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LLMs enable a new kind of text search. It looks like reasoning and intelligence, but it is not. For example, If you are not aware of Internet, you would consid
by qsera 5mo ago
LLMs enable a new kind of text search. It looks like reasoning and intelligence, but it is not.
For example, If you are not aware of Internet, you would consider a traditional internet search that comes up with a stackoverflow answer as a machine generating "novel ideas" and answers.
It is a clever marketing trick (touting Erdos solutions) employeed by AI companies.
- CamperBob2 5mo agoReading comments like this is like watching an impaired pedestrian about to be run over by an approaching bus. You yell, you wave your arms, but they aren't paying attention. There's no way to warn them, so all you can do is... watch.
- skydhash 5mo ago> There's no way to warn them, so all you can do is... watch …and then wake up from the nightmare wishing the stress from the job is lower. I can only laugh that some people truly believe that developers, one of the most ardent group at automating the tedious part of their job, would refuse to use an effective tool. You only need to look at the open source world to see people litterally scratching their own hitch everywhere.
- qsera 5mo ago>would refuse to use an effective tool. No one said I don't use LLMs. I use LLMs daily...for search. That is its best use. That is my own judgement.
- voidUpdate 5mo agoWhat if I don't want to automate away the part of my job that I actually like doing? What if, in my job as a programmer, I actually want to do programming?
- qsera 5mo agoPeople who demand programmers start using LLMs in their work don't understand that it is essentially like asking programmers to start doing accounting or HR. Something fundamentally different from what they love to do..
- voidUpdate 5mo agoTheyre asking programmers to become managers, asking another entity to do the work for them and check in every now and again to see how it's going
- qsera 5mo agoActually they are asking programmers to become managers in addition to programmers. Because when the LLMs stops working, they are expected to take over. So I think programmers who are asked to use LLMs should demand their job descriptions to be changed to that of managers, and should ever deny responsibility if the LLM stops to make progress. Thus let the organization be responsible to actually find a version of AI that works, just like how it was responsible to find competent programmers to work under the managers before.
- maybe_pablo 5mo agoThat’s fair. I do think, however, that the software industry may become a bit like the clothing industry: there will still be an artisanal market for people who want human-made software, but to be honest I wouldn’t expect it to remain the mainstream option.
- voidUpdate 5mo agoWell I can say for sure I'd rather wear long lasting, tested (second hand), human made clothing rather than Shein Slop
- maybe_pablo 5mo agoSure, and I don’t disagree, but goods and services still need to scale to billions of people. Most people aren’t going to start knitting their own clothes, or have the time to, just like most companies probably won’t rely on fully hand-written software if cheaper automated alternatives are good enough. What you want or enjoy is one thing; the reality of society is another.
- weakfish 5mo agoReading comments like this is like watching someone who is absolutely convinced that they have a crystal ball in their lap when at best they have a foggy piece of plastic. You could be right you could be wrong, but don’t act like you have such certainty.
- CamperBob2 5mo agoThe foggy piece of plastic writes better code and better text than I do. I don't know about you, but that makes me sit up and stop waving my hands dismissively. As for "certainty," that's a luxury nobody has.
- weakfish 5mo agoI really don't want to sound like an asshole, but I refuse the notion that an agent writes better code / prose than I do and I am concerned for anyone who does think that. Is it _faster_? sure! That is NOT better. Before you ask, I write code w/ agents daily, I find it useful, but it's not better than I am purely on quality.
- CamperBob2 5mo agoWhat I've been seeing lately with Opus 4.7 under Claude Code is that it finds more bugs in my code than I find in its code. That, to me, makes it hard to argue that I am "better" than it is. Certainly Claude/Codex's knowledge of algorithms and data structures is leagues ahead of any human programmer alive. Only its capacity for creating new ones on demand is weaker. Recent results from the mathematics field suggest that's a temporary state of affairs. As far as prose goes, my best writing is indeed better than the best I've seen from LLMs. But that's a matter of opinion (mine.) On average the clanker wins, especially if conditioned to avoid LLM-isms. The truth is that the models are getting better in both areas, while I'm not. Which IMHO is freaking awesome, not a reason to burn it all down.
- weakfish 5mo agoI think it's pretty good at review and finding bugs, but IME it's really not great at designing solutions to non-trivial problems, which IME is the part of the job that makes me "good" at it. YMMV
- mgfist 5mo agoWhatever LLMs are or are not, they've completely changed what I do for work. 9 months ago I was coding, today I prompt. Every line of code I commit is generated by LLMs. If you want to call it text search, be my guest. Doesn't change what it's done for the industry.
- CamperBob2 5mo agoNo, no, you don't get it. See, it's just like a text search, if a text search could return text that never existed before, and that solves original math problems, and answer your emails for you, ... and ...
- qsera 5mo agoEver heard of "prompt injection" attacks? This "super intelligent" and "capable" thing cannot even understand that your ssh keys are private and should not be sent to randos. It can solve complex math, but does not understand basic security/privacy. What does that say to you?
- maybe_pablo 5mo agoEver heard of social engineering? Also, models nowadays are way sharper than they were even a year ago. They’re not going to make stupid mistakes like that unless you basically ask them to. GPT-5.x for example would bend over backwards to avoid even reading your passwords into context.
- qsera 5mo ago> Ever heard of social engineering? Oh wait, I thought these things were super smart. I didn't expect "social engineering" to work on them. > models nowadays are way sharper than they were even a year ago. You are missing the point. If the thing can solve complex math problems and at the same time be so dumb as to fall for "social engineering", then that means that it is not "smartness" or "reasoning" that is helping it to solve those problems. Just some form of advanced, but yet dumb, search algorithm.
- Rapzid 5mo agoThat's one way to look at it. Kinda like a way to look at cargo planes is in terms of boxes and sticks.