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I think there's a more general bifurcation here, between logic that: 1. Intrinsically needs to be precise, rigid, even fiddly, or 2. Has only been that way so
by brundolf 2y ago
I think there's a more general bifurcation here, between logic that:
1. Intrinsically needs to be precise, rigid, even fiddly, or
2. Has only been that way so far because that's how computers are
1 includes things like security, finance, anything involving contention between parties or that maps to already-precise domains like mathematics or a game with a precise ruleset
2 will be increasingly replaced by AI, because approximations and "vibes-based reasoning" were actually always preferable for those cases
Different parts of the same application will be best suited to 1 or 2
- senordevnyc 2y agoWhat are some examples of #2?
- Feathercrown 2y agoAutosorting, fuzzy search, document analysis, identifying posts with the same topic, and sentiment analysis all benefit from AI's soft input handling.
- userbinator 2y agofuzzy search I do NOT want search to become any fuzzier than it already is. See the great decline of Google's search results, which often don't even have all the words you're asking about and likely omits the one that's most important, for a great example.
- Joker_vD 2y agoJust yesterday saw this great example: [0]. [0] https://grumpy.website/1642 https://grumpy.website/1642
- squiggleblaz 2y agoI don't necessarily want search to become any fuzzier than it already is either, but what's happened has happened and I've already responded to the decline of traditional search engines. Nowadays I pretty much only search duckduckgo with site:(something), or else I ask perplexity the question and for some links. Traditional search engines now just give a thousand SEOed-to-death articles, probably generated by ai, from hundreds of pointless third party websites that just have the same basic milk. It might be that it's worth it to bifurcate soon. Search indexes and AI engines, doing different roles. The index would have to be sorted with AI though - to focus on original and first-party material and to downrank ad-driving slop.
- arkh 2y ago> fuzzy search > I do NOT want search to become any fuzzier than it already is. For a specialized shop site you may want it. Search term: "something 150", the client is looking for a 1.5m something, if you're doing an exact text search your search engine will give you a lot of noise. Or you'll have to fiddle with synonyms, dictionaries and how you index your products with a huge chance to break other types of search queries.
- soco 2y agoHow many sites will have useful results to return for a "something 150"? Muzzle width? Bees? T-shirt size? Walking distance? You surely cannot want _all_ these categories yet you'll get them all in a list. I might be biased but today's fuzzy search is a dumpster fire, sites hating to return only two results so they bury anything relevant in a tidal wave of unrelated garbage. I have office mates like that and everybody hates them as well.
- ZeroTalent 2y agoBut this is why LLMs are so amazing. They understand context and nuance, and they have reasoning skills now. So you will not get a long list of garbage from a good model.
- soco 2y agoDo you know such models or is this wishful thinking?
- ZeroTalent 2y agoo3, reasoner.com, and complex setups of "thinking" workflows for sonnet 3.7, gemini 2.5 pro, and o1-pro Gemini 2.5 pro is basically free. Also watsonx, but that's b2b.
- arkh 2y agoMy current case is: whatever you'll look for in a hardware store. So anything yeah: muzzle width, wood length, protective gear, liquid quantities, animal food etc. And depending on the client vertical they tend to not use the same vocabulary when looking for products. But contrary to some other comments I know LLM are not magical tools and anything we use will require data to fine tune whatever base model we choose. And it will be used on top of standard text search not as a full replacement. I'm sure many companies are currently doing the exact same thing or will be soon enough.
- kolinko 2y agoJust because Google is doing it bad doesn’t mean it has to be bad.
- mrob 2y agoI want both fuzzy search and exact search. Google still has the "I'm feeling lucky" button, so it can support multiple search buttons. It could default to fuzzy search and have an "I'm feeling unlucky" button for exact search.
- jayd16 2y agoThese are fuzz tolerant, not preferred. Stable and high quality results would still be ideal.
- dfabulich 2y agoAutomated UI tests, perhaps.
- wcfrobert 2y agoI am not a frontend dev but centering a div came to mind. I just want to center the damn content. I don't much care about the intricacies of using auto-margin, flexbox, css grid, align-content, etc.
- darepublic 2y agoAre you describing coding html via LLM or actually using the llm as a rendering engine for ui
- t-writescode 2y agoNeither. They're describing the philosophical similarities of: * "Has only been that way so far because that's how computers are" and * "I just want to center the damn content. I don't much care about the intricacies of using auto-margin, flexbox, css grid, align-content, etc." Centering a div is seen as difficult because complexities that boil down to "that's just how computers are", and they find (imo rightful) frustration in that.
- kevingadd 2y agoThat doesn't seem like a #2 scenario, unless you're okay with your centered divs not being centered some of the time.
