of revolution that dragon naturally speaking was to voice to text. A huge leap forward over existing models, but we've spent the last two (three?) decades trying to close the remaining gap left by dragon in the voice to text problem space, and haven't much progress to show. I think LLMs are likely to be like that. They are a huge jump over previous models of NLP, but I don't see them improving enough to matter to indicate they'll ever make it to AGI
  - kohee 2y ago
    The limitation lies in Transformer architecture itself, therefore AGI was never a possibiblity. It's wonderful, but not miraculous; And that's okay. At this point big techs are just milking the hype of what already reached it's boundaries.
    - zamadatix 2y ago
      I dunno I'm confident enough to say transformer based architectures have really reached their boundaries quite yet but I would agree the hype milks a bit past where it seems transformers alone will take things.
    - HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
      What do you think of Google's new architecture?
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    > but we've spent the last two (three?) decades trying to close the remaining gap left by dragon in the voice to text problem space, and haven't much progress to show. Who says it's possible to close the gap? Humans are certainly not capable of doing perfect speech-to-text. You can sit someone down with a song recording and the ability to replay it as much as they want and there's no guarantee they'll ever be able to tell you what the lyrics are.
    - malfist 2y ago
      Human speech recognition is not perfect but it's way higher than the 90% accuracy of current gold standard systems
the_snooze 2y ago
LLMs remind me of this line from Borat: >Filtration system a marvel to behold >It remove 80% of human solid waste I mean, yeah, it's impressive. But it fails noticeably often enough to be unusable, especially in repeat cases.
zamadatix 2y ago
People are used to Googling something and reading whole threads about how something can/can't be done before an actual sound conclusion, how to do something but it's actually completely wrong, and other similar behaviors so it's not really that big a leap to do the same with an LLM giving you a single response. That said, single pass LLMs tend to do this kind of thing but a lot of the more useful things are best done on chain of thought type ones, where they are given some time to reflect on options before they have to start generating the start of the final response.
- AnonymousPlanet 2y ago
  Those comment sections have dates, sometimes even version numbers, and often caveats like "this worked for me, don't know if it will for you" or "it'll work until the next update". During my interactions with LLMs so far none of them offered any if these caveats or specifics about what version of the software this will work in, even when asked explicitly.
layer8 2y ago
> one must press shift to get the number 1 This is true for French keyboards: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AZERTY https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AZERTY ;)
- 000ooo000 2y ago
  TIL, thank you

vladde 2y ago

To me, the problem always seemed like people who use ChatGPT and alike default into the "I don't care" mode, and copy-paste blindly. Personally I think this is the root cause of most sloppy AI code. If you just look at the code that was generated, and you don't think "I would've come up with that", then probably the code is wrong.

askonomm 2y ago
One thing is to see senior engineers turning to brainrot, and seemingly overnight forgetting how to do basic programming, to the point where if ChatGPT is down they suddenly have no idea how to do work, and another thing is having an entire generation of junior engineers never having learned programming in the first place, because they finished uni via prompting, somehow got a job via prompting, and now are all getting fired en-masse for obvious reasons, creating a huge void in the job market, and very disappointed seniors (those who haven't succumbed to brainrot just yet). I'm not sure how to feel about any of this. On the one hand it clearly shows yet again how gullible people are. I wonder if senior engineers (those who can actually solve novel problems) value in the job market will go up as a result of this? Or will the market be saturated with so much AI-enabled waste that it brings the entire fields salary down as a whole? I feel bad for the end consumer who has to tolerate lower and lower quality products year over year, as the general software engineering practice seemingly burns to the ground, and becomes a chinese sweatshop churning out counterfeit sneakers.
- bruce511 2y ago
  This past year or so I've had ChatGPT open a lot. It's been super useful as a explore a "new" [1] field in a lot more depth. Interestingly though I don't get it to write code. It's no good at the language I write in, so useless there. As a "tutor" though it's been really useful. I'm asking a lot of (probably simple) questions, and the answers are "right enough". Occasionally I'm not sure why something is failing, and it's usually helpful there too. So, less brain-rot and more "helpful senior who helps me along". [1] the work I'm doing is related to SQL, which I've used here and there before, but not to the depth or degree I am now. I don't need it to write SQL, but rather to answer more general questions and to compare SQL databases, discuss effeciency and so on.

