It's like ice creams. If you get two scoops, they'll be smaller than 2x a single scoop.
What you do is get a single, wait till they're done, say actually you'd like a double (b/c the new scoop will have to be the same size) and then...
...get ice cream all over your shoes because 2x a single scoop doesn't fit in a cone, and swear off lifehacks from the internet.
Corvos
19hr ago
My read is that convenience store food / takeout is really just the old tradition of having food made by Cook or your landlady, it's just that now Cook lives in a warehouse instead of downstairs.
Ordinary Joe putting up an amateur flyer is only copying what he sees other things doing, and he's not going to know anything about "this is why you do such a thing"
That moment of, "oh, shit, I have no idea why I'm actually doing this thing," is how you learn and grow, though. I've been there dozens of times. I just think that it's bad if the response becomes "I paid $10 for this piece of shit and it can't even do what it's told!" instead of, "okay, I need to sit down and think for a minute and learn some stuff and figure out what I actually want".
The former is a waste of time that, as @gattsuru says, isn't going to work well with most human professionals either. The latter is how you gain experience and expertise. I'm not being condescending to our hypothetical Joe, it's exactly the advice I'd give a friend or junior.
I agree with you that to the extent LLM companies aren't open about this it's bad.
Corvos
22hr ago
To be fair, the Canadian church burnings in fury at the discovery of blatantly fake 'mass graves' was pretty bad, as was the conspicuous disinterest of the government. Drawing a line from that kind of attitude to something worse requires being a pessimist but not a maniac. And I don't think people are worried about 'literally banning Christianity' as much as 'making it impossible to state an increasingly large subset of Christian views' and just letting the religion die.
As I read this thread, I'm noticing a similar and similar implied arguement crop up - the 1% that can use LLMs beautifully naturally assume the moment the general masses they will be freed like a butterfly bursting from it's crysalis into something beautiful and everything will be wonderful.
It's a possibility, though I hope not. One part of me thinks that it would be better if LLMs were never mentioned again outside technical documents - the public would be deprived of something that I think is an immensely important resource that could edify them, but on the other hand we would be safe from the kind of spasms of public morality that caused the censorship of social media.
The other part of me thinks that this is a temporary moment, where LLMs are used only by the most curious, and is looking forward to seeing what a generation of people now in their teens do with the tech, in the same way we saw in the flowering of internet culture 2000-2010.
I'm not trying to argue that we shut down LLM development. What I'm trying to say is that a good chunk of LLM development and movement and usage isn't from honest improvement but from sales department buzzwords and artificial push.
Then we have very little quarrel. I broadly agree with what you've said, and I think the LLM marketers and grifters are doing more to damage the field than a thousand 'can't spell STRAWBERRY' bugs.
you immeadiately and covertly imply that they're just luddites(in your case - like, c'mon, really?)
Really not my intention. This anonymous forum is where I can be totally open about my feelings because frankly none of this matters. I was trying to provide examples of cases where good, honest, clever people looked at something, concluded correctly that they had no personal interest in it, and concluded wrongly that it had no long-term value. I think it's an easy trap to fall into, and I feel the same in other areas.
A single datapoint is data, yes. But it does not equate to an overall data trend. I've no doubt that you and people like this guy can do alot with LLMs, but I've yet to see any broader overall concrete benefit to the world at large nor any market uptick that would imply this is making things better.
In all sincerity, I've got my fingers crossed.
Corvos
1d ago
As Sir Humphrey once said, "It is necessary to get completely behind a man if you wish to stab him in the back". The point is that people will resist the open implication, especially if it comes with apparent malice, but if you keep the relevant data points in front of their face long enough they will come to the conclusion you want themselves.
Corvos
1d ago
That’s good. Never pick a name you can’t scrub the floor in, and never pick a name that makes you look like a try-hard. If after a year you decide that the anglicisation isn’t enough, then change.
As a metaphor take cosmetic surgery - one should always get somebody else to decide the procedure or one just ends up with a face structured around your insecurities.
Corvos
1d ago
No, well-dressed men in their seventies who remember the Cold War and feel strongly about the necessity of Standing Up To Russia.
Corvos
1d ago
It’s a guilt thing. By not using the ‘correct’ non-Russian name he was letting down the Ukrainian war effort. Men of a certain age feel really strongly about this.
There's no getting around the fact that I use LLMs near-constantly, find them incredibly useful, and have considerable expectation for future use cases once the bottleneckers like Apple get off their arses. You don't.
