Repple (she/her)

That would be the best result if everyone just went back to static sites.

I’d probably fall into the mechanist category but I don’t think tests as I understand your description would be sufficient. A giant lookup table defining my responses for every situation in my life would pass all tests of input > output but not be conscious.

I would say it’s in all likelihood about the physical processes that occur during the process of input > output that would define it.

Of course, I have no idea what consciousness actually is, but I don’t see any compelling evidence that the current models are anywhere near there.

I buy art directly from artists all the time. It may not be expensive one of a kind paintings, but a shirt directly from the designer of the print is something I’ve done several times this year. A record directly from the band who recorded it is something I’ve done probably a couple dozen times this year. Prints of paintings, posters directly from the artist. These are all things I get fairly regularly.

Am I allowed to complain now?

I do agree it’s pretty helpful for remembering things I don’t use often or finding APIs for things I haven’t done before. Also not a bad rubber duck. Not worth burning the planet for, but smaller local models that can handle this job I’d be happy to have in my workflow

Every time I test and LLM solution and am pleased with how well it works, and I look at the code and it looks reasonable, it’s a lie. It may work, and even look okay, but unless the change was minuscule it’s always doing weird things when I look closely. By the time I’m done fixing the code I could have done it significantly faster myself.

Edit: in case anyone is wondering I only ever use frontier models (the anthropic and openAI ones), I have unlimited access to them from work and mandates to use them.

They were wrong about me on that one, though it is a place I’ve shipped a good deal to.

I grew up with it and as I age I identify with those generations more and more. When I was young I didn’t want to deal with people to get things done, and to a certain extent I still feel that way, but we’ve given up so much for those touches of convenience and so many times we made the simplest use cases easy while completely fucking over the less common ones.

For example, a couple times within the last few years I’ve needed to check into hotels early in the morning. This has traditionally been easy: book starting the night before, call the front desk, let them know and they make sure not to give the room away. Well, seems like now some hotel chains only direct calls to the call center and don’t have a pathway to reach the front desk anymore. I tried telling them and they said they let the front desk know, and both times the room was cancelled.

Big corporations have too much power and it’s too hard to avoid using them. I’m lucky enough to have enough money where I can afford to go out of my way to choose small businesses but most people are really limited in how much they can do this.

Honestly the 2008 real estate/subprime bubble felt the same way. People were talking about the bubble popping for what seemed like forever until it actually did.

This AI work is normally not classified as “GenAI” which is what I was responding to, and the parent was specifically talking about LLMs. Usually GenAI specifically refers to LLMs as well as image/video creation.

The big data centers aren’t for the most part being built for pharma research.

This to me seems to be a very odd interpretation of the phrase “coding was never the hard part”. First, that doesn’t mean that it’s not hard, just not the hardest. Second, and more importantly, they jump to deciding what to build being the hard part as if those are the only two things?

I have used a variation of this phrase (I usually say coding was never the bottleneck at work) but I’ve never even considered deciding what to build as to be what the bottleneck is.

First, I should say by coding I mean taking a concrete design for a change and writing a single pass at implementation. Modern models to this extremely quickly with up to good performance depending on exactly what you ask them to do.

The things that take up more time in software development just for engineers, leaving aside things that design and pms do.

• Coming up with that concrete design for a change (humans may do this in many ways, one of which is writing the code without a plan and refining)
• Architecting the system at all levels. This one is continuous and huge. A good architecture will easily adopt changes as they come, but you can never foresee all possibilities, and even if you could, there’s usually other people around you who can’t, which brings me to
• Communicating the system design and coming to consensus about aspects of it. This is mostly applicable to teams and is the primary reason individuals can often outperform entire teams. It’s also one reason why throwing a second LLMs at a problem doesn’t solve it at twice the rate. You’ll never get linear scaling
• Upkeep tasks: what needs to be replaced and fixed now, how do we best monitor and alarm to figure this out in the future.

There are “what to build” aspects in here and many engineers also spend time on the overall what to build questions, but the way the article was talking about it seemed very high level.

Coding isn’t easy, it’s hard. But it’s also not usually the bottleneck in software development.

I tried switching to ddg several times over the last decade or so and always gave up because of issues like this, especially with technical or obscure topics. Recently started paying for Kagi and do not have the same issues at all there. The results are good and nicely presented without ads. Of course, on the flip side it’s pretty expensive.

Maybe it’s time to open up a hipster bespoke ram shop. You may only get 1kb but it will be the most beautiful hand-woven core memory you’ve ever seen.

To be more specific (for anyone interested), the next word predictors are usually a type of model called an LSTM (at least I think that’s the most common). This model type has been used for a long time for dealing with sequential data. In 2014 there was a famous paper introducing an attention mechanism. This was a rather brilliant, though relatively minor extension to how LSTMs work. Essentially between each step of an LSTM it generates some data representing the model’s knowledge of the sequence to that point. The attention mechanism looks back at these intermediate values and determines how relevant each state is to the current point in the sequence and pulls in the most relevant bits. This vastly improved the memory of the LSTM over longer sequences.

In 2017 there was another famous paper “attention is all you need” which said something to the effect of “the attention mechanism is doing all the work, we don’t need the rest of the LSTM we can replace it by running attention between all point combinations in the sequence.” It’s actually significantly slower to run as the model grows, but much much faster to train because it’s not intrinsically sequential. This is the transformer model that’s the basis of all our LLMs.

Obviously some massive simplifications here but as despite being fairly anti AI, I do love the engineering behind it. So yeah, pretty literally a fancy text predictor, but it turns out when you throw all the compute you can muster at a fancy word predictor is makes the world go crazy

Language needs to change because it’s completely undecipherable to lay people. I use all sorts of models to great effect in my work. Random forests, LSTMs, SVMs, etc all have tons of great uses. I am pretty anti “AI” as lay people understand it (though the technology is super cool on a technical level)

On the plus side, I can much more easily convince people to use any sort of machine learning models than I used to be able to by calling it AI.

Yeah, the price kept me away for a long time. I do now find it worth it but completely get that it wouldn’t be for many. So nice to be the consumer rather than the product, though.

It’s so bad it drove me to finally pay for Kagi, which I must say is incredibly better than ddg or ecosia

The only codebase an agentic system could refactor in 15 minutes would be almost trivially small. I still couldn’t do it in 15 mins, but give me a couple hours and I’ll make much more meaningful improvements

🤢

Fuck, tears of the rich sounds like icing on the $6000/hr cake. Though they would probably expect comfort from me rather than laughter and mockery…

I’m a woman engineer and for that kind of money might be able to stomach this (not that I’m anywhere near attractive enough for them to hire me), but I’m pretty sure if I were attractive enough and got hired they would probably only last a few minutes before I completely emasculated them by actually knowing what the fuck I’m talking about.

Sounds pretty fun, actually, now that I think about it… as long as I didn’t need to fuck them