5 ms·

But that's not how most products work. If you buy a table saw and can't figure out how to cut a straight line in a piece of wood with it - or keep cutting your

• what 10mo ago
  It’s more like the iPhone “you’re holding it wrong”.
  • deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
• tjr 10mo ago
  It seems generally agreed that LLMs (currently) do better or worse with different programming languages at least, and maybe with other project logistical differences. The fact that an LLM works great for one user on one project does not mean it will work equally great for another user on a different project. It might! It might work better. It might work worse. And both users might be using the tool equally well, with equal skill, insofar as their part goes.
• consp 10mo ago
  A table saw does not advertise to be a panacea which will make everyone obsolete.
  • simonw 10mo ago
    You should ignore anyone who says that LLMs are a panacea that will make everyone obsolete.
    • achierius 10mo ago
      Even if they're your boss? Remember that most people here are not independently wealthy, they're stuck answering to someone who may not have so level a take on these things as you do.
      • mckn1ght 10mo ago
        The problem there is the boss, not the technology. If it isn’t an insane take on AI, it’d be on something else, and eventually will be. People quit bad managers, not bad jobs. If you have a bad manager, work on quitting them.
        • theappsecguy 10mo ago
          I think the problem is the techno fascist oligarchs that are peddling the snake oil that LLMs will wipe out all white collar jobs tomorrow. Managers usually answer to C suite, and the C suite is salivating at the idea of laying off 80% of staff
      • enraged_camel 10mo ago
        >> Even if they're your boss? Especially if they are your boss.
      • AstroBen 10mo ago
        Your boss can't magic things into reality. If the LLM can't do your job they can't replace you with it They can try. Which they'll then fail, and you'll be rehired and have to clean up the mess, then continue on
        • achierius 10mo ago
          > and you'll be rehired and have to clean up the mess, then continue on Not how this works. Yes, it happens sometimes, but there's no guarantee. Alternatives include: - The rest of your team (or another tam) soaks up the additional work by working longer hours - They hire someone else, or transfer someone from elsewhere - The company accepts the lower output quality / whatever breakages result - The breakages, even if unacceptable, only show up months down the line So all that needs to happen is for your boss to believe they can replace you up to the point where they feel comfortable firing you. Whether that works or not is largely immaterial to the impact it thereafter has on your ability to pay rent / your mortgage / etc.
    • camgunz 10mo ago
      You can't ignore managers, founders, colleagues, investors, and procurement teams.
      • jason_oster 10mo ago
        Can't, or you're afraid to?
        • camgunz 10mo ago
          If you're not afraid of pushing back against an entire industry you don't have a full appreciation of the risks. Aside: I love your website! Cool games :)
          • jason_oster 10mo ago
            Thanks! FWIW, I left my full time job some years ago to do my own thing, in part because pushing back on bad decisions was not really doing me any favors for my mental health. Glad to report I'm in a much better place after finding the courage to get out of that abusive relationship. Some might argue the risk of not pushing back is far worse.
            • camgunz 10mo ago
              I was a contractor/consultant between 2020-2023; I have a problem w/ authority so it suited me. But work/life balance was awful--I have 2 kids now, and I can't do nothing for 6 weeks then work 100 hour weeks for 4 weeks. The maximum instability my life will tolerate is putting the kids to bed at 9 instead of 8:30 lol. I'm also in the Netherlands so there's also other benefits. Worker protections are very strong here, so it's highly unlikely I'll be fired or laid off; I can't be asked to work overtime; I can't be Slack'd after hours; I can drop down to 4 days a week no questions asked, when the kids were born I got a ton of paid leave, etc. Not to imply I work at some awful salt mine; I like my current gig and coworkers/leadership. Anyway, this is a collective action problem. I don't take any responsibility for the huge plastic island in the Pacific, nor do I take any responsibility for the grift economy built on successive, increasingly absurd hype waves of tech (web 2.0, mobile, SPAs, big data, blockchain, VR, AI). I've also worked in social good, from Democratic presidential campaigns and recounts to helping connect people w/ pro bono legal services, which is to say I've done my time. There are too many problems for me to address, I get to pick which, if any, I battle, I am happy if my kids don't meltdown too much during the evening. Maybe when they're both in school I can take more risks or reformulate my work/life balance, but currently I'm focused on furthering the human race.
    • wasmainiac 10mo ago
      But this is how LLMs are marketed by all the big players. Should we ignore them too. LLMs are over sold.
      • simonw 10mo ago
        Same as any other technology. If MongoDB tell you that their solution is "web scale" it's still on you to evaluate that claim before picking the database platform to build your company on.
• troupo 10mo ago
  Table saws and cars are deterministic. Once uou learn how to use them, the experience is repeatable. The various magic incantations that LLMs require cannot be learned or repeated. Whatever the "just one more prompt bro" du jour you're thinking of may or may not work at any given time for any given project in any given language.
