22 ms·

The Rise of Whatever

• tptacek 1y ago
  LLM output is crap. It’s just crap. It sucks, and is bad. Still don't get it. LLM outputs are nondeterministic. LLMs invent APIs that don't exist. That's why you filter those outputs through agent constructions, which actually compile code. The nondeterminism of LLMs don't make your compiler nondeterministic. All sorts of ways to knock LLM-generated code. Most I disagree with, all colorable. But this article is based on a model of LLM code generation from 6 months ago which is simply no longer true, and you can't gaslight your way back to Q1 2024.
  • beckthompson 1y ago
    AIs still frequently make up stuff up - there isn't really a way to get out of that. Have they improved a lot in the last six months? 100%! But they still make mistakes its quite common
    • tptacek 1y ago
      LLM calls make stuff up. Your compiler can't make things up. An agent iterates LLM calls. When your LLM call makes an API up, your compiler will generate errors. The errors get fed back into the iterative loop. In pretty much ever real case, the LLM corrects, but either way: the result is clear. The code may be wrong, but it shouldn't hallucinate entire APIs.
      • beckthompson 1y ago
        But just compiling doesn't mean that much and doesn't really solve the core issue of AIs making stuff up. I could hook up a random word generator into a compiler and it also would also pass that test! For example, just yesterday I asked an AI a question about how to approach a specific problem. It gave an answer that "worked" (it compiled!) but in reality it didn't really make any sense and would add a very nasty bug. What it wrote (It used a FrameUpdate instead of a normal Update) just didn't make sense on a basic level of how the framework worked.
        • tptacek 1y ago
          I'm not interested in this Calvinball argument. The post we're commenting on makes a clear claim: an LLM hallucinating entire APIs. Not surreptitiously sneaking subtly shitty stuff past a compiler. This is my problem: not that people are cynical about LLM-assisted coding, but that they themselves are hallucinating arguments about it, expecting their readers to nod along. Not happening here.
          • kgwgk 1y ago
            > The post we're commenting on makes a clear claim: an LLM hallucinating entire APIs You made a similar claim: LLMs invent APIs that don't exist https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44461381 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44461381
            • tptacek 1y ago
              The AES block cipher core: also grievously insecure if used naively, without understanding what a block cipher can and can't do, by itself. Thus also an LLM call.
      • loire280 1y ago
        A great solution to this problem, but it doesn't seem like this approach will generalize to problems in other fields, or even to more suble coding confabulations that can't be detected by the compiler or static analysis.
        • tptacek 1y ago
          I vehemently agree with this. But it doesn't change the falsity of the claim in the article.
    • csomar 1y ago
      You can improve on that 1. A type-strict compiler. 2. https://github.com/isaacphi/mcp-language-server https://github.com/isaacphi/mcp-language-server LLMs will always make stuff up because they are lossy. In the same way that if I ask you to list the methods for some random object lib you'd not be able to do that; you use the documentation to pull that up or your code-complete companion. LLMs are just getting the tools for that.
      • beckthompson 1y ago
        Oh for sure I agree 100%! I was just saying that they will always make stuff up no matter what. Those are both good fixes but at its core it can only "make stuff up".
  • 62702b077f3 1y ago
    > The garbage generator generates garbage, but if you run it enough times it gets something slightly-less-garbage that can satisfy a compiler! You're stupid if you don't think this is awesome!
    • KPGv2 1y ago
      I had Copilot for a hot minute. When I wrote things like serializers and deserializers, it was incredible. So much time saved. But I didn't do it enough to make the personal cost worth it, so I cancelled. It's annoying to have to hand-code that stuff. But without Copilot I have to. Or I can write some arcane regex and run it on existing code to get 90% of the way there. But writing the regex also takes a while. Copilot was literally just suggesting the whole deserialization function after I"d finished the serializer, 100% correct code.
      • Shorel 1y ago
        I remember writing LISP code that created the serialisers and deserialisers for me. Now that everything is containerised and managed by docker style environments, I am thinking about giving SBCL another try, the end users only need to access the same JSON REST APIs anyway. Everything old is new again =)
    • ipdashc 1y ago
      I don't understand the point of this style of argument. There are oh-so-many issues with LLMs - plagiarism/IP rights, worsening education, unmaintainable code - this should be obvious to anyone. But painting them as totally useless just doesn't make sense. Of course they work. I've had a task I want to do, I ask the LLM in plain English, it gives me code, the code works, I get the task done faster than I would have figuring out the code myself. This process has happened plenty of times. Which part of this do you disagree with, under your argument? Am I and all the other millions of people who have experienced this all collectively hallucinating (pun intended) that we got working solutions to our problems? Are we just unskilled for not being able to write the code quickly enough ourselves, and should go sod off? I'm joking a bit, but it's a genuine question.
    • 1y ago
  • ipdashc 1y ago
    There was an article that made the rounds a few weeks ago that still rings true. Basically, it feels like one is going crazy reading either "extreme" of the whole LLM conversation, with one extreme (obviously) being the "AI can do anything" Twitter techbro types, but the other extreme being articles like this that claim it can't do anything. I know the author already addressed this, literally calling out HN by name, but I just don't get it. You don't even need agents (though I'm sure they help), I still just use regular ChatGPT or Copilot or whatever and it's still occasionally useful. You type in what you want it to do, it gives you code, and usually the code works. Can we appreciate how insane this would have been, what, half a decade ago? Are our standards literally "the magic english-to-code machine doesn't work 100% of the time, so it's total crap, utterly useless"? I absolutely agree with the general thrust of the article, the overall sense of disillusionment, the impact LLM abuse is going to have on education, etc. I don't even particularly like LLMs. But it really does feel like gaslighting to the extent that when these essays make this sort of argument (LLMs being entirely useless for coding) it just makes me take them less seriously.
    • paulddraper 1y ago
      > it just makes me take them less seriously Indeed. This is how to spot an ideologue with an axe to grind, not someone whose beliefs are shaped by dispassionate observation.
      • happytoexplain 1y ago
        Aside from trivial facts, beliefs can not be, and should not be, shaped by dispassionate observation alone. Even yours are not. And framing it the way you have is simply the same but oppositely-positioned fallacy as the one the author is accused of.
  • csomar 1y ago
    > LLM outputs are nondeterministic. LLM outputs are deterministic. There is no intrinsic source of randomness. Users can add randomness (temperature) to the output and modify it. > But this article is based on a model of LLM code generation from 6 months ago There hasn't been much change in models from 6 months ago. What happened is that we have better tooling to sift through the randomly generated outputs. I don't disagree with your message. You are being downvoted because a lot of software developers are butt-hurt by it. It is going to force a change in the labor market for developers. In the same way the author is butt-hurt that they didn't buy Bitcoin in the very early days (as they were aware of it) and missed the boat on that.
    • tptacek 1y ago
      There hasn't been much change in models from 6 months ago. I made the same claim in a widely-circulated piece a month or so back, and have come to believe it was wildly false, the dumbest thing I said in that piece.
      • csomar 1y ago
        I have my own test to measure performance: https://omarabid.com/gpt3-now https://omarabid.com/gpt3-now So far the only model that showed significant advancement and differentiation was GPT-4.5. I advise to look at the problem and read GPT-4.5 answer. It'll show the difference to other "normal models" (including GPT-3.5) as it shows considerable levels of understanding. Other normal models are now more chatty and have a bit more data. But they do not show increased intelligence.
        • Karrot_Kream 1y ago
          I was able to have Opus 4 one-shot it. Happy to share a screenshot if that wasn't your experience.
          • csomar 1y ago
            Interested to see your Opus 4 one-shot. I tried it very recently on Opus 4 and it burbled non-sense.
  • lovich 1y ago
    > agent constructions > But this article is based on a model of LLM code generation from 6 months ago which is simply no longer true, and you can't gaslight your way back to Q1 2024. You’re ahead of the curve and wondering why others don’t know what you do. If you’re not an AI company, a faang, or an AI evangelist you likely haven’t heard of those solutions. I’ve been trying to keep up with AI developments, and only learned about MCP and agentic workflows 1-2 months ago and I consider myself failing at keeping up with cutting edge AI development Edit: Also six months ago is Q1 2025, not 2024. Not sure if that was a typo or a need to remind you at how rapidly this technology is iterating
  • eviks 1y ago
    > or they suggested an elaborate and tedious workaround that would technically solve the problem (but introduce new ones). There is no value in randomly choosing an API that exists. There is value in choosing an API that works. When LLM makes up an API that doesn't even exist it indicates that it's not tied to the reality of the task of fetching a working API, so filtering out nonexistent APIs will not help the other results match better. But yes, they'll compile.
    • tptacek 1y ago
      Give me a break. First, that's not the claim the article makes. Second, that's not the experience of anybody who actually uses Claude Code or Gemini Desktop or whatever people are using this week. This is what I'm talking about: people just gaslighting. LLMs can write truly shitty code. I have a <50% hit rate on stuff I don't have to rewrite, with Sketch.dev, an agent I like a lot. But they don't fail the way you or this article claim they do. Enough.