- Groxx 2y agolooking at most websites, regardless of how much money and human energy has been spent on them: yes I think we're okay with divs not being centered some of the time. many millions have been spilled to adjust pixels (while failing to handle loads of more common issues), but most humans just care if they can eventually get what they want to happen if they press the button harder next time. (I am not an LLM-optimist, but visual layout is absolutely somewhere that people aren't all that picky about edge cases, because the success rate is abysmally low already. it's like good translations: it can definitely help, and definitely be worth the money, but it is definitely not a hard requirement - as evidence I point to the vast majority of translated software.)
- s1artibartfast 2y agoI unironically use llm for tax advice. It has to be directionally workable and 90% is usually good enough. Beats reddit and the first page of Google, which was the prior method.
- blatantly 2y agoThat is search. Like Google, you need to verify accuracy of what you get told. An LLM that talks then quotes only government docs would be best so you can quickly check. Any conclusions the LLM makes about tax are suspect.
- s1artibartfast 2y agoI think you miss my point. A 100% accurate llm would also be helpful, but is a different use case. Sometimes the tax guidance are incomplete or debatable. Sometimes reasonable, plausible, or acceptable is the target.
- peterldowns 2y agoAbsolutely any kind of classifier.
- peterburkimsher 2y agoI used Copilot to play a game "guess the country" where I hand it a list of names, and ask it to guess their country of origin. Then I handed it the employee directory. Then I searched by country to find native speakers of languages who can review our GUI translation. Some people said they don't speak that language (e.g. they moved country when they were young, or the AI guessed wrong). Perhaps that was a little awkward, but people didn't usually mind being asked, and overall have been very helpful in this translation reviewing project.
- WesolyKubeczek 2y agoA good chunk of Americans would have ended up with GUIs in Polish, just sayin’
- t-writescode 2y agoI see the ".fr" in your profile; but, in the United States, that activity would almost certainly be a conversation with HR. If you really, really wanted help with a translation project and you didn't want to pay, professional translators (which you should do since translation-by-meaning requires fluency or beyond in both languages), then there are more polite ways of asking this information than cold-calling every person with a "regional" sounding name and saying "hey, you know [presumed mother tongue]?"
- aboardRat4 2y ago[flagged]
- t-writescode 2y ago... to be clear, you're saying that banning prejudicial activities at companies is a reflection of how "entitled" the US has grown to be? You understand why they're banned, right? We have a very recent and loud history about why we ban discrimination like that - or at least did.
- 2y ago
- brookst 2y agoTranslating text; writing a simple but not trivial python function; creating documentation from code.
- Sevii 2y agoFor every program in production there are 1000s of other programs that accomplish exactly the same output despite having a different hash.
- bawolff 2y agoI wouldnt take that too literally, since that is the halting problem. I suppose AI can provide a heuristic useful in some cases.
- jayd16 2y agoI think the only thing where you could argue is it's preferred is creative tasks like fictional writing, words smithing, and image generation where realism is not the goal.
- brundolf 2y agoThe human or "natural" interface to the outside world. Interpreting sensor data, user interfacing (esp natural language), art and media (eg media file compression), even predictions of how complex systems will behave
- dharmab 2y agoShopping assistant for subjective purchases. I use LLMs to decide on gifts, for example. You input the person's interests, demographics, hobbies, etc. and interactively get a list of ideas.
- BeetleB 2y agoAnything people ask a human to do instead of a computer. Humans are not the most reliable. If you're ok giving the task to a human then you're ok with a lower level of relisbility than a traditional computer program gives. Simple example: Notify me when a web page meaningfully changes and specify what the change is in big picture terms. We have programs to do the first part: Detecting visual changes. But filtering out only meaningful changes and providing a verbal description? Takes a ton of expertise. With MCP I expect that by the end of this year a nonprogrammer will be able to have an LLM do it using just plugins in a SW.
- ssivark 2y agoTo elaborate — the task definition itself is vague enough that any evaluation will necessarily be vibes based. There is fundamentally no precise definition of correctness/reliability.
- ajb 2y agoNot anything - it wouldn't be a great idea to give an LLM the ability to spend money, but we let humans do it all the time.
- dambi0 2y agoWith suitable safeguards or limits on what it can spend why not? On the one hand it might not fear repercussions as a human would, on the other hand it’s far less likely to embezzle funds to support its overly lavish lifestyle or gambling addiction.
- Jensson 2y agoYeah, you could marry an AI and share a bank account with it, and now it could buy you useful stuff it thinks you need without you doing anything, or even buy you presents.
- iamacyborg 2y agoWe don’t let LLM’s spend money yet but many businesses make bank letting computers automatically buy and sell things.