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It's so strange that anti-AI people think the advice and information you can get from a good model (if you know how to operate it well) is less valuable than th

by simonw 1y ago

It's so strange that anti-AI people think the advice and information you can get from a good model (if you know how to operate it well) is less valuable than the advice and information you can get from a book.

saulpw 1y ago
That "a good model (if you know how to operate it well)" is doing a lot of lifting. To be sure, there are a lot of bad books, and you can get negative advice from them, but a book has fixed content that can gain and lose a reputation, whereas a model (even a good one!) has highly variable content dependent on "if you know how to operate it well". So when someone or some group that I respect recommends a book, I can read the words with some amount of trust that the content is valuable. When someone quotes a model's response without any commentary or affirmation, it does not inspire any trust that the content is valuable. It just indicates that the person has abdicated their thought process.
- simonw 1y ago
  I agree that quoting a model's answer to someone else is bad form - you can get a model to say ANYTHING if you prompt it to, so a screenshot of a ChatGPT conversation to try and prove a point is meaningless slop. I find models vastly more useful than most technical books in my own work because I know how to feed in the right context and then ask them the right questions about it. There isn't a book on earth that could answer the question "which remaining parts of my codebase still use the .permission_allowed() method and what edge-cases do they have that would prevent them from being upgraded to the new .allowed() mechanism"?
  - theamk 1y ago
    And as long as you don't copy-paste its advice into comments, that's fine. No one really cares how you found all those .permission_allowed() calls to replace - was it grep, or intense staring, or AI model. All that matters is you stand behind it, and act as an author. Original post said it very well: > ChatGPT isn’t on the team. It won’t be in the post-mortem when things break. It won’t get paged at 2 AM. It doesn’t understand the specific constraints, tech debt, or your business context. It doesn’t have skin in the game. You do.
    - tensility 1y ago
      Further, grep (and any of its similar siblings) works just fine for such a task, is deterministic, won't feed you bullshit, and doesn't charge you tokens to do a worse job than existing free tools will do well. Better yet, from my experience with the dithering pace of LLMs, you'll get your answer quicker, too.
  - 000ooo000 1y ago
    >There isn't a book on earth that could answer the question "which remaining parts of my codebase still use the .permission_allowed() method and what edge-cases do they have that would prevent them from being upgraded to the new .allowed() mechanism"? You're so close to realising why the book counter argument doesn't make any sense!
JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> anti-AI people think the advice and information you can get from a good model (if you know how to operate it well) is less valuable than the advice and information you can get from a book Those people exist and they’re wrong. More frequently, however, I find I’m judging the model less than its user. If I get an email that smells of AI, I ignore it. That’s partly because I have the luxury to do so. It’s largely because engaging has commonly proven fruitless. You see a similar effect on HN. Plenty of people use AI to think through problems. But the comments that quote it directly are almost always trash.
- tensility 1y ago
  "But the comments that quote it directly are almost always trash." Because the output is almost always trash, and it takes re-doing the work and then claiming that it came from LLMs for it not to be. These tools are being sold to me as similar to what a Jr engineer offers me, but that's not at all true because I would fire a Jr that came to me with such bullshit and needing such significant hand-holding so often as what I see coming out of an LLM.

by simonw 1y ago

saulpw 1y ago

That "a good model (if you know how to operate it well)" is doing a lot of lifting. To be sure, there are a lot of bad books, and you can get negative advice from them, but a book has fixed content that can gain and lose a reputation, whereas a model (even a good one!) has highly variable content dependent on "if you know how to operate it well". So when someone or some group that I respect recommends a book, I can read the words with some amount of trust that the content is valuable. When someone quotes a model's response without any commentary or affirmation, it does not inspire any trust that the content is valuable. It just indicates that the person has abdicated their thought process.

simonw 1y ago
I agree that quoting a model's answer to someone else is bad form - you can get a model to say ANYTHING if you prompt it to, so a screenshot of a ChatGPT conversation to try and prove a point is meaningless slop. I find models vastly more useful than most technical books in my own work because I know how to feed in the right context and then ask them the right questions about it. There isn't a book on earth that could answer the question "which remaining parts of my codebase still use the .permission_allowed() method and what edge-cases do they have that would prevent them from being upgraded to the new .allowed() mechanism"?
- theamk 1y ago
  And as long as you don't copy-paste its advice into comments, that's fine. No one really cares how you found all those .permission_allowed() calls to replace - was it grep, or intense staring, or AI model. All that matters is you stand behind it, and act as an author. Original post said it very well: > ChatGPT isn’t on the team. It won’t be in the post-mortem when things break. It won’t get paged at 2 AM. It doesn’t understand the specific constraints, tech debt, or your business context. It doesn’t have skin in the game. You do.
  - tensility 1y ago
    Further, grep (and any of its similar siblings) works just fine for such a task, is deterministic, won't feed you bullshit, and doesn't charge you tokens to do a worse job than existing free tools will do well. Better yet, from my experience with the dithering pace of LLMs, you'll get your answer quicker, too.
- 000ooo000 1y ago
  >There isn't a book on earth that could answer the question "which remaining parts of my codebase still use the .permission_allowed() method and what edge-cases do they have that would prevent them from being upgraded to the new .allowed() mechanism"? You're so close to realising why the book counter argument doesn't make any sense!

JumpCrisscross 1y ago

> anti-AI people think the advice and information you can get from a good model (if you know how to operate it well) is less valuable than the advice and information you can get from a book Those people exist and they’re wrong. More frequently, however, I find I’m judging the model less than its user. If I get an email that smells of AI, I ignore it. That’s partly because I have the luxury to do so. It’s largely because engaging has commonly proven fruitless. You see a similar effect on HN. Plenty of people use AI to think through problems. But the comments that quote it directly are almost always trash.

tensility 1y ago
"But the comments that quote it directly are almost always trash." Because the output is almost always trash, and it takes re-doing the work and then claiming that it came from LLMs for it not to be. These tools are being sold to me as similar to what a Jr engineer offers me, but that's not at all true because I would fire a Jr that came to me with such bullshit and needing such significant hand-holding so often as what I see coming out of an LLM.