      • eviks 1y ago
        First, it is, you've just reduced the forest article claim down to a single tree to make it appear like your "solution" cuts it. Second, speak for yourself, you have no clue about everybody's experience to make such a universal claim. Lastly, the article talks about author's experience, not yours, so you're the only one who can gaslight the author, not the other way around
        • tptacek 1y ago
          I'm comfortable with the assertions I'm making here and stand by them.
  • d4rkn0d3z 1y ago
    Isn't this saying "We get it that our nondeterministic bullshit machine writes crap, but we are wrapping it in a deterministic finite state machine in order to bring back determinism. We call it 'Agentic'". Seems like 40 years of effort making deterministic computing work in a non-deterministic universe is being cast aside because we thought nondeterminism might work better. Turns out, we need determinism after all. Following this out, we might end up with alternating layers of determinism and nondeterminism each trying to correct the output of the layer below. I would argue AI is a harder problem than any humans have ever tried to solve, how does it benefit me to make every mundane problem into the hardest problem ever? As they say on the internet ...and now you have two problems, the second of which is always the hardest one ever.
• mumbisChungo 1y ago
  I think there's a decent chance that folks on the fringes find interesting uses for immutable and programmable distributed ledgers, even if the prevailing culture of crypto is hellish.
  • Analemma_ 1y ago
    I keep hearing this theory, that “eventually” we will find the use cases for distributed ledgers, and I don’t buy it. Bitcoin was invented at roughly the same time as the iPhone, and the iPhone immediately found use cases. Right away the global economy reoriented itself around the smartphone, because it demonstrated real value to actual people. We did not need to wait and twiddle our fingers for years going “I think there’s a decent chance people find interesting uses for this someday”. Immutable distributed ledgers, by contrast, have found no use cases other than crime and financial speculation in coming up on twenty years. Exactly how long do we have to wait for these interesting uses that are “surely” coming?
    • mumbisChungo 1y ago
      You make it sounds like it's a struggle between two sides. It's just another option for a creative person who has a problem to solve. Maybe it'll be used for something interesting. Maybe it won't be. It's just a piece of maybe frivolous optional technology.
    • yieldcrv 1y ago
      there are many people with many use cases for distributed ledgers. we are already aware of the flowchart of your argument path “list them” “oh I can do that in this other convoluted way that doesnt solve any of these users goals or problems” “I’m not the target audience for that so it doesnt count” “ah so financial speculation, that doesnt count despite being the largest application and sector on the planet” “marketcap doesnt matter and isnt indicative of anything in that economy, I would rather hold digital assets at a separate different standard than every other asset on the planet out of total ignorance that my same arguments apply to asset classes that I respect” “see I proved my point for myself, there is no use case after 17 years, classic HN” “those are strawman arguments despite all conversations following this same predictable path enough for any language model to regurgitate it verbatim”
• tyre 1y ago
  The author is mad at Stripe and PayPal for banning transactions involving unicorn wieners but this is imposed on them by the backing banks. The reason behind banning adult materials has to do with Puritanism and with the high rates of refunds on adult websites.
  • anonzzzies 1y ago
    I have an issue with Stripe or Paypal banning merchants without recourse that do not sell adult stuff or anything else bad/high refund, just because 'AI flagged the account'. And I know from Paypal that they have used 'AI' (statistics) to flag accounts, without recourse, almost since they started. It did cost us a lot of money; we had no refunds or anything and paypal was simply (in email and on the phone) repeating that there was no recourse. We moved to an EU system which we are using for 15 years now and never had any issues of course (as we never did anything weird, ever); also, I can call them or visit them if anything happens unlike the impersonal big guys. Far cheaper too. Screw paypal & stripe (their fees are an absolute joke, no idea why they are so popular), thanks.
    • movetheworld 1y ago
      Which EU system did you move to?
    • dspillett 1y ago
      > no idea why they are so popular Momentum. They are the big games in town because so many people use them, so many people use them because they are the big games in town. There was a time for both when they didn't suck as much as they do now, at least relative to what other options existed.
  • N_Lens 1y ago
    There's a reason "Paypal mafia" is in the lexicon.
  • tavavex 1y ago
    I still think it's mostly puritanism. "Adult transactions" is a massive category of goods and services, and I'm willing to bet that John the average guy buying an overpriced subscription on generic porn website #729 and regretting it 20 minutes later is much more likely to trigger a refund or chargeback than someone commissioning an artist or buying goods (anything from real-life things to 3D models). Yet, the payment processors will all reliably treat anything NSFW equally by suppressing it as much as they can. From banning individuals who dare do transactions they don't approve of to directly pressuring websites that might tolerate NSFW content by threatening to take away their only means of making money. If they only cared about refunds and profitability, they wouldn't ban individual artists - because the fact how these artists often manage to stay undetected for years suggests that many of their customers aren't the kind to start complaining. It's quite fascinating how this is the one area where the companies are willing to "self-regulate". They don't process sales of illicit drugs because the governments above them said no and put in extensive guardrails to make these illegal uses as difficult as reasonably possible. Yet, despite most first-world governments not taking issue with adult content at large (for now), the payment processors will act on their own and diligently turn away any potential revenue they could be collecting.
• raincole 1y ago
  [flagged]
• paulddraper 1y ago
  > Either that, or live in some futuristic utopia like the EU where banks consider "send money to people" to be core functionality. But here in the good ol' U S of A, where material progress requires significant amounts of kicking and screaming, you had PayPal. The irony of this rant next to the AI rant. Progress is not uniformly distributed I guess.
• washmyelbows 1y ago
  Couldn't agree more on many of these points. There is so much 'whatever' everywhere on the web that I legitimately don't understand people being interested in the platforms that suck everyone's time. Its frustrating as someone who used to enjoy the early web a lot and it's frustrating to see people that I have a lot of respect for buying into these awful systems with their time and attention. Worse still, I'm something of an outsider in many situations for opting out of them. The author lost me a little on the AI rant. Yes, everything and everyone is shoving LLMs into places that I don't want it. Just today Bandcamp sent me an email about upcoming summer albums that was clearly in part written by AI. You can't get away from it, it's awful. That being said, the tooling for software development is so powerful that I feel like I'd be crazy not to use it. I save so so much time with banal programming tasks by just writing up a paragraph to cursor about what I want and how I want it done.
• gyomu 1y ago
  Broadly agreed with all the points outlined in there. But for me the biggest issue with all this — that I don't see covered in here, or maybe just a little bit in passing — is what all of this is doing to beginners, and the learning pipeline. > There are people I once respected who, apparently, don’t actually enjoy doing the thing. They would like to describe what they want and receive Whatever — some beige sludge that vaguely resembles it. That isn’t programming, though. > I glimpsed someone on Twitter a few days ago, also scoffing at the idea that anyone would decide not to use the Whatever machine. I can’t remember exactly what they said, but it was something like: “I created a whole album, complete with album art, in 3.5 hours. Why wouldn’t I use the make it easier machine?” When you're a beginner, it's totally normal to not really want to put in the hard work. You try drawing a picture, and it sucks. You try playing the guitar, and you can't even get simple notes right. Of course a machine where you can just say "a picture in the style of Pokémon, but of my cat" and get a perfect result out is much more tempting to a 12 year old kid than the prospect of having to grind for 5 years before being kind of good. But up until now, you had no choice and to keep making crappy pictures and playing crappy songs until you actually start to develop a taste for the effort, and a few years later you find yourself actually pretty darn competent at the thing. That's a pretty virtuous cycle. I shudder to think where we'll be if the corporate-media machine keeps hammering the message "you don't have to bother learning how to draw, drawing is hard, just get ChatGPT to draw pictures for you" to young people for years to come.
  • maegul 1y ago
    Agreed! The only silver lining I can see is that a new perspective may be forced on how well or badly we’ve facilitated learning, usability, generally navigating pain points and maybe even all the dusty presumptions around the education / vocational / professional-development pipeline. Before, demand for employment/salary pushed people through. Now, if actual and reliable understanding, expertise and quality is desirable, maybe paying attention to how well the broader system cultivates and can harness these attributes can be of value. Intuitively though, my feeling is that we’re in some cultural turbulence, likely of a truly historical magnitude, in which nothing can be taken for granted and some “battles” were likely lost long ago when we started down this modern-computing path.
• icameron 1y ago
  Love this writing. One paragraph hit very close to home. I used to be the guy who could figure out obscure scripts by google-fu and rtfm and willpower. Now that skill has been completely obliterated by LLMs and everyone’s doing it- except it’s mostly whatever > I don’t want to help someone who opens with “I don’t know how to do this so I asked ChatGPT and it gave me these 200 lines but it doesn’t work”.
  • N_Lens 1y ago
    I use LLMs for coding everyday and agree with most of the article, even if it does attack me as an "indignant HackerNews mudpie commenter". In the same vein, I've actually worked on crypto projects in both DeFi and NFT spaces, and agree with the "money for criminals" joke assessment of crypto, even if the technology is quite fascinating.
  • Shorel 1y ago
    I am still the guy doing google-fu and rtfm. The skill has not been obliterated. We still need to fix the slop written by the LLMs, but it is not that bad. Some people copy and paste snippets of code without knowing what it does, and in a sense, they spread technical debt around. LLMs lower the technical debt spread by the clueless, to a lower baseline. The issue I see is that the amount of code having this level of technical debt is created at a much faster speed now.