I have old family friends whose ancestors felt that electricity was a fad and literally bankrupted themselves buying up candle factories 'cheap' in anticipation of renewed demand. My own grandmother felt that heated houses were fripperies and didn't get central heating until her 90s. I give these examples not to call you a luddite but just to say that literally neither of us knows yet and good, sensible people have been skeptical of in-hindsight very useful technologies (and vice-versa of course). My preference would be that we leave LLMs 20 years and see how it looks.
Corvos
1d ago
No, I get that, I don't like the marketing campaigns. But at some point you have to pay attention to what you're doing. If you're putting up flyers with a QR code, why haven't you scanned them at least once to know they work? And if you find they don't work, and I'm guessing 'work' here means 'link to your website' then why don't you ask the AI why they're not doing that? And if you've got no idea what you want the QR code to do, why are you asking for a QR code?
Managing AI is very much like managing humans. In both cases half the job is clarifying your thinking and soliciting follow-up questions and checking you're on the same page all the time, and "Well, I know what I want," doesn't work for AI or humans.
Corvos
1d ago
We could well be, I think some of the claims made are silly.
people aren't going to have to do anything and the market will eventually sort itself out. Supply will come to match demand
This is my hope! My concern is people turning it into a nuclear-power situation, where a perfectly good thing is loaded down with so much taboo and fear and regulation that it's no longer accessible even when everybody calms down.
Corvos
2d ago
The marketing for these things has been terrible from the start, I agree. Solving stupid 'problems' in stupid ways, stoking needless terror and antagonism...
And so unnecessary, too. These things percolated perfectly well with no marketing budget whatsoever.
Corvos
2d ago
In most cases one just gets increased convenience with evident downsides as well.
Just speaking from experience, the increased convenience is a really big thing. I'm having trouble with my employer in a way that's very time-sensitive, and being able to check their work while my lawyer was away on summer holiday was a life saver. I cannot stress enough how much it helped me.
I'm not opposed to this in theory but this feels like the wrong time: you can't do a cost-benefit analysis when neither the costs nor the benefits are readily apparent.
More generally... the conversation around AI feels like a Culture War conversation between lovers and haters squabbling over the pool of haven't-trieds. Both sides seem to have very strong confirmation biases; I'm a member of the lover faction myself and the 'I downloaded it, it told me a square has six sides, I deleted it' stories that haters tell me sound like they come from a different world which is a pretty good indicator that we're not operating on good epistemics here. If we're all operating on Conflict Theory then I don't think a big public discussion would produce very good results.
Corvos
2d ago
a significant fraction of the time it's literally on the level of "Please design me a rectangle." "Ok, here's that triangle you asked for."
I will say I used free GPT for a couple of years and never got this. But also:
the free version on mobile at least doesn't ask follow-up questions
How hard is it to put “please ask any relevant follow-up questions” in your prompt? This isn’t wizardry. We were doing this is 2023. Yes, you have to put in a modicum of effort.
And if you have an ounce of curiosity in you then you should really ask it ‘what is a QR code and how does it work’ when you say you want a QR code on your flier!
very little has actually come of this supposed improvement to coding. We haven't seen a flowering of new programs, and neither have existing programs gotten better.
Partly it's happening, just slower than you think and concentrated on business-to-business because these days building software for users has very high expectations for ease of use and frankly it's not worth it.
But the main issue is regulation and incumbents sitting on top of the bottlenecks. Want an app on your phone to point out you've missed an email that's urgent? Tough, only Apple gets to see your emails. Want it to be able to point out when you're doomscrolling? Tough, Apple doesn't let apps see what you're doing. Want your phone to take care of some trivial tasks without you? Tough, Apple definitely doesn't allow apps to use other apps. There's good security reasons for this but it means massive swathes of AI use cases can literally only be looked at by Apple and Google, who are slow-moving and mostly uninterested because they already own the market.
And this extends all over the place. Want to help people with something medical? I hope you've got a twenty person compliance team and you're friends with the regulators, and that's before you have a clue if your putative product will be popular or profitable. Similar for legal, similar for finance.
In short, the number of people who can do interesting things that you @OliveTapenade might notice in your personal life are limited to about 1-10 companies, who mostly have other priorities.
So far the primary use case for them is coding, right?
I also think this is too narrow. I've had a dispute with my employer and having something that can not only go through thirty pages of legal documents immediately and spot traps but also provide a legal fix so I don't have to rely purely on their drafting has been incredibly useful.
In 1980 you could say the same about the PC. When I was growing up, you could say the same about the internet. Lots of people's only interaction with the internet these days is Youtube and Facebook, because you need compelling content and incredible simplicity to interest the lower-than-average user, but that's enough for them to care about it now. Took ages.
Not that I ever saw. Reading about cool battles, yes. What are you thinking of?
It’s a good idea, but the insecurity is somehow part of the fun :)
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