5 ms·

> Now it's always available. And often incorrect! (and occasionally refuses to answer)

by terminalbraid 8mo ago

0x696C6961 8mo ago
Sure, but it's easy to check if it's incorrect and try again.
- terminalbraid 8mo ago
  Forgive me if "just dig your way out of the hole" doesn't sound appealing.
  - shepherdjerred 8mo ago
    Surely you, a programmer, can imagine a way to automate this process
    - terminalbraid 8mo ago
      No, I actually haven't made, nor desire to make, a way to automate "thinking about, researching, and solving a problem".
  - 0x696C6961 8mo ago
    You're free to use whatever tools you like.
    - chasd00 8mo ago
      > You're free to use whatever tools you like. this is important, i feel like a lot of people are falling in to the "stop liking what i don't like" way of thinking. Further, there's a million different ways to apply an AI helper in software development. You can adjust your workflow in whatever way works best for you. ..or leave it as is.
      - wtetzner 8mo ago
        You're right, though I think a lot of the push back is due to the way companies are pushing AI usage onto employees. Not that complaining on HN will help anything...
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
- Jensson 8mo ago
  When you use it to lookup a single word, yeah, but people here use it to lookup thousand words at once and then can't check it all.
  - 0x696C6961 8mo ago
    That doesn't make the tool bad.
dgacmu 8mo ago
It is! But you can then verify it via a correct, conventional forward dictionary. The scary applications are the ones where it's not so easy to check correctness...
- terminalbraid 8mo ago
  Right. Except the dictionary analogy only goes so far and we reach the true problem.
  - 0x696C6961 8mo ago
    It's not an analogy.
- 9rx 8mo ago
  Words are something made up to express whatever the speaker/author intends them to, so there is really no such thing as correct or incorrect there. A dictionary can hint at the probability of someone else understanding a word absent of other context, which makes for a useful tool, but that is something quite different to establishing correctness. As for things that can actually be incorrect, that has always been impossible, but we accept the human consensus to be a close enough approximation. With that, verifying 'correctness' to the degree that is possible is actually quite easy through validating it across many different LLMs trained on the human consensus. They will not all hallucinate identically. If convergence is found, then you have also found the human consensus. That doesn't prove correctness — we have never had a way to do that — but it is equivalent to how we have always dealt with establishing what we believe is correct.
  - margalabargala 8mo ago
    Your first paragraph, while perhaps philosophically true to a solipsist, is not actually useful in the world we live in.
    - 9rx 8mo ago
      It is a fundamental property of the universe. Whether or not it is useful is immaterial. Humans are unable to read minds. They can only make up words and use them as they intend. There is no other way. Despite your insistence, I think you will find that the human consensus is that it useful. The human consensus is especially biased in this case, I will grant you that, but it seems few humans wish they were bears in the forest. Our ability to so effectively communicate in such a messy, imperfect environment is what has enabled us to be unlike all the other animals. It might not sound like it should work on paper, but in the real world it does.
NeutralCrane 8mo ago
Is it? I’ve seen AI hallucinations, but they seem to be increasingly rare these days. Much of the AI antipathy reminds me of Wikipedia in the early-mid 2000s. I remember feeling amazed with it, but also remember a lot of ranting by skeptics about how anyone could put anything on there, and therefore it was unreliable, not to be used, and doomed to fail. 20 years later and everyone understands that Wikipedia may have its shortcomings, and yet it is still the most impressive, useful advancement in human knowledge transfer in a generation.
- advael 8mo ago
  I think robust crowdsourcing is probably the biggest capital-A Advancement in humanity's capabilities that came out of the internet, and there's a huge disparity in results that comes from how that capability is structured and used. Wikipedia designed protocols, laws, and institutions that leverage crowdsourcing to be the most reliable de facto aggregator of human knowledge. Social media designed protocols, laws, and institutions to rot people's brains, surveil their every move, and enable mass-disinformation to take over the public imagination on a regular basis. I think LLMs as a technology are pretty cool, much like crowdsourcing is. We finally have pretty good automatic natural language processing that scales to large corpora. That's big. Also, I think the state of the software industry that is mostly driving the development, deployment, and ownership of this technology is mostly doing uninspired and shitty things with it. I have some hope that better orgs and distributed communities will accomplish some cool and maybe even monumental things with them over time, but right now the field is bleak, not because the technology isn't impressive (although somehow despite how impressive it is it's still being oversold) but because silicon valley is full of rotten institutions with broken incentives, the same ones that brought us social media and subscriptions to software. My hope for the new world a technology will bring about will never rest with corporate aristocracy, but with the more thoughtful institutions and the distributed open source communities that actually build good shit for humanity, time and time again
joquarky 8mo ago
Your comment does not align with my experience. Garbage in, garbage out still applies.
- autoexec 8mo ago
  > Garbage in, garbage out still applies. Which is why we shouldn't be surprised when AI, trained on the collective wisdom of facebook posts and youtube comments, keeping lying to us.