    • darkwater 1y ago
      > LLMs lower the technical debt spread by the clueless, to a lower baseline. I'm SO stealing this!! <3
    • ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y ago
      > LLMs lower the technical debt spread by the clueless, to a lower baseline. Yeah? What about what LLMs help with? Do you have no code that could use translation (move code that looks like this to code that looks like that)? LLMs are real good with that, and they save dozens of hours on single sentence prompt tasks, even if you have to review them. Or is it all bad? I have made $10ks this year alone on what LLMs do, for $10s of dollars of input, but I must understand what I am doing wrong. Or do you mean, if you are a man with a very big gun, you must understand what that gun can do before you pull the trigger? Can only the trained can pull the trigger?
• elza_1111 1y ago
  [flagged]
• moralestapia 1y ago
  >by a man whose other claims to fame are inventing JavaScript But he did invent JavaScript ...
  • Doxin 1y ago
    calling it a "claim to fame" is not implying it's not true. It's an idiom. Wiktionary defines it as "That for which one has bragging rights; one's reason for being well-known or famous."
    • moralestapia 1y ago
      Nice, TIL.
  • alternatex 1y ago
    I have a feeling you don't know what the "claim to fame" expression means :)
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• vasco 1y ago
  Well they even call them "content creators", is there anything more whatever? It's literally "whatever" content needed to load the ads around it. It's not painters or musicians or documentarians, it's content creators.
  • kzrdude 1y ago
    I'm delighted to see the point about "content" in the blog post, finally someone saying that (I also think so and have thought so).
    • vasco 1y ago
      I always found it weird that the new generation embraced being called the id of the div they put stuff in.
• rob_c 1y ago
  [flagged]
• doug_durham 1y ago
  Wow, the lack of self-awareness on the part of the writer of this is stunning. To say "I don't go out of my way to dunk on people who use LLMs", and then write a multipage blog post doing exactly that is fascinating. You do you, and I'll do me. Perhaps spend more time coding which you say you like to do and less time sneering at people who use different tools.
  • arthurbrown 1y ago
    You've read that paragraph backwards. They are talking about LLM enthusiasts dunking on people who aren't using.
    • doug_durham 1y ago
      The author mocks LLM enthusiasts, because they "dunk" on him. While writing an blog post that "dunks" on LLM enthusiasts. Total lack of awareness. If they had taken the time to read their blog before posting it, they might have avoided embarrassment.
      • arthurbrown 1y ago
        So just misquoting the author intentionally then? You should pick some of the substance of the article to take issue with instead of jumping to be a victim. They clearly read it if they wrote it.
        • doug_durham 1y ago
          Here you go, a direct quote: I know there are people who oppose, say, syntax coloring, and I think that’s pretty weird, but I don’t go out of my way to dunk on them. Did you even read the blog post? The entire blog is dunking on people who use the tools.
      • latexr 1y ago
        > they might have avoided embarrassment. What embarrassment? This post, like plenty of Evelyn’s writing, reached the front page of HN and has a ton of commentary in agreement. Your comment, on the other hand, was downvoted to the bottom of the thread. The author also draws and publishes what is, in their own words, “pretty weird porn”. You should voice your disagreement with the contents of the post and explain what they are, if that is what you’re feeling. Discussion is what HN is for. But to believe the author is or should be suffering any kind of embarrassment about this post is detached from reality.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• bflesch 1y ago
  Excellent and well-written article.
• simonw 1y ago
  Looks like I was the inspiration for this post then. https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/post/3lt2xbayttk2h https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/post/3lt2xbayttk2... > Quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw. The reaction to that post has been interesting. It's mainly intended to be an argument against the LLM hype! I'm pushing back against all the people who are saying "LLMs are so incredible at programming that nobody should consider programming as a career any more" - I think that's total nonsense, like a carpenter quitting because someone invented the table saw. Analogies like this will inevitably get people hung up on the details of the analogy though. Lots of people jumped straight to "a table saw does a single job reliably, unlike LLMs which are non-deterministic". I picked table saws because they are actually really dangerous and can cut your thumb off if you don't know how to use them.
  • ninetyninenine 1y ago
    You have to realize that we're only a couple years into wide spread adoption of LLMs as agentic coding partners. It's obvious too everyone, and you that LLMs currently cannot replace coders. People are talking about the trendline, what AI was 5 years ago versus what AI is today points to a different AI 5 years down the line. Whatever AI will be 5 years from now it is immensely possible that LLMs may eliminate programming as a career. If not 5 years... give it 10. If not 10, give it 15. Maybe it happens in a day, a major break through in AI, or maybe it will be like what's currently happening, slow erosion and infiltration into our daily tasks where it takes on more and more responsibilities until one day, it's doing everything. I mean do I even have to state the above? We all know it. What's baffling to me is how I get people saying shit like this: >"LLMs are so incredible at programming that nobody should consider programming as a career any more" - I think that's total nonsense, like a carpenter quitting because someone invented the table saw. I mean it's an obvious complete misrepresentation. People are talking about the future. Not the status quo and we ALL know this yet we still make comments like that.
    • simonw 1y ago
      The more time I spend using LLMs for code (and being impressed at how much better they are compared to six months ago) the less I worry for my career. Using LLMs as part of my process helps me understand how much of my job isn't just bashing out code. My job is to identify problems that can be solved with code, then solve them, then verify that the solution works and has actually addressed the problem. An even more advanced LLM may eventually be able to completely handle the middle piece. It can help with the first and last pieces, but only when operated by someone who understands both the problems to be solved and how to interact with the LLM to help solve them. No matter how good these things get, they will still need someone to find problems for them to solve, define those problems and confirm that they are solved. That's a job - one that other humans will be happy to outsource to an expert practitioner. It's also about 80% of what I do as a software developer already.
• cousin_it 1y ago
  This reminds me of the normie/autistic/sociopath triangle. The idea is that sociopaths can see through normies, normies can see through autists, and autists can see through sociopaths - when there's a sociopath, often the normies in the group will be easily fooled by him, but the autists will be onto him right away. Don't know why that is, but it's true in my experience. Same with AI. I'm notably more autistic (or more aspie, or whatever) than my friend group, and also I much more easily recognize AI text and images as uncanny slop, while my friends are more easily wowed by it. Maybe AI output has the same "superficially impressive but empty inside" quality as the stuff that sociopaths say.
  • test1235 1y ago
    is it to do with patten matching maybe? maybe autists can spot sociopaths 'cos they behave just ever so slightly differently ... and maybe you can recognize AI text 'cos you see a pattern in the content which non-autists do not?
    • cousin_it 1y ago
      It's the opposite of that. All the superficial patterns are there, all the words and their combinations. But the core, the meaning, isn't there.
    • wiseowise 1y ago
      The theory is bullshit, if you didn’t understand from lack of any studies. Most likely yet another flawed output from human-LLM (4chan) so online schizos have something to identify themselves with.
  • sanitycheck 1y ago
    Is this a known thing? I've called myself 'immune to charisma' which seems at least related, and I've thought perhaps it's an autistic/aspie trait but have never come across any studies or articles mentioning it.
  • alittlebee 1y ago
    [dead]
• lovich 1y ago
  I read through the essay and really resonated with some parts and didn’t resonate with others, but I think they put some words to the feelings I have had on AI and its effect in the tech industry > There are people who use these, apparently. And it just feels so… depressing. There are people I once respected who, apparently, don’t actually enjoy doing the thing. They would like to describe what they want and receive Whatever — some beige sludge that vaguely resembles it. That isn’t programming, though. That’s management, a fairly different job. I’m not interested in managing. I’m certainly not interested in managing this bizarre polite lying daydream machine. It feels like a vizier who has definitely been spending some time plotting my demise. I was several minutes of reading before this paragraph when the idea hit me that this person hates managing. Because everyone I’ve met who hates using AI to produce software describes to me problems like the AI not being correct or lying to them if the model thought that would please you better, and that’s my experience with junior engineers as a manager. And everyone I’ve met who loves AI at some point makes an analogy to it, that compares it to a team of eager juniors who can do a lot of work fast but can’t have their output trusted blindly, and that’s my experience with junior engineers as a manager. And then anyone whose been trying to get an Engineering manager job over the past few months and tracking their applications metadata has seen the number of open postings for their requirements go down month after month unless you drop the manager part and keep all the same criteria but as IC And then I read commentary from megacorps about their layoffs and read between the lines like here[1] >… a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement, adding that the company is reducing managerial layers … I think our general consternation around this is coming from creators being forced into management instead of being able to outsource those tasks to their own managers. I am not really sure what to do with this insight [1] https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/02/tech/microsoft-layoffs-9000-employees https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/02/tech/microsoft-layoffs-9000-e...
  • pm215 1y ago
    I think there's still a difference even if you look at it as "supervising a bunch of juniors". I'm happy to review the output of a human in that case because I believe that even if they got some stuff wrong and it might have been quicker and more interesting for me to just do the thing, the process is helping them learn and get better, which is both good in itself and also means that over time I have to do the supervision and support part less and less. Supervising an LLM misses out both of those aspects, so it's just not-very-fun work.
