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Your fixation is a result of the fact that interacting with LLM coding tools is much like playing a slot machine, it grabs and chokeholds your gambling instinct

Your fixation is a result of the fact that interacting with LLM coding tools is much like playing a slot machine, it grabs and chokeholds your gambling instincts. You're rolling dice for the perfect result without much thought.

amelius 1y ago
I'm sure they are working hard to tell the LLM how to think and where it went wrong.
- rjpower9000 1y ago
  It's true you're still working, but it's a different, more distracted effort: you put the LLM on something for a while and then come back. Sometimes it does it right, some times not. I can see the relation to gambling if, say, it does it right 50% of the time. If I had been taking a more scientific approach to the problem and had a clear direction of what I wanted to test, I suspect I wouldn't have gotten quite as "stuck".
rjpower9000 1y ago
Good insight. That's a better description than what I came up with, "Tiktok for engineers". LLMs probably compound the issue, with that hope of a magic outcome. Though I've had many problems pre-LLM where I was plowing through it myself and couldn't let up...
munificent 1y ago
That mixed with a dash of simulated social interaction making you not want to thwart your AI "partner" and give up.
jimbob45 1y ago
Is there any progress toward more deterministic AI? Like seeding with predictable values or a nanny AI that discards hallucinations? I know the smartest people in the world are working on this stuff so I’m sure they’ve thought of everything before me but I don’t know where to seek out layman’s news on cutting-edge AI developments that aren’t just “we threw more compute and tokens at it”.
sbierwagen 1y ago
Over the last year and change I've generated 70 thousand images on civitai.com, a website that hosts neural net image generation models. (For porn, obviously) Twenty out of a hundred gens are malformed horrors. Seventy out of a hundred are boring or cack-handed. Nine are interesting and worth exploring. And one out of a hundred I would say the algorithm accidentally produces real art. Roll that one out of a hundred too many times when you're just starting out, and, well, you end up like me.

amelius 1y ago

I'm sure they are working hard to tell the LLM how to think and where it went wrong.

rjpower9000 1y ago
It's true you're still working, but it's a different, more distracted effort: you put the LLM on something for a while and then come back. Sometimes it does it right, some times not. I can see the relation to gambling if, say, it does it right 50% of the time. If I had been taking a more scientific approach to the problem and had a clear direction of what I wanted to test, I suspect I wouldn't have gotten quite as "stuck".

rjpower9000 1y ago

Good insight. That's a better description than what I came up with, "Tiktok for engineers". LLMs probably compound the issue, with that hope of a magic outcome. Though I've had many problems pre-LLM where I was plowing through it myself and couldn't let up...

munificent 1y ago

That mixed with a dash of simulated social interaction making you not want to thwart your AI "partner" and give up.

jimbob45 1y ago

Is there any progress toward more deterministic AI? Like seeding with predictable values or a nanny AI that discards hallucinations? I know the smartest people in the world are working on this stuff so I’m sure they’ve thought of everything before me but I don’t know where to seek out layman’s news on cutting-edge AI developments that aren’t just “we threw more compute and tokens at it”.

sbierwagen 1y ago

Over the last year and change I've generated 70 thousand images on civitai.com, a website that hosts neural net image generation models. (For porn, obviously) Twenty out of a hundred gens are malformed horrors. Seventy out of a hundred are boring or cack-handed. Nine are interesting and worth exploring. And one out of a hundred I would say the algorithm accidentally produces real art. Roll that one out of a hundred too many times when you're just starting out, and, well, you end up like me.