5 ms·

I have been using it for coding for some time, but I don't think I'm getting much value out of it. It's useful for some boilerplate generation, but for more com

• fauigerzigerk 1y ago
  I used to donate to Wikipedia, but it has been completely overrun by activists pushing their preferred narrative. I don't trust it any more. I guess it had to happen at some point. If a site is used as ground truth by everyone while being open to contributions, it has to become a magnet and a battleground for groups trying to influence other people. LLMs don't fix that of course. But at least they are not as much a single point of failure as a specific site can be.
  • ramon156 1y ago
    Can I ask for some examples? I'm not this active on Wikipedia, so I'm curious where a narrative is being spread
    • kristjank 1y ago
      Franklin Community Credit Union scandal is a good example, well outlined in this youtuber's (admittedly dramatized) video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0yIGG-taFI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0yIGG-taFI
      • n4r9 1y ago
        Is their argument documented anywhere in text, rather than an 8 minutes video?
        • hbogert 1y ago
          ask chatgpt to summarize
          • n4r9 1y ago
            Not convinced that would be any better, but I did just have a go and got the response: > I'm currently unable to fetch data directly from YouTube due to a tool issue. This means I can't access the transcript, timestamps, or metadata from the video at this time.
    • fauigerzigerk 1y ago
      I thought about giving examples because I understand why people would ask for them, but I decided very deliberately not to give any. It would inevitably turn into a flame war about the politics/ethics of the specific examples and distract from the reasons why I no longer trust Wikipedia. I understand that this is unsatisfactory, but the only way to "prove" that the motivations of the people contributing to Wikipedia have shifted would be to run a systematic study for which I have neither the time nor the skills nor indeed the motivation. Perhaps I should say that am a politically centrist person whose main interests are outside of politics.
      • junek 1y ago
        Let me guess: you hold some crank views that aren't shared by the people who maintain Wikipedia, and you find that upsetting? That's not a conspiracy, it's just people not agreeing with you.
        • fauigerzigerk 1y ago
          Your guess is incorrect. I'm keeping well away from polarised politics as well as anti-scientific and anti-intellectual fringe views.
    • notarobot123 1y ago
      Here are some examples from which you can extrapolate the more serious cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars
  • notarobot123 1y ago
    > at least they are not as much a single point of failure Yes, network effects and hyper scale produce perverse incentives. It sucks that Wikipedia can be gamed. Saying that, you'd need to be actively colluding with other contributors to maintain control. Imagining that AI is somehow more neutral or resistant to influence is incredibly naive. Isn't it obvious that they can be "aligned" to favor the interests of whoever trains them?
    • fauigerzigerk 1y ago
      >Imagining that AI is somehow more neutral or resistant to influence is incredibly naive The point is well taken. I just feel that at this point in time the reliance on Wikipedia as a source of objective truth is disproportionate and increasingly undeserved. As I said, I don't think AI is a panacea at all. But the way in which LLMs can be influenced is different. It's more like bias in Google search. But I'm not naive enough to believe that this couldn't turn into a huge problem eventually.
  • Panzer04 1y ago
    Single point of failure? Yeah u can download the entirety of Wikipedia if you want to. What's the single point of failure?
    • fauigerzigerk 1y ago
      Not in a technical sense. What I mean is that Wikipedia is very widely used as an authoritative source of objective truth. Manipulating this single source regarding some subject would have an outsize influence on what is considered to be true.
• sandworm101 1y ago
  Fun test: ask chatgtp to find where Wikipedia is wrong about a subject. It does not go well, proving that it is far less trustworthy than wikipedia alone. (Most AI will simply find where twitter disagrees with Wikipedia and spout out ridiculousness conspiracy junk.)
• oezi 1y ago
  One of the issues certainly is that Stackoverflow is absolutely over. Within the last twelve months the number of users just fell off a cliff.
  • danbruc 1y ago
    That might be a good thing after all, at least in a certain sense. Stack Overflow has been dying for the last ten years or so. In the first years there where a lot of good questions that were interesting to answer but that changed with popularity and it became an endless sea of low effort do my homework duplicates that were not interesting to answer and annoying to moderate. If this now gets handled by large language models, it could maybe become similar to the beginning again, only those questions that are not easily answerable by looking into the documentation or asking a chat bot will end up on Stack Overflow, it could be fun again to answer questions on Stack Overflow. On the other hand if nobody looks up things on Stack Overflow, it will be hard to sustain the business, maybe even when downscaled accordingly.
    • birn559 1y ago
      Is it really dying? There's only so much growth possible without having it flooded with low effort stuff. They try to instead grow by introducing more topics, but that's limited as well. I personally didn't use it so much (meaning: Writing content) because it always felt a bit over engineered. From what I remember the only possible entry point is writing questions that get up voted. Not allowed to even write comments, vote and of course not allowed to answer questions. Maybe that's not correct but that has always been my impression. In general stack exchange seems to be a great platform. I think "it's dying" has an unfortunate connotation. It's not like content just vanishes, just the amount of new stuff is shrinking.