• vincnetas 1y ago
  After reading "...the press release and in the fine print it says that now it can count the number of letters in “Mississippi” correctly or whatever" tried to count letters in another word :) You said: how many letters are in the lithuanian word "nebeprisikaspinaudamas"? Just give me one number. ChatGPT said: 23 You said: how many letters are in the lithuanian word 'nebeprisikaspinaudamas'. Just give me one number. ChatGPT said: 21 Both are incorrect by the way. It's 22
  • molteanu 1y ago
    I got 22 the first time. But then 21 the second time. And the third time...
  • fsh 1y ago
    I'm all for making fun of LLMs, but asking this from a software that processes vectors of tokens is a bit silly. The information isn't really there in the input.
    • layer8 1y ago
      Then it shouldn’t pretend to know the correct answer.
• Mistletoe 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • forgotoldacc 1y ago
    Their big point is crypto isn't being used for purchases like it was promised, which I assumed was true. It's great that they're wrong, though. How often do you use crypto directly to pay for your bills and groceries? Must be nice not needing a credit card anymore. Those interest rates and credit scores can be a killer!
  • teddyh 1y ago
    This is a discussion forum. Putting things into words is the purpose of commenting. If you can’t, then maybe you shouldn’t.
  • rcxdude 1y ago
    It's more or less how my relationship with it went. I was a keen early adopter, but it's been obvious for years that any interest in making them useful has been totally eclipsed by bullshit and/or criminal activity.
• 827a 1y ago
  > What are we actually saying here — that even Microsoft has to evaluate usage of “AI” directly, because it doesn’t affect performance enough to have an obvious impact otherwise Oh wow.
• resonious 1y ago
  I agree with a lot of this at the outset, but don't really like the gloomy outlook. I don't think there's much to gain by writing off all this unfortunate stuff as people being stupid and greedy. I mean sure, that may be true, but you can flip it around and say that it's impressive that we have it as good as we do despite having to co-exist with stupidity and greed. Better yet, you can see it as a challenge to overcome. And I'm not the only one saying this but - the bit about LLMs is likely throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Yes the "AI-ification" of everything is horrible and people are shoehorning it into places where it's not useful. But to say that every single LLM interaction is wrong/not useful is just not true (though it might be true if you limit yourself to only freely available models!). Using LLMs effectively is a skill in itself, and not one to be underestimated. Just because you failed to get it to do something it's not well-suited to doesn't mean it can't do anything at all. Though the conclusion (do things, make things) I do agree with anyway.
  • ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y ago
    > every single LLM interaction is wrong/not useful I think it is defense mechanism, you see it everywhere, and you have to wonder, "why are people thinking this way?". I think those with an ethical or related argument deserve to be heard, but opposite of that, it seems like full blinders, ignoring the reality presented before us.
  • 8n4vidtmkvmk 1y ago
    The free models are also useful. A little more limited, but still useful.
  • notpachet 1y ago
    > you can flip it around and say that it's impressive that we have it as good as we do despite having to co-exist with stupidity and greed I have a feeling that line of thinking is going to be of diminishing consolation as the world veers further into systemic and environmental collapse.
  • rglover 1y ago
    You can—except for the researchers and pioneers at the low-level—write most of the fervor off as mimetic behavior. We live in a world now where people scare one another into making significant choices with limited information. Person A claims it's the future you don't want to miss, Person B takes that at face value and starts figuring out how to get in on the scam, and Person C looks at A and B and says "me too." Rinse and repeat. That's why so much of the AI world is just the same app with a different name. I'd imagine a high percentage of the people involved in these projects don't really care about what they're working on, just that it promises to score them more money and influence (or so they think). So in a way, for the majority, it is just stupid and greedy behavior, but perhaps less conscious.
• ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y ago
  IMO, this is more ranting about people who meet the metrics of the platform. You're a platform drone, you have no mind, yada. Yet, we are reading the author's blog. The author may hate LLMs, but they will lead to many people realizing things they never were aware of, like the author's superficial ability to take information and present it in a way that engages others. Soon that will be a thing that is known. Not many will make money sharing information in prose. What the author refers to as "LLMs" today, will continually improve and "get better" at everything the author has issues with, maybe in novel ways we can't think of at the moment. Alternative take: "Popular culture" has always been a "lesser" ideal of experience, and now that ontological grouping now includes the Internet, as a whole. There are no safe corners, everything you experience on the Internet, if someone shared it with you, is now "Popular culture". Everyone knows what you know, and you are no longer special or have special things to share, because awareness is ubiquitous. This is good for society in many ways. For example, with information asymmetry, where assholes made others their food, it will become less common that people are food. Things like ad-driven social networks will fade away as this realization becomes normalized. Unfortunately, we are at the very early stages of this, and it takes a very long time for people to become aware of things like hoaxes.
  • wiseowise 1y ago
    I’m in your camp, but what makes you think assholes won’t suffocate the technology in its infancy and use it to oppress others even further?
• chrismorgan 1y ago
  > Like, just to calibrate here: you know how some code editors will automatically fill in a right bracket or quote when you type a left one? You type " and the result is "|"? Yeah, that drives me up the wall. It saves no time whatsoever, and it’s wrong often enough that I waste time having to correct for it. I have not yet figured out why anyone would choose this behaviour in a text editor. You have to press something to exit the delimited region anyway, whether that be an arrow key or the closing delimiter, so just… why did the first person even invent the idea, which just complicates things and also makes it harder to model the editor’s behaviour mentally? Were they a hunt-and-peck typist or something? In theory, it helps keep your source valid syntax more of the time, which may help with syntax highlighting (especially of strings) and LSP/similar tooling. But it’s only more of the time: your source will still be invalid frequently, including when it gets things wrong and you have to relocate a delimiter. In practice, I don’t think it’s useful on that ground.
  • sonofhans 1y ago
    Preach it. I’d rather hit right bracket than right arrow.
    • arkh 1y ago
      Maybe the origin is the fact not everyone uses qwerty mappings. On a french keyboard, ~#{[|\\^@]} all require the "alt gr" modifier key which is usually just right of the space key. So totally outside the realm of shift, caps lock, ctrl or alt.
  • atemerev 1y ago
    Because otherwise it would break syntax highlighting until you finish writing the string. And no, sorry, I like my syntax highlighting, I won't turn it off. This feature is useful for me. So are LLMs. If someone doesn't want to use this or that, they are not obliged to. But don't tell me that features that I find useful "suck".
    • willvarfar 1y ago
      Sad this is downvoted, because syntax highlighting is a very plausible explanation for this editor behaviour. You can perhaps imagine an editor that only inserts the delimiter if you type the start-string symbol in the middle of a line.
• dalemhurley 1y ago
  > "live in some futuristic utopia like the EU where banks consider "send money to people" to be core functionality. But here in the good ol' U S of A, where material progress requires significant amounts of kicking and screaming, you had PayPal." I remember when PayPal came to Australia, I was so confused by it as I could just send money via internet banking. Then they tried to lobby the government to make our banking system worse so they could compete, much like Uber.
  • zpeti 1y ago
    I don't get this sentence. It's pretty damn hard sending money in the EU too. We only had SWIFT and CHAPS too like in the USA. The EU isn't some banking haven with ultrafast transfers. If they are talking about the new legislation about fast transfers (SEPA), that came 1 decade after paypal.
    • dofubej 1y ago
      We currently (as in the for the last months) have instant transfers but for the longest time we didn’t and had to use PayPal as well if we wanted to send somebody money instantly without paying the bank an extra for it. I’m confused as to what the article means. It’s possible the author is misinformed.
      • quonn 1y ago
        Instant transfers have been available for many years. they were not free, but most banks supported doing them.
        • lotsofpulp 1y ago
          In the US, I have been sending money electronically for free, and instantly, to my friends and family for almost 15 years. Zelle, previously known as clearXchange, and whatever else, but if you had an account at one of the bigger bank, it has long been trivial to send money to each other. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zelle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zelle > In April 2011, the clearXchange service was launched. It was originally owned and operated by Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo.[6][7] The service offered person-to-person (P2P), business-to-consumer (B2C), and government-to-consumer (G2C) payments.[8]
• thombles 1y ago
  Speaking as a grump who recently chilled out, put reservations on hold and gave Claude a crack... it turns out that the anti-AI crowd (which still includes me in many regards) gets a lot wrong about the experience of using it, as demonstrated in TFA. You don't get reams of wishy-washy code unless you ask for it. If you're an experienced developer who Knows What They Want then you can wield it like a scalpel. None of the output is a surprise because you discussed the context and requirements first. It just gets there (probably) faster than you might have typing out keywords yourself. If the goal is Whatever, then sure, you will get that faster.
  • nottorp 1y ago
    > If you're an experienced developer who Knows What They Want then you can wield it like a scalpel. But that's not what the marketing says. The marketing says it will do your entire job for you. In reality, it will save you some typing if you already know what to do. On HN at least, where most people are startup/hustle culture and experts in something, they don't think long term enough to see the consequences for non experts.
    • thombles 1y ago
      Well I never set much store by marketing and I'm not planning to start. :) More seriously though it helps explain the apparent contradiction that it sounds scammy at a macro level yet many individuals report getting a lot of value out of it.