> Now it's always available. And often incorrect! (and occasionally refuses to answer)

0x696C6961 8mo ago

Sure, but it's easy to check if it's incorrect and try again.

terminalbraid 8mo ago
Forgive me if "just dig your way out of the hole" doesn't sound appealing.
- shepherdjerred 8mo ago
  Surely you, a programmer, can imagine a way to automate this process
  - terminalbraid 8mo ago
    No, I actually haven't made, nor desire to make, a way to automate "thinking about, researching, and solving a problem".
- 0x696C6961 8mo ago
  You're free to use whatever tools you like.
  - chasd00 8mo ago
    > You're free to use whatever tools you like. this is important, i feel like a lot of people are falling in to the "stop liking what i don't like" way of thinking. Further, there's a million different ways to apply an AI helper in software development. You can adjust your workflow in whatever way works best for you. ..or leave it as is.
    - wtetzner 8mo ago
      You're right, though I think a lot of the push back is due to the way companies are pushing AI usage onto employees. Not that complaining on HN will help anything...
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
Jensson 8mo ago
When you use it to lookup a single word, yeah, but people here use it to lookup thousand words at once and then can't check it all.
- 0x696C6961 8mo ago
  That doesn't make the tool bad.

dgacmu 8mo ago

It is! But you can then verify it via a correct, conventional forward dictionary. The scary applications are the ones where it's not so easy to check correctness...

terminalbraid 8mo ago
Right. Except the dictionary analogy only goes so far and we reach the true problem.
- 0x696C6961 8mo ago
  It's not an analogy.
9rx 8mo ago
Words are something made up to express whatever the speaker/author intends them to, so there is really no such thing as correct or incorrect there. A dictionary can hint at the probability of someone else understanding a word absent of other context, which makes for a useful tool, but that is something quite different to establishing correctness. As for things that can actually be incorrect, that has always been impossible, but we accept the human consensus to be a close enough approximation. With that, verifying 'correctness' to the degree that is possible is actually quite easy through validating it across many different LLMs trained on the human consensus. They will not all hallucinate identically. If convergence is found, then you have also found the human consensus. That doesn't prove correctness — we have never had a way to do that — but it is equivalent to how we have always dealt with establishing what we believe is correct.
- margalabargala 8mo ago
  Your first paragraph, while perhaps philosophically true to a solipsist, is not actually useful in the world we live in.
  - 9rx 8mo ago
    It is a fundamental property of the universe. Whether or not it is useful is immaterial. Humans are unable to read minds. They can only make up words and use them as they intend. There is no other way. Despite your insistence, I think you will find that the human consensus is that it useful. The human consensus is especially biased in this case, I will grant you that, but it seems few humans wish they were bears in the forest. Our ability to so effectively communicate in such a messy, imperfect environment is what has enabled us to be unlike all the other animals. It might not sound like it should work on paper, but in the real world it does.

NeutralCrane 8mo ago

Is it? I’ve seen AI hallucinations, but they seem to be increasingly rare these days. Much of the AI antipathy reminds me of Wikipedia in the early-mid 2000s. I remember feeling amazed with it, but also remember a lot of ranting by skeptics about how anyone could put anything on there, and therefore it was unreliable, not to be used, and doomed to fail. 20 years later and everyone understands that Wikipedia may have its shortcomings, and yet it is still the most impressive, useful advancement in human knowledge transfer in a generation.

advael 8mo ago
I think robust crowdsourcing is probably the biggest capital-A Advancement in humanity's capabilities that came out of the internet, and there's a huge disparity in results that comes from how that capability is structured and used. Wikipedia designed protocols, laws, and institutions that leverage crowdsourcing to be the most reliable de facto aggregator of human knowledge. Social media designed protocols, laws, and institutions to rot people's brains, surveil their every move, and enable mass-disinformation to take over the public imagination on a regular basis. I think LLMs as a technology are pretty cool, much like crowdsourcing is. We finally have pretty good automatic natural language processing that scales to large corpora. That's big. Also, I think the state of the software industry that is mostly driving the development, deployment, and ownership of this technology is mostly doing uninspired and shitty things with it. I have some hope that better orgs and distributed communities will accomplish some cool and maybe even monumental things with them over time, but right now the field is bleak, not because the technology isn't impressive (although somehow despite how impressive it is it's still being oversold) but because silicon valley is full of rotten institutions with broken incentives, the same ones that brought us social media and subscriptions to software. My hope for the new world a technology will bring about will never rest with corporate aristocracy, but with the more thoughtful institutions and the distributed open source communities that actually build good shit for humanity, time and time again

joquarky 8mo ago

Your comment does not align with my experience. Garbage in, garbage out still applies.

autoexec 8mo ago
> Garbage in, garbage out still applies. Which is why we shouldn't be surprised when AI, trained on the collective wisdom of facebook posts and youtube comments, keeping lying to us.