  • simonw 10mo ago
    I'm finding the prompting techniques I've learned over the last six months continue to work just fine.
    • troupo 10mo ago
      Have you run the "same prompting technique" on the same problem in the same code base and got the same result all the time? I also have prompting techniques that work better than other magical incantations. They do also fail often. Or stop working in a new context. Or...
  • jonas21 10mo ago
    Operating a car (i.e. driving) is certainly not deterministic. Even if you take the same route over and over, you never know exactly what other drivers or pedestrians are going to do, or whether there will be unexpected road conditions, construction, inclement weather, etc. But through experience, you build up intuition and rules of thumb that allow you to drive safely, even in the face of uncertainty. It's the same programming with LLMs. Through experience, you build up intuition and rules of thumb that allow you to get good results, even if you don't get exactly the same result every time.
    • troupo 10mo ago
      > Operating a car (i.e. driving) is certainly not deterministic. Yes. Operating a car or a table saw is deterministic. If you turn your steering wheel left, the car will turn left every time with very few exceptions that can also be explained deterministically (e.g. hardware fault or ice on road). Operating LLMs is completly non-deterministic.
• lelanthran 10mo ago
  > But that's not how most products work. That's exactly how most products work :-/ > If you buy a table saw and can't figure out how to cut a straight line in a piece of wood with it - or keep cutting your fingers off - but didn't take any time at all to learn how to use it, that's on you. Of course - that's deterministic, so if you make a mistake and it comes out wrong, you can fix the mistake you made. > Why should LLMs be any different? Because they are not deterministic; you can't use experience with LLMs in any meaningful way. They may give you a different result when you run the same spec through the LLM a second time.
  • embedding-shape 10mo ago
    > They may give you a different result when you run the same spec through the LLM a second time. Yes kind of, but only different results (maybe) for the things you didn't specify. If you ask for A, B and C, and the LLM automatically made the choice to implement C in "the wrong way" (according to you), you can retry but specify exactly how you want C to be implemented, and it should follow that. Once you've nailed your "spec" enough so there isn't any ambiguity, the LLM won't have to make any choices for you, and then you'll get exactly what you expected. Learning this process, and learning how much and what exactly you have to instruct it to do, is you building up your experience learning how to work with an LLM, and that's meaningful, and something you get better with as you practice it.
    • troupo 10mo ago
      > Yes kind of, but only different results (maybe) for the things you didn't specify. No. They will produce a different result for everything, including the things you specify. It's so easy to verify that I'm surprised you're even making this claim. > Once you've nailed your "spec" enough so there isn't any ambiguity, the LLM won't have to make any choices for you, and then you'll get exactly what you expected 1. There's always ambiguity, or else you'll end up an eternity writing specs 2. LLMs will always produce different results even if the spec is 100% unambiguous for a huge variety of reasons, the main one being: their output is non-deterministic. Except in the most trivial of cases. And even then the simple fact of "your context window is 80% full" can lead to things like "I've rewritten half of your code even though the spec only said that the button color should be green"
• PunchyHamster 10mo ago
  Now imagine the table saw is really, REALLY shit at being table saw and saw no straight angle anywhere during its construction. And they come with new one every 6 months that is very slightly less crooked but controls are all moved over so you have to tweak your workflow Would you still blame the user ?
• torginus 10mo ago
  I'm glad you brought up the power tool analogy - I've bought a $40 soldering iron once, which looked just like the Weller that cost like 5x as much. There was nothing wrong with it on the surface, it was well built and heated up just fine. But every time i tried to solder with it, the results sucked. I couldn't articulate why, and assumed I was doing something wrong (I probably was). Then at my friends house, I got to try the real thing, and it worked like a dream. Again I can't pin down why, but everything just worked. This is how I felt with LLMs (and image generation) - sometimes it just doesn't feel right, and I can't put my finger on what should I fix, but I come away often with the feeling that I needed to do way more tweaking than necessary and the results were just still mediocre.
• switchbak 10mo ago
  It's not anyone's job to "promote it in a good way", we have no responsibility either for or against such tech. The analogy would be more like: "yeah, the motor blew up and burned your garage, but please don't be negative - we need you to promote this saw in a good way". Sure, it's important to "hold it right", but we're not in some cult here where we need to all sell this tech well beyond its current or future potential.
  • senordevnyc 10mo ago
    I think that was a typo and should have been "prompting", not "promoting".
• notnullorvoid 10mo ago
  No one knows what the actual "right way" to hold (prompt) an LLM is. A certain style or pattern to prompting may work in one scenario for one LLM, but change the scenario or model and it often loses any advantage and can give worse output than a different style/pattern. In contrast table saws and cars have pretty clear rules of operation.