      • nottorp 1y ago
        > many individuals report getting a lot of value I'm not sure it's a lot of value. It probably is in the short term, but in the long run... There have already been studies saying that you don't retain the info about what a LLM does for you. Even if you are already an expert (a status which you have attained the traditional way), that cuts you off from all those tiny improvements that happen every day without noticing.
    • adastra22 1y ago
• moritzwarhier 1y ago
  Cool post, but: > And the only real hope I have here is that someday, maybe, Bitcoin will be a currency, and circulating money around won’t be the exclusive purview of Froot Loops. Christ PLEASE NO. The only thing this will lead to is people who didn't get rich with this scheme funding the returns of people who bought in early. Whatever BTC becomes, everyone who advocates for funneling public money of people who actually work for their salary into Bitcoin is a fraud. I don't think the blog author actually wants this, but vaguely calling for Bitcoin to become "real money" indirectly will contribute to this bailout. And yes, I'm well aware that funneling pension funds money etc into this pyramid scheme is already underway. Any politician or bank who supports this should be sued if you ask me.
  • rcxdude 1y ago
    Yeah, I think for crypto to actually turn into something net-positive, Bitcoin needs to lose a lot of value. It would almost certainly be some other network that would actually solve this problem, given Bitcoin's essentially frozen in a half-completed state now (Ethereum still seems to be trying to make something that scales to a point that would be usable, but it is also the nexus of a lot of the scams for the same reason)
    • fsflover 1y ago
      > Bitcoin needs to lose a lot of value Why is that? You can just buy 0.00000001 BTC.
      • immibis 1y ago
        Having currency is only meaningful if the amount of currency someone has correlates, at least loosely, to some kind of merit or work. Let's say me and my friends agree to carve off 0.00002 BTC supply and pretend that is the whole world of currency. We could run a whole country using that 0.00002 BTC as money. Except that anyone who has 1 BTC can break into our walled garden and, with a tiny fraction of their holdings, buy the entire walled garden, and there's no way to prevent this as long as our money is fungible with theirs. It's the same reason you wouldn't use immibiscoins as a currency: I could just grant myself a zillion of them and buy everything you have. Except that in the case of bitcoin the grant is pre-existing. Deflationary currencies are fundamentally unstable, just like currencies that one guy can print at will, because they decorrelate quantity and merit.
• nottorp 1y ago
  Emphasis: ----- This is why I absolutely cannot fucking stand creative work being referred to as "content". "Content" is how you refer to the stuff on a website when you're designing the layout and don't know what actually goes on the page yet. "Content" is how you refer to the collection of odds and ends in your car's trunk. "Content" is what marketers call the stuff that goes around the ads. "Content"... is Whatever. ----- People, please don't think of yourself as "content consumers".
  • layer8 1y ago
    I upvoted your content.
• rednafi 1y ago
  Software programming used to be a blue-collar thing in the early days, when hardware wiring was all the rage. Then it became hip, and people would hand-roll machine-specific assembly code. Later on, it became too onerous when CPU architecture started to change faster than programmers could churn out code. So we came up with compilers, and people started coding at a higher level of abstraction. No one lamented the lost art of assembly. Coding is just a means to an end. We’ve always searched for better and easier ways to convince the rocks to do something for us. LLMs will probably let us jump another abstraction level higher. I too spent hours looking for the right PHP or Perl snippet in the early days to do something. My hard-earned bash-fu is mostly useless now. Am I sad about it? Nah. Writing bash always sucked, who am I kidding. Also, regex. I never learned it properly. It doesn’t appeal to me. So I’m glad these whatever machines are helping me do this grunt work. There are sides of programming I like, and implementation isn’t one of them. Once upon a time I could care less about the binary streams ticking the CPU. Now I’m excited about the probable prospect of not having to think as much about “higher-level” code and jumping even higher. To me, programming is more like science than art. Science doesn’t care how much profundity we find in the process. It moves on to the next thing for progress.
  • eddiewithzato 1y ago
    LLMs will not be doing that. I wish they could, but they just spit out whatever without verifying anything. Even in Cursor which has the agent tell you to run the test script they generated to verify the output, it just says “yep seems fine to me!”. AI at the current state in my workflow is a decent search engine and stackoverflow. But it has far greater pitfalls as OP pointed out (it just assumes the code is always 100% accurate and will “fake” API).
    • wiseowise 1y ago
      That’s where you, human, come into the scene.
      • eddiewithzato 1y ago
        And that’s where I end up wasting more time investigating and fixing issues, rather than creating a solution ;) I only use AI for small problems rather than let it orchestrate entire files.
• Al-Khwarizmi 1y ago
  I disagree with many of the points on LLMs (but broadly agree with 80% of the post). But regardless of agreeing or not, it was a pleasure to read this because it's beautifully written, the arguments are solid, it makes you think, and the website has a personality, which is rare nowadays. I clicked halfheartedly, started to read halfheartedly, and got sucked into a read that threw me back into the good old days of the internet. A pity that the micropayments mentioned in the post never materialized, I'd surely throw a few bucks at the author but the only option is a subscription and I hate those.
  • sunnybeetroot 1y ago
    It is a nice read but something tells me it’s AI generated due to the frequent em dashes so I wouldn’t place all bets on it being entirely human written. Edit: I apologies, the author has pre-gpt posts that use em dashes so likely it’s part of their writing style.
    • Al-Khwarizmi 1y ago
      It would be a monument to hypocrisy if this piece with this specific content were AI-generated. Color me naive but honestly I'm pretty sure it's not, though. We all tend to be worse at distinguishing AI from human text than we think, but the text sounds genuine to me and transpires an author with a quirky personality that seems difficult to imitate by an LLM. And that could include using em dashes.
    • JBits 1y ago
      Some people just like em dashes—myself included. You can find em dashes in articles written by the author before LLMs became a thing.
    • rcxdude 1y ago
      This strikes me as written by someone who would bother to put in em dashes themselves.
    • EraYaN 1y ago
      If you use a nice enough writing tool it will do en/em and any other dash for you semi automatically anyway. Even Word does it when AutoFormat is turned on. Although it normally chooses the En-dash (U+2013) instead of the Em-dash (U+2014), this also depends on your language.
• zpeti 1y ago
  > But the dream has died. It almost came true, and then it was immediately co-opted by a bunch of get-rich-quick grifters and a bunch of turbo-libertarians whose entire identities are defined by the Things that they Own and who want to cryptographically impose that on everyone else too because they’re mad that World of Warcraft nerfed warlock or something. Oh come on. As someone who works with plenty of entrepeneurs, you don't get much more enthusiasm from anyone about what they are doing than them, who care about it as much. It's up there with professional sports and professional artists. Just because things didn't get built that were the absolute dream of what things could be, doesn't mean people didn't care and didn't put in all their efforts to build things. Just because they didn't meet this couch critic's expectations doesn't mean people didn't put the effort in. I really don't like this attitude. He's really unhappy about paypal and stripe existing? What exactly is the alternative? What alternate universe are they dreaming about? Perfection doesn't exist.
  • rcxdude 1y ago
    >I really don't like this attitude. He's really unhappy about paypal and stripe existing? What exactly is the alternative? What alternate universe are they dreaming about? Perfection doesn't exist. They're unhappy that something better doesn't exist, and that the dream of cryptocurrencies, that they would actually become a useful technology for everyday movement of money, has essentially been killed and buried by the sheer quantity of grift in the ecosystem (to be fair, there's a lot of fundamental technology issues that make that a difficult dream to achieve in practice, but it's sad that it basically doesn't seem to get much at all of the substantial resources poured into the ecosystem, and the general stench of it now makes legitimate use so much harder. So many people associate crypto == scam that adoption for real payments has actively gone backwards since the first few years).
  • alternatex 1y ago
    Presumably the universe promoted by crypto enthusiasts. Which is to say the universe they don't actually care for, but act like they want because it can bring them more money in the current universe.
• Arch-TK 1y ago
  > Is everyone else working on projects built exclusively out of lists of primes and rebalancing binary trees? Yes that is actually roughly the take away here. LLMs are getting so popular in programming not because they are good at solving problems but because they are good at reproducing a solution to some minor variation of an existing problem which has already been solved many times. Most of the work that most of the industry does is just re-solving the same set of problems. This is not just because of NIH but also because code reuse is a hard problem. This is not to say that everything is the same product. The set or problems you solve and how you chain those solutions together (the overarching architecture) as well as the small set of unique problems you solve are the real value in a product. But its often not the majority of any single codebase.
• dwedge 1y ago
  It's probably just me but I really struggle to read this whiney tone that became common around ten years ago. It's not about the subject matter itself, it's about the jokes that are always sad somehow, the font choice, the tone of the language. Some kind of perpetual-victim style of writing.
  • Epora 1y ago
    [dead]
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • lubujackson 1y ago
    I agree, it's immature, repetitive, polemic and dismissive. Not that it doesn't capture a popular mindset or make a decent point, but it does so without clarity or persuasion. Then again, it's just a blog post.
• saubeidl 1y ago
  This entire article is a critique of capitalism and how it's ruined everything. I'm not sure the author is aware of that, however.