zamadatix 2y ago

I think there is a 3rd mode "I know exactly what I want, I just need this thing to autocomplete 90%+ of it in one shot so I don't have to type it all". Like when you're building out a class and you know it needs to have certain variations of constructor, certain types, certain public and private methods, certain ways to iterated and deep copy, certain ways to pretty print and build up the plumbing to tie those to the default printing methods of the language, and so on. It's not really the "I don't care" mode as you care very much it matches specifically what you want to build out rather than "something which seems to work as a class if I paste it in". It's also not really "I want to learn something here" as you already know exactly what you want and you're not looking for it to deviate, you're just looking to have it appear a couple times faster than if you typed it out. This is, more or less, "I want faster autocomplete for this task" usage.

OccamsMirror 2y ago
I do this a lot for React components. I could type it all out myself but that would essentially be busy work. Nothing is being solved by the AI other than me having to do less typing. Once you start hoping the AI is going to solve your problems that is when you're asking for trouble.
- bluefirebrand 2y ago
  How is describing it to the AI in detail any faster than writing it yourself, or copy + pasting from a template?
  - mathieuh 2y ago
    If you use something like Copilot a lot of the time you don’t explicitly have to tell it to do anything, you just start typing the signature and it autocompletes it. In my use I almost never use the conversation feature of Copilot, I’m just typing e.g. function signatures or the start of a for loop or switch statement etc.
  - mercer 2y ago
    tbh I can see even some benefit from just the need to think ahead and put it into 'regular' words, and then not having to type all the non-ergonomic markup-soup that isn't entirely avoidable. EDIT: On the least-spectacular end of things, I guess it would just be a template with enough magic to not need the inevitable adjustments.

deadbabe 2y ago

Give a fuck about what you’re doing. You get paid a lot of money to write quality software. No engineer’s default mode should ever be “I don’t care I just want the end result”. We’re talking about pressing some keys on a keyboard. Do you want other engineering professions to take similar attitudes? Want to trust your life on some machine or structure designed by someone who just threw some prompts into an LLM and skimmed the results briefly before submitting to production? Don’t rot your brain on this AI autocomplete stuff, learn how to apply AI to do things that were previously impossible or unfeasible, not as a way to just save time or do things cheaper as so many are tempted to.

noodletheworld 2y ago

Zero memory of chat conversations resonates to me. At a practical level, this is a good reason to run your own AI plugin, even if it just a wrapper around some api. You can log your requests and the responses, and then use a similarity score to periodically see what sorts of things you’re asking. I may even update mine to hassle me and be like “you’re asking this a lot, maybe you should remember it…” (If, you can be bothered, rather just reaching for copilot)

muglug 2y ago

I’ve been using O1 for some question/answering stuff around CMake and symbol resolution — stuff I know little about, yet stuff the internet knows a ton about. O1 has been really useful, but just the practice of putting my convoluted question into words has often helped me figure out the answer without even clicking submit.

torlok 2y ago
This practice is called Rubber Duck Debugging.
- kridsdale3 2y ago
  Or the Socratic method of teaching.

aicoding 2y ago

"This site was made with some AI tools on November 27, 2024"

sandruso 2y ago
Yes, that supposed to be funny. The text was written by us humans.

NooneAtAll3 2y ago

For a reflection on the period /without/ ai, this text spent a looot of time about time /with/ ai I understand that your goal was to review the "default" you got into, but I'd love to know a lot more about struggles (and counters to them) you experienced in the NAD itself