4 ms·

How many more appeal-to-authority counter arguments are going to be made in this thread

threethirtytwo 9mo ago
They are more effective then on the ground in your face evidence largely because people who are so against AI are blind to it. I hold a result of AI in front of your face and they still proclaim it’s garbage and everything else is fraudulent. Let’s be clear. You’re arguing against a fantasy. Nobody even proponents of AI claims that AI is as good as humans. Nowhere near it. But they are good enough for pair programming. That is indisputable. Yet we have tons of people like you who stare at reality and deny it and call it fraudulent. Examine the lay of the land if that many people are so divided it really means both perspectives are correct in a way.
- bofadeez 9mo ago
  I think the author is way understating the uselessness of LLMs in any serious context outside of a demo to an investor. I've had nothing but low IQ nonsense from every SOTA model. If we're being honest with ourselves, Opus 4.5 / GPT 5.2 etc are maybe 10-20% better than GPT 3.5 at most. It's a total and absolute catastrophic failure that will go down in history as one of humanity's biggest mistakes.
- habinero 9mo ago
  If you want to be any good at all in this industry, you have to develop enough technical skills to evaluate claims for yourself. You have to. It's essential. Because the dirty secret is a lot of successful people aren't actually smart or talented, they just got lucky. Or they aren't successful at all, they're just good at pretending they are, either through taking credit for other people's work or flat out lying. I've run into more than a few startups that are just flat out lying about their capabilities and several that were outright fraud. (See DoNotPay for a recent fraud example lol) Pointing to anyone and going "well THEY do it, it MUST work" is frankly engineering malpractice. It might work. But unless you have the chops to verify it for yourself, you're just asking to be conned.
  - threethirtytwo 9mo ago
    >If you want to be any good at all in this industry, you have to develop enough technical skills to evaluate claims for yourself. You have to. It's essential. This is an orthogonal off topic point. My or anyones skills don't have to do with the topic at hand. The topic at hand is AI. >Because the dirty secret is a lot of successful people aren't actually smart or talented, they just got lucky. Or they aren't successful at all, they're just good at pretending they are, either through taking credit for other people's work or flat out lying. Again orthoganol to the point. But I'll entertain it. There's another class of people who are delusional. They think they're good, but they're not good at all. I've seen plenty of that in the industry. More so then people who lie, it's people who lie to themselves and believe it. Engineers so confident in their skills, but when I look at them I think they're raw dog shit. >I've run into more than a few startups that are just flat out lying about their capabilities and several that were outright fraud. (See DoNotPay for a recent fraud example lol) Again so? >Pointing to anyone and going "well THEY do it, it MUST work" is frankly engineering malpractice. It might work. But unless you have the chops to verify it for yourself, you're just asking to be conned. Of course. But it's idiotic when there is a huge population of people who are smarter than you better than you and proven to be more capable than you saying they can do it. I need to emphasize it's not just one person saying it. Tons and tons and tons of people are saying it. Fraud happens in the margins of society it rarely ever happens at a macro level, and if it does happen at a macro level the trend doesn't last long and will mostly die within a year at most. So when multitudes of highly reputed people are saying one thing, and your on the ground self verification of that thing is directly opposite of what they are saying. Then you need to re-evaluate your OWN verification. You need to investigate WHY there is a discrepancy, because it is utter stupidity to deny what others have seen as fraud and believe that your own judgements and verifications are flawless. No offense, my dude, but your philosophy on this topic embodies the delusional stupidity I am talking about. People lie to themselves. That is the key metric here. I don't need to explain ANY of this to you. You know it, because every explanation I just gave is an OBVIOUS facet of life in general. It needs to be explained to someone like you despite it's obviousness because of self delusion.
    - habinero 8mo ago
- ActorNightly 9mo ago
  Just to be more pedantic, there is more nuance to all of that. Nobody smart is going to disagree that LLMs are a huge net positive. The finer argument is whether or not at this point you can just hand off coding to an LLM. People who say yes simply just haven't had enough experience with using LLMs to a large extent. The amount of time you have to spend prompt engineering the correct response is often the same amount of time it takes for you to write the correct code yourself. And yes, you can put together AGENT.md files, mcp servers, and so on, but then it becomes a game of this. https://xkcd.com/1205/ https://xkcd.com/1205/