  • lr0 1y ago
    That's exactly what I was going to say. It's a long piece of how anything is always going great just before capitalism gets involved.
• VMG 1y ago
  > Finally, society says, with a huge sigh of relief. I don’t have to write a letter to my granddaughter. I don’t have to write a three-line fetch call. one of these things is not like the other I agree with the author, I usually do not care how exactly the fetch call looks like. Whatever indeed.
• OvbiousError 1y ago
  > Bitcoin failed as a currency because the people who got most invested in it do not care about currency As far as I understand, bitcoin is fundamentally unusable as a currency. Transactions are expensive and limited to ?7k? every few seconds. It's also inherently deflationary, you want inflationary currency, you want people spending, not hoarding.
  • fsh 1y ago
    It's much worse, the maximum on-chain transaction rate is something like 7 per second. Also the time intervals between blocks have a huge spread, so it can take more than an hour for a transaction to be confirmed if you are unlucky. This is obviously impractical, so people came up with schemes such as Lightning to avoid touching the blockchain as much as possible. Of course this makes it much more difficult to judge whether the system can be cheated in some way...
    • m0wer 1y ago
      Blockchains don't scale. But that's a feature, not a bug. Great protocols are built in layers. You have decentralized instant settlement for an average of 0.005% even for micropayments with the Lightning Network (another protocol built on top of Bitcoin). That's orders of magnitude away from the settlement time and resilience of the current payment networks.
      • immibis 1y ago
        This might be the first time I've heard the argument "it's great that my project is shit because a lot of great things are layers on top of shit"
        • m0wer 1y ago
          You missed the point. The IP protocol doesn't scale! Ethernet MTU is just 1500 bytes how are we ever going to transfer a movie over the Internet! Ethernet does not need to carry the whole movie in one packet. If it does the job of delivering the MTU to the host on the other side of the cable, it's good. Websockets can be figured out somewhere else. The IP stack is not shit because each layer does just one thing, it's good because of that. But hey, time will tell.
• aredox 1y ago
  >Also, making your own website is kinda hard? You have to, like, learn things. That seems snarky ("you don't want to learn things") when the reality is that the problem, the finite ressource that is the bottleneck, is _time_. This is also why hyperlinks are underused: few people go through every single one of the words in their last post to try to add appropriate hyperlinks.
• marcus_holmes 1y ago
  I think I share the conclusion, but coming at it from the other side. The point of doing things is the act of doing them, not the result. And if we make the result easily obtainable by using an LLM then this gets reinforced not destroyed. I'm going to use sketching as an example, because it's something I enjoy but am very bad at. But you could talk in the same way about playing a musical instrument, writing code, writing anything really, knitting, sports, anything. I derive inspiration from other people who can sketch really well, and I enjoy and admire their ability. But I'm happy that I will never be that good. The point of sketching (for me) is not to produce a fantastic drawing. The point is threefold: firstly to really look at the world, and secondly to practice a difficult skill, and thirdly the meditative time of being fully absorbed in a creative act. I like that the fact that LLMs remove the false idea that the point of this is to produce Art. The LLM can almost certainly produce better Art than I can. Which is great because the point of sketching, for me, is the process not the result, and having the result be almost completely useless helps make that point. It also helps that I'm really bad at sketching, so I never want to hang the result on my wall anyway. I understand that if you're really good at something, and take pride in the result of that, and enjoy the admiration of others at your accomplishments, then this might suck. That's gotta be tough. But if you only ever did it for the results and admiration, then maybe find something that you actually enjoy doing?
  • AndrewDucker 1y ago
    The point of nearly everything I do in the office is the result, not the doing. For art/craft you are completely correct though.
  • prmph 1y ago
    Are you not contradicting yourself? If the point of doing things is the doing itself, not the result, then how is it meaningful to just issue a low-effort prompt for the AI to do it?
    • Revisional_Sin 1y ago
      They are saying that the option to make AI art, but not doing so, helped to clarify their purpose for making art.
• senko 1y ago
  This reads like people have been sleeping through mountains of shit being thrown at them (content, news, user-hostile services...) for decades, and then suddenly woke up and blame the most recent hype. Most of Internet is crap. Most of media is crap. This does need to stop you (or me) from creating.
  • rcxdude 1y ago
    Sturgeon's law multiplies as accessibility increases. You see more of everything, but many more times more crap than not. Generative AI does substantially lower barriers to making all kinds of things, so the increase in crap is substantial.
• Ezhik 1y ago
  I feel it. We can debate AI over and over and over but my ultimate problem is not even the tech itself but the "whatever" part. I'm a bit annoyed with LLMs for coding, because I care about the craft. But I understand the premise of using them when the end goal is not "tech as a craft" but "tech as a means". But that still requires having some reason to use the tech. Hell, I feel the "tech as a means to get money" part for people trying to climb up the social ladder. But for a lot of people who already did get to the top of it? At some point we gotta ask what the point of SEO-optimizing everything even is. Like, is the end goal optimizing life out of life? Why not write a whole app using LLMs? Why not have the LLM do your course work? Why do the course work at all? Why not have the LLM make a birthday card for your partner? Why even get up in the morning? Why not just go leave and live in a forest? Why live at all? What is even the point?
  • wiseowise 1y ago
    You need to take a break from your “craft” if fancy autocomplete makes you question reason to live.
    • Ezhik 1y ago
      And do what, given that AI-as-marketed optimizes out having relationships with people and enjoying art/cinema/music? Touch grass all by myself?
      • wiseowise 1y ago
        [flagged]
        • Ezhik 1y ago
          I think calling me delusional for trying to understand the hype might be a bit much. It's not my own life I was describing.
  • gattr 1y ago
    On a more positive note, LLMs (or their successors) could be used to create a perfect tutor. Taylored for every individual, automatically adjusting learning material difficulty, etc. But yeah, first we'll go through a few (?) years of the self-defeating "ChatGPT does my homework" and the necessary adjustments of how schools/unis function.
• ValveFan6969 1y ago
  [dead]
• defanor 1y ago
  Rather annoyed by the hype around LLMs myself, but I notice, both in this article and more generally, that some of the criticism seems to attribute to LLMs specifically the issues that are neither unique to them, nor caused by them. > Why would someone using a really cool tool that makes them more productive… feel compelled to sneer and get defensive at the mere suggestion that someone else isn’t doing the same? It sounds like it is about people seeing others doing things in a way they view as inefficient or wrong, and then trying to help. "Sneer and get defensive" does not sound like trying to be helpful, but they probably would not describe themselves as sneering and getting defensive, either. > I might have strong opinions about what code looks like, because I might have to read it, but why would I — why would anyone — have such an intense reaction to the hypothetical editor setup of a hypothetical stranger? As above, but even closer to this particular question, see the editor war. > But the Bitcoin people make more money if they can shame everyone else into buying more Bitcoin, so of course they’re gonna try to do it. What do programmers get out of this? Apart from "helping" others, a benefit of promoting technologies one uses and prefers may be a wider user base, leading to a better support, proliferation of technologies they view as good and useful. > We’ve never had a machine that can take almost any input and just do Whatever. Well, there is Perl. It is a joke (the statement, not the language), but the previous points actually made me to think of programming languages with dynamic and weak typing, similarly allowing to pretend that some errors do not happen, at the cost of being less correct, and doing whatever when things go wrong. Ambiguities in natural languages come to mind, too. > That means they aren’t even reading the words they claim as their own! Both homework and online discussions featured that before LLMs, too. For instance, with people sometimes linking (not necessarily copying) materials to prove a point, but materials contradicting it. Carelessness, laziness, lack of motivation to spend time and effort, are all old things. > I can’t imagine publishing a game with, say, Midjourney-generated art, even if it didn’t have uncanny otherworldly surfaces bleeding into each other. I would find that humiliating. But there are games on the Switch shop that do it. I heard "AI-generated game" mentioned as a curiosity or a novelty, apparently making it a selling point. Same as with all the "AI-powered" stuff, before LLMs. There is much of that used for marketing: as block chaining and "big data" were added everywhere when those were hyped, and many silly things are similarly added into items outside of computing if they have a potential to sound cool at least to some (e.g., fad diets, audiophile hardware). > But I think the core of what pisses me off is that selling this magic machine requires selling the idea that doing things is worthless. This also sounds like yet another point in the clash between prevalent business requirements and more enthusiastic human aspirations. The economic and social systems, and cultures, probably have more to do with it than particular technologies. Pretty much any bureaucracy/corporate/enterprise-focused technologies tend to lessen the fun and enjoyment.