      • danbruc 1y ago
        Maybe it changed, but you could ask and answer questions right after signing up, just commenting, voting, and moderation rights required a certain amount of points. I only answered questions and was among the top 100 contributors at my peak activity but that was at least a decade ago. I stopped contributing when the question quality fell of a cliff. Existing contributors got annoyed by the low effort questions, new users got annoyed because their questions got immediately closed, it was no longer fun. There were a lot of discussions on meta how to handle the situation but I just left. So admittedly things might have changed again, I do not really know much about the development in the last ten or so years.
• logicchains 1y ago
  >I have been using it for coding for some time, but I don't think I'm getting much value out of it. I find this perspective so hard to relate to. LLMs have completely changed my workflow; the majority of my coding has been replaced by writing a detailed textual description of the change I want, letting an LLM make the change and add tests, then just reviewing the code it wrote and fixing anything stupid it did. This saves so much time, especially since multiple such LLM tasks can be run simultaneously. But maybe it's because I'm not working on giant, monolithic code bases.
  • surgical_fire 1y ago
    > I find this perspective so hard to relate to. LLMs have completely changed my workflow; the majority of my coding has been replaced by writing a detailed textual description of the change I want, letting an LLM make the change and add tests, then just reviewing the code it wrote and fixing anything stupid it did. I use it in much the same way you describe, but I find that it doesn't save me that much time. It may save some brain processing power, but that is not something I typically need saving. I extract more from LLM asking it to write code Infind tedious to write (unit tests, glue code for APIs, scaffolding for new modules, that sort of thing). Recently I started asking it to review the code I write and suggest improvements, try to spot bugs and so on (which I also find useful). Reviewing the code it writes to fix the inevitable mistakes and making adjustments takes time too, and it will always be a required step due to the nature of LLMs. Running tasks simultaneously don't help much unless you are giving it instructions that are too general that will take it a long time executiny - and the bottleneck will be your ability to review all the output anyway. I also gind that the broader is the scope of what I need it to do, the less precise it tends to be. I achieve most success by being more granular in what I ask of it. My take is that while LLMs are useful, they are massively overhyped, and the productivity gains are largely overstated. Of course, you can also "vibe code" (what an awful terminology) and not inspect the output. I find it unacceptable in professional settings, where you are expected to release code with some minimum quality.
    • logicchains 1y ago
      >Reviewing the code it writes to fix the inevitable mistakes and making adjustments takes time too, and it will always be a required step due to the nature of LLMs. Yep but this is much less time than writing the code, compiling it, fixing compiler errors, writing tests, fixing the code, fixing the compilation, all that busy-work. LLMs make mistakes but with Gemini 2.5 Pro at least most of these are due to under-specification, and you get better at specification over time. It's like the LLM is a C compiler developer and you're writing the C spec; if you don't specify something clearly, it's undefined behaviour and there's no guarantee the LLM will implement it sensibly. I'd go so far as to say if you're not seeing any significant increase in your productivity, you're using LLMs wrong.
• tom_m 1y ago
  It is over hyped for sure. This is among the biggest hype cycles we've seen yet. When it bursts, it'll be absolutely devastating. Make no mistake. Many companies will go out of business, many people affected. However. It doesn't mean AI will go away. AI is really useful. It can do a lot actually. It is a slow adoption because it's somehow not the most intuitive to use. I think that may have a lot to do with tooling and human communication style - or the way we use it. Once people learn how to use it, I think it'll just become ubiquitous. I don't see it taking anyone's job. The doomers who like to say that are people pushing their own agenda, trolling, or explaining away mass layoffs that were happening BEFORE AI. The layoffs are a result of losing a tax credit for R&D, over hiring, and the economy. Forgetting the tax thing for a moment, is anyone really surprised that companies over hired?? I mean come on. People BARELY do any work at all at large companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, etc. I mean that not quite fair. Don't get me wrong, SOME people there do. They work their tails off and do great things. That's not all of the company's employees though. So what do you expect is going to happen? Eventually the company prunes. They go and mass hire again years later, see who works out, and they prune again. This strategy is why hiring is broken. It's a horrible grind. Sorry, back to AI adoption. AI is now seen by some caught in this grind as the "enemy." So that's another reason for slow adoption. A big one. It does work though. I can see how it'll help and I think it's great. If you know how everything gets put together then you can provide the instructions for it to work well. If you don't, then you're not going to get great results. Sorry, if you don't know how software is built, what good code looks like, AND you don't "rub it the right way." Or as people say "prompt engineering." I think for writing blog posts, getting info, it's easier. Though there's EXTREME dangers with it for other use cases. It can give incredibly dangerous medical advice. My wife is a psychiatrist and she's been keeping an eye on it, testing it, etc. To date AI has done more to harm people than it has help them in terms of mental health. It's also too inaccurate to use for mental health as well. So that field isn't adopting it so quickly. BUT they are trying and experimenting. It's just going to take some time and rightfully so. They don't want to rush start using something that hasn't been tested and validated. That's an understaffed field though, so I'm sure they will love any productivity gain and help they can get. All said, I don't know what "slow" means for adoption. It feels like it's progressing quickly.