They are more effective then on the ground in your face evidence largely because people who are so against AI are blind to it. I hold a result of AI in front of your face and they still proclaim it’s garbage and everything else is fraudulent. Let’s be clear. You’re arguing against a fantasy. Nobody even proponents of AI claims that AI is as good as humans. Nowhere near it. But they are good enough for pair programming. That is indisputable. Yet we have tons of people like you who stare at reality and deny it and call it fraudulent. Examine the lay of the land if that many people are so divided it really means both perspectives are correct in a way.

bofadeez 9mo ago
I think the author is way understating the uselessness of LLMs in any serious context outside of a demo to an investor. I've had nothing but low IQ nonsense from every SOTA model. If we're being honest with ourselves, Opus 4.5 / GPT 5.2 etc are maybe 10-20% better than GPT 3.5 at most. It's a total and absolute catastrophic failure that will go down in history as one of humanity's biggest mistakes.
habinero 9mo ago
If you want to be any good at all in this industry, you have to develop enough technical skills to evaluate claims for yourself. You have to. It's essential. Because the dirty secret is a lot of successful people aren't actually smart or talented, they just got lucky. Or they aren't successful at all, they're just good at pretending they are, either through taking credit for other people's work or flat out lying. I've run into more than a few startups that are just flat out lying about their capabilities and several that were outright fraud. (See DoNotPay for a recent fraud example lol) Pointing to anyone and going "well THEY do it, it MUST work" is frankly engineering malpractice. It might work. But unless you have the chops to verify it for yourself, you're just asking to be conned.
- threethirtytwo 9mo ago
  >If you want to be any good at all in this industry, you have to develop enough technical skills to evaluate claims for yourself. You have to. It's essential. This is an orthogonal off topic point. My or anyones skills don't have to do with the topic at hand. The topic at hand is AI. >Because the dirty secret is a lot of successful people aren't actually smart or talented, they just got lucky. Or they aren't successful at all, they're just good at pretending they are, either through taking credit for other people's work or flat out lying. Again orthoganol to the point. But I'll entertain it. There's another class of people who are delusional. They think they're good, but they're not good at all. I've seen plenty of that in the industry. More so then people who lie, it's people who lie to themselves and believe it. Engineers so confident in their skills, but when I look at them I think they're raw dog shit. >I've run into more than a few startups that are just flat out lying about their capabilities and several that were outright fraud. (See DoNotPay for a recent fraud example lol) Again so? >Pointing to anyone and going "well THEY do it, it MUST work" is frankly engineering malpractice. It might work. But unless you have the chops to verify it for yourself, you're just asking to be conned. Of course. But it's idiotic when there is a huge population of people who are smarter than you better than you and proven to be more capable than you saying they can do it. I need to emphasize it's not just one person saying it. Tons and tons and tons of people are saying it. Fraud happens in the margins of society it rarely ever happens at a macro level, and if it does happen at a macro level the trend doesn't last long and will mostly die within a year at most. So when multitudes of highly reputed people are saying one thing, and your on the ground self verification of that thing is directly opposite of what they are saying. Then you need to re-evaluate your OWN verification. You need to investigate WHY there is a discrepancy, because it is utter stupidity to deny what others have seen as fraud and believe that your own judgements and verifications are flawless. No offense, my dude, but your philosophy on this topic embodies the delusional stupidity I am talking about. People lie to themselves. That is the key metric here. I don't need to explain ANY of this to you. You know it, because every explanation I just gave is an OBVIOUS facet of life in general. It needs to be explained to someone like you despite it's obviousness because of self delusion.
  - habinero 8mo ago
ActorNightly 9mo ago
Just to be more pedantic, there is more nuance to all of that. Nobody smart is going to disagree that LLMs are a huge net positive. The finer argument is whether or not at this point you can just hand off coding to an LLM. People who say yes simply just haven't had enough experience with using LLMs to a large extent. The amount of time you have to spend prompt engineering the correct response is often the same amount of time it takes for you to write the correct code yourself. And yes, you can put together AGENT.md files, mcp servers, and so on, but then it becomes a game of this. https://xkcd.com/1205/ https://xkcd.com/1205/