• recursinging 1y ago
  Aside from the old-man-in-a-wooden-rocking-chair-on-a-porch tone, it seems to me that the author's beef is mainly about back-patting, and how the "Whatever" machines are flooding the pat-me-on-the-back platforms with "Content" that makes their own stick out less, resulting in fewer back-pats. The last line of the article summarizes it perfectly.: > Do things. Make things. And then put them on your website so I can see them. I subscribe fully to the first two sentences, but the last one is bullshit. The gloom in the article is born from the authors attaching the value of "making things" to the recognition received for the effort. Put your stuff out there if you think it is of value to someone else. If it is, cool, and if it's not, well, who cares. > I can’t remember exactly what they said, but it was something like: “I created a whole album, complete with album art, in 3.5 hours. Why wouldn’t I use the make it easier machine?” This is kind of darkly fascinating to me, because it gives rise to such an obvious question: if anyone can do that, then why listen to your music? It takes a significant chunk of 3.5 hours just to listen to an album, so how much manual work was even done here? Apparently I can just go generate an endless stream of stuff of the same quality! Why would I want your particular brand of Whatever? This gem implies that the value of the music (or art in general) is partially or even wholly dependent on whether or not someone else thinks it's good. I can't even... If you eliminate the back-patting requirements, and the stuff we make is genuine, then it's value is intrinsic. The "Whatever" machines are just tools, like the rest of the tools we use, to make things. So, just make your things and get on with it.
  • pebble 1y ago
    > and the stuff we make is genuine hmmm
  • probably_wrong 1y ago
    I think there are more generous interpretations than "the value of art is dependent on whether someone else thinks it's good". I had an interesting discussion with a piano teacher once. Some of his students, he told me, would play for themselves but never for any kind of audience. As the saying goes: if a musician plays a piano in a closed room with no one to hear it, does it make a sound? Obviously there's nothing wrong with extremely personal art that never gets released to the wider public - not every personal diary should be a blog. But there's also the question of what happens to art when none of it gets shared around, and vibrant art communities are, in my opinion (and I think also the author's), something to encourage.
• Almondsetat 1y ago
  The author claims that computers aren't fun anymore and then talks about payment methods and social networks. Not only I fail to see how a website would magically make a piece of hardwars boring, but computers have always been boring and it is the job of the user to get something fun out of them
  • gwd 1y ago
    Er, they all seem pretty connected: 1. Computers could be more fun if you could buy things more easily. Crypto could solve that, but the people involved don't care about crypto, they care about Whatever. 2. Computers can be fun when people do cool things on them. The web could make that possible, but unfortunately the economics of ads incentivize people to post Whatever. 3. Programming can be fun, but LLMs just generate Whatever.
  • alittlebee 1y ago
    [dead]
• roncesvalles 1y ago
  >It feels like the same attitude that happened with Bitcoin, the same smug nose-wrinkling contempt. [...] But the Bitcoin people make more money if they can shame everyone else into buying more Bitcoin, so of course they’re gonna try to do it. What do programmers get out of this? Unless you work at Microsoft and have a lot of stock options, you aren’t getting rich off of how many people use Copilot. The reason for this is as follows: A good number of software engineers make a fuckton of money, but not all of them (it's bimodal/trimodal/whatever). SWEs are also one of the highest paid people within tech companies, often earning more than the MBAs, the CPAs, and the JDs (who tend to come with massive chips on account of actually having actual credentials, and tech companies being prestigious destinations within these profession). It seems that over time, this phenomenon has caused the emergence of a large coterie of people whom I would kindly describe as being "bearish" of these high-end software engineering salaries and double-down on any narrative that undermines the livelihood of the software engineer, basically just to make themselves feel better. tl;dr people desperately want AI to succeed because they're envious of software engineers
• rob_c 1y ago
  Learning to use LLM effectively is like learning how to use scripting in office. Useless to a lot of people. Dangerous if you get it wrong. Full of many bad things from the internet. But still the most powerful thing to happen to computing in a generation. And probably soon about to be turned off by default for security reasons to follow the analogy. Just because you failed to use an LLM effectively the first time, or it doesn't live up to your version of the hype doesn't mean you have a magic window into how sh1t they are. Many people who use them regularly know just how bad they are and what it's like to move beyond the original context window length. But having auto complete on steroids is still the best thing with regards to making computing "fun" again in a generation. No more boiler plate, no more beating your head against a desk looking for that minor coding bug that could have been fixed by a awesome regex if only you had the time to learn it. No more having to break your stride and go through about 20 websites with popups to find that someone else solved the problem got you, just getting on with stuff and having fun whilst doing it. Edit: no retort, just flagging and down-voting... lovely
• ZoomZoomZoom 1y ago
  > But the dream has died. I don't know why shitty ecosystem around cryptocurrencies drives the author to this conclusion. Crypto is the most convenient and respectful of your human rights way to just send money. It's there, it's useful and in many cases absolutely vital.
  • Andrew_nenakhov 1y ago
    Yeah, people in Russia and Iran use it all the time to circumvent the sanctions. A godsend, basically.
• redhale 1y ago
  > But whose creative output consists solely of doing things a million people have already done? Is everyone else working on projects built exclusively out of lists of primes and rebalancing binary trees? Yes. Most developers in the corporate world are building CRUD apps that are 90% boilerplate. Hopefully this helps explain the disconnect. And even if GenAI progress stops here and it never gets better, it's incredibly useful. Why do people realize that it can't do EVERYTHING and then get stuck to the view that they can't use it for ANYTHING, confused as to why others are getting benefit from it? Two things can be true (and I believe they are): the hype can be "staggeringly overblown" AND it can still be useful in many cases.
• Havoc 1y ago
  That really code have done with some editing and pruning cause that's just an omnibus stream of thought talking about whatever came to mind. Agree with the sense that we're at a weird moment though.
• tsurba 1y ago
  I agree with everything up until the AI part, and for that part too, the general idea is good and worth worrying about. I’m scared af about what happens to kids who do all their homework with LLMs. Thankfully at least we still have free and open models, and are not just centralizing everything. But chatgpt does help me work through some really difficult mathematical equations in newest research papers by adding intermediate steps. I can easily confirm when it gets them right and when not, as I do have some idea. It’s super useful. If you are not able to make LLMs work for you at all, and complain about them on the internet, you are an old man yelling at clouds. The blog post devolves from an insightful viewpoint into a long sad ramble. It’s 100% fine if you don’t want to use them yourself, but complaining to others gets tired quick.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  Reading this person's blog, I came upon this article[0]. I can absolutely relate. That was ten years ago, so I'm not exactly sure where they are, now, but they still seem to be going strong. [0] https://eev.ee/blog/2015/06/09/i-quit-the-tech-industry/ https://eev.ee/blog/2015/06/09/i-quit-the-tech-industry/
• draw_down 1y ago
  [dead]
• PoshBreeze 1y ago
  > The only browser with built-in tipping is the one spearheaded by a man whose other claims to fame are inventing JavaScript and wanting to outlaw my marriage, and the token it uses apparently had 80 whole sellers in the past 24 hours. Sounds like all of that is going great. Brenden Eich's beliefs about marriage aren't relevant. It been what well over a decade since he was ousted from Mozilla? Wasn't that enough? People constantly bring this up as a reason why you shouldn't use Brave. There are valid reasons not to use Brave Browser. Brendan Eich's beliefs about marriage isn't one of them. It some tired old jab at Eich who like most older people have beliefs that are considered backwards by today's standards. > This is starting to get away from the main thesis of Whatever but every time I hear about students coasting through school just using LLMs, I wonder what we are doing to humanity’s ability to think critically about anything. It already wasn’t great, but now we’re raising a whole generation on a machine that gives them Whatever, and they just take it. You’ve seen anecdotes of people posting comments and submitting papers and whatnot with obvious tells like “As a large language model…” in them. That means they aren’t even reading the words they claim as their own! They just produce Whatever. People were cut and pasting Wikipedia articles into University work and doing zero effort back in the mid-2000s while I was in University. There is a deeper problem with education generally and it isn't people copying stuff with AI. > The most obnoxious people like to talk about how Stable Diffusion is “democratizing art” and that is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. There is no fucking King of Art decreeing who is allowed to draw and who isn’t. You could do it. You could do it right now. But it’s hard, so you’d rather spend that time crying on Twitter about how unfair it is that learning a skill takes work and thank god the computer can give you all of the admiration with none of the effort now. This isn't what is meant when people say this. What people typically mean is that people can cheaply create things in the AI that match what they have in their head. e.g. - There are parody songs / music videos made for internet streams I watch by other fans of the show. In the past people used to cheaply copy and paste stuff into a video editor and crudely animate it and they weren't great. I literally laughed a parody song that was done like a sea shanty that mocked a well known e-celeb. - I make cheesy YouTube Thumbnails for my videos because I have zero budget for an artist and my skills with image editing software isn't stellar. I can use the AI to generate me some of the thumbnail and the rest I can do in GIMP. I get something that looks better than if I didn't have the AI IMO. This does democratise it, because I don't have to spend literally hundreds on a graphic designer. - AI can help with animations. A friend of mind could take a 20 FPS animation and have the AI interpolate the animations accordingly. He has told me this saves him a huge amount of time.
• arkh 1y ago
  > If it’s something I don’t know, I can go find out about it, and now I know more things. Do you realize how many person-hour of highly intelligent people have been spent on ORM just so people could not learn SQL? Most people don't value learning.
• bgwalter 1y ago
  What a great article, I hope it becomes Internet lore. We have been in the Whatever Economy for quite a while and the LLM hype is the logical conclusion. Like the author, I'm mystified by those who accept the appearance of output as a valid goal. Even with constrained algorithmic "AI" like Stockfish, which, unlike LLMs, actually works, chess players frown heavily on using it for cheating. No chess player can go to a tournament and say: "I made this game with Stockfish."
• ecocentrik 1y ago
  Summarize this article as a prompt that can be fed back to Claude to generate similar content. https://claude.ai/share/5e348270-2eb8-40c3-ac32-ba9066a6fcee https://claude.ai/share/5e348270-2eb8-40c3-ac32-ba9066a6fcee I understand the frustration people have with technology but it's not the technology that keeps selling them out. Bad actors take control of the technology and use it to gain and consolidate power. Identify those bad actors and bad use cases for technology and avoid giving them power. Writing whiny tropey angst ridden blog posts doesn't help anyone.
• WesolyKubeczek 1y ago
  I imagine the future people, unless WW3 obliterates this iteration of civilisation, will be using slop for everything, and craftsmanship and doing the thing will be done in buildings not unlike gyms of today. Where you will pay for the privilege to exercise your mind.
• f38zf5vdt 1y ago
  open blog > But yes, thanks: I was once offered this challenge when faced with a Ren’Py problem, so I grit my teeth and posed my question to some LLM. It confidently listed several related formatting tags that would solve my problem. One teeny tiny issue: those tags did not and had never existed. Just about anything might be plausible! It can just generate Whatever! I cannot stress enough that this is worse than useless to me. The probabilistic machine generated a probabilistic answer. Unable to figure out a use for the probabilistic machine in two tries, I threw it into the garbage. Unfortunately, humans are also probabilistic machines. Despite speaking English for nearly a lifetime, errors are constantly produced by my finger-based output streams. So I'm okay talking to the machine that might be wrong in addition to the human that might be wrong. > It feels like the same attitude that happened with Bitcoin, the same smug nose-wrinkling contempt. Bitcoin is the future. It’ll replace the dollar by 2020. You’re gonna be left behind. Enjoy being poor. I mean, you were left behind. I was left behind. I am not enjoying being poor. Most of us were left behind. If we invested in Bitcoin like it was the future in 2011 we'd all be surfing around on yachts right now given the current valuation.
• dibora13 1y ago
  [flagged]
• tempodox 1y ago
  This article should be pinned to the top of HN for the next 10 years or so.
• alittlebee 1y ago
  [dead]
• Procrastes 1y ago
  This captures something I've been struggling to describe, and "Whatever" is the perfect term for this. Private Equity & Financialization: Whatever for business Flood the Zone & Deadcatting: "Whatever" for politics It's what I think about when I hear all of the "AI is going to eliminate all the jobs." That's just a convenient cover story for "Tax laws changed so R&D isn't free money anymore, and we need to fire everyone." When almost every drop of wealth is in the control of a tiny number of people, it's not surprising that the world turns into one big competition for ways to convince those people that you have a way for them to sop up the remaining thimbleful too.
  • ddorian43 1y ago
    The tax law for R&D got fixed though with the big bill.
• ranger207 1y ago
  I liked the idea in there about how there's so many people out there that look at a thing merely for its potential to "line go up", and the actual thing itself doesn't matter at all, it's just Whatever. The current crypto is the perfect distillation in that regard, but it does apply more broadly to everything. It's the same problem with management as a skill entirely separate from what's being managed: It's abstracting around Whatever (be it a particular crypto token, Netflix show, or plumbing company), and when the abstraction inevitably leaks, the MBA solution is to crush whatever leaks, since that's not purely related to "line goes up". Of course, abstractions don't only leak trivial details, and so when the leaky part is cut off to try to shove the Whatever back into the box, it's cutting off important parts of the Whatever itself, causing it to wither and die. The second half of the article about LLMs and stuff I agree with, but I think that insight from the first part of the article is the more important one
• CursedSilicon 1y ago
  I was late to this blog post but I added some of my own thoughts. Copied below for those just stumbling across this post The bigger picture that I think too few people focus on is the desperation of it all. The slop machine is just the latest in tech's desperate attempt to recapture what they did in the 90's where they connected a chunk of the planet to the fucking internet at large. Of course, they forget the part where "buying pet food on the internet" doesn't mean we want to be in Zuckerberg's legless dystopic "metaverse" for fucking standup meetings. Even when we had SecondLife 20 years earlier (and I guess VRchat and friends today) I think the only people that really know this are Nvidia and AMD. The same way the only people who made money in the California gold rush were the people selling pickaxes and supplies and all that. Nvidia's stock price soaring to the size of half the fucking planet like Nortel or Standard Oil before them. But the dogfooding, good god the dogfooding that is already going on. It feels like that the majority of people have either resoundingly rejected using the slop machine, or, much more troubling for capital. Their uses of it simply aren't "profitable". In the same way that having a speaker on your kitchen counter you can ask "what's the weather today" doesn't actually make you any money but we're going to pretend because we manufactured billions of these fuckers and if we just grin and pretend the musical chairs won't stop just yet. Right? Right? So you've got an unprofitable product that you dumped hundreds of billions of dollars into. The only thing you can do to stave off your own demise as a C-suite (for making the line not go up. Or, heaven forbid making the line go down) is to feed one end of your workforce into a woodchipper and shackle the remainder of them to the slop machine you bought by installing it on all their desks and demanding they use it so you can pretend your workforce is some order of magnitude more productive now. If you as a C-suite (somehow) come from a tech background you might even know, deep down. Where you push all those feelings down into that it's all a lie, a farce. A distraction for the forces of capital that are even bigger than you are. Unless you're someone like Intel and they push you out the door for not making the line go up fast enough, of course. But the question I keep coming back to is if there'll ever be a point of reckoning. When does this money black hole escape confinement and suck all the players into oblivion with it? That's been the historic reality of everything from tulips to houses. Or has tech found a way to truly become so inescapable, so irredeemably beyond understanding that they've escaped financial reality for their own mistakes?
• oars 1y ago
  Great article and interesting comments. Will be interesting to come back and read this in 5 years.
• darksome 1y ago
  Bitcoin was an experiment, in retrospect it's obvious that it has major design flaws which prevent it from being "an electronic cash system" (privacy, scalability, fungibility). It technically can be fixed, but it won't ever be because of the mentioned "graph goes up" lunatics. Monero is what Bitcoin should have been.
• econ 1y ago
  This writeup makes the www worth it. Thanks for writing it up. "Whatever" captures the context wonderfully. Values at times seem like a property of an extinct subspecies. Like being born with a tail.
• praptak 1y ago
  This sounds like Marx's alienation from labor. Do whatever, get your wage but not the satisfaction from a job well done.
• octo888 1y ago
  > Like, just to calibrate here: you know how some code editors will automatically fill in a right bracket or quote when you type a left one This drives me mad in JetBrains' products mostly because there are about 14 ways to completely disable it (including Rider, which is different to the others). There should be a single toggle for "Disable all 'smart' completions"
• Expurple 1y ago
  This is a very good description of the modern issues with slop "content" and advertising plaguing everything they touch. (including human-made slop, as the author correctly identifies) But I disagree on LLMs being "worse than useless". Sure, "vibe coding" an entire app from a short prompt will always give you fragile, subtly broken nonsense. *Code is the spec*. In most cases, you can't meaningfully "compress" your requirements into a short informal prompt. We need better formal languages for expressing requirements concisely and declaratively! Think: Prolog, Haskell... LLMs are good at small tasks that you can review much quicker than doing it yourself. Something tedious, like doing some local refactoring, writing ad-hoc Bash scripts, SQL queries, FFmpeg commands. I use Bash and SQL regularly, but somehow I always have to google the exact syntax. I already use ShellCheck, by the way. It's a must, and it helps a lot when reviewing LLM output. I like the autocomplete feature too. It often saves time when writing repetitive or obvious code. `if bad_stuff {` usually autocompletes `return Err(BadStuff)` for me. `MyStruct {` initializer usually autocompletes the list of fields for me. I know that incorrect suggestions piss off some people and make it a net-negative for them. Incorrect suggestions are common, but they don't bother me in practice. UPDATE: I've turned this comment into a blog post. https://home.expurple.me/posts/my-take-on-llms-for-coding/ https://home.expurple.me/posts/my-take-on-llms-for-coding/
• soueuls 1y ago
  I found some interesting bits in this article but overall I think it’s being overly cynical. In the past ten years, I worked with one guy from Nigeria and a bunch of people from Iran. Bitcoin (or rather cryptocurrencies in general) have been more than just mere gimmicks. Sending money from one side of the world to another, for such a low fees, even when the central bank of Nigeria is blocking USD transfers, even when bank transfers to Iran are being blocked, has been very useful in itself. As for AI, yes if you use it as a God, you will be disappointed. Yes it can’t do everything. Yes it will hallucinate. But it’s been a great learning environment for me, I keep asking questions to get an overview of things. I used to learn concepts such as « clean architecture » because AI is never tired, it can provide endless variations to the same problems, until you better understand the underlying principles and the recurring patterns. When I work on a project, 20-30% is creative, cutting edge, never seen before. 70% is CRUD, necessary boilerplate. I know what I am supposed to be doing, I can verify the result, double check the validity of it. Why would I waste hours typing letters? Do I rely on AI for everything? No I don’t. But pretending it’s completely useless, is nonsensical. Yes it’s just statistically inferring the next token, but it’s actually a very simple, powerful concept.