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this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2024
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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It's takes like this that just discredit the rest of the text.
You can dislike LLM AI for its environmental impact or questionable interpretation of fair use when it comes to intellectual property. But pretending it's actually useless just makes someone seem like they aren't dissimilar to a Drama YouTuber jumping in on whatever the latest on-trend thing to hate is.
"Almost nothing" is not the same as "actually useless". The former is saying the applications are limited, which is true.
LLMs are fine for fictional interactions, as in things that appear to be real but aren't. They suck at anything that involves being reliably factual, which is most things including all the stupid places LLMs and other AI are being jammed in to despite being consistely wrong, which tech bros love to call hallucinations.
They have LIMITED applications, but are being implemented as useful for everything.
To be honest, as someone who's very interested in computer generated text and poetry and the like, I find generic LLMs far less interesting than more traditional markov chains because they're too good at reproducing clichés at the exclusion of anything surprising or whimsical. So I don't think they're very good for the unfactual either. Probably a homegrown neural network would have better results.
GPT-2 was peak LLM because it was bad enough to be interesting, it was all downhill from there
Absolutely, every single one of these tools has got less interesting as they refine it so it can only output the platonic ideal of kitsch.
Agreed, our chat server ran a Markov chain bot for fun.
In comparison to ChatGPT on a 2nd server I frequent it had much funnier and random responses.
ChatGPT tends to just agree with whatever it chose to respond to.
As for real world use. ChatGPT 90% of the time produces the wrong answer. I've enjoyed Circuit AI however. While it also produces incorrect responses, it shares its sources so I can more easily get the right answer.
All I really want from a chatbot is a gremlin that finds the hard things to Google on my behalf.
Let's be real here: when people hear the word AI or LLM they don't think of any of the applications of ML that you might slap the label "potentially useful" on (notwithstanding the fact that many of them also are in a all-that-glitters-is-not-gold--kinda situation). The first thing that comes to mind for almost everyone is shitty autoplag like ChatGPT which is also what the author explicitly mentions.
I'm saying ChatGPT is not useless.
I'm a senior software engineer and I make use of it several times a week either directly or via things built on top of it. Yes you can't trust it will be perfect, but I can't trust a junior engineer to be perfect either—code review is something I've done long before AI and will continue to do long into the future.
I empirically work quicker with it than without and the engineers I know who are still avoiding it work noticeably slower. If it was useless this would not be the case.
ah, a señor software engineer. excusé-moi monsoir, let me back up and try once more to respect your opinion
uh, wait:
whoops no, sorry, can't do it.
jesus fuck I hope the poor bastards that are under you find some other place real soon, you sound like a godawful leader
yep yep! as we all know, velocity is all that matters! crank that handle, produce those features! the factory must flow!!
fucking christ almighty. step away from the keyboard. go become a logger instead. your opinions (and/or the shit you're saying) is a big part of everything that's wrong with industry.
and you fucking know what? it's not even just me being a snide motherfucker, this rant is literally fucking supported by data:
and that's a report sponsored and managed right from the fucking lying cloud company, no less. a report they sponsor, run, manage, and publish is openly admitting this shit. that is how much this shit doesn't fucking work the way you sell it to be doing.
but no, we should trust your driveby bullshit. motherfucker.
Thank you for saving me the breath to shit on that person's attitude :)
yw
these arseslugs are so fucking tedious, and for almost 2 decades they've been dragging everything and everyone around them down to their level instead of finding some spine and getting better
word. When I hear someone say "I'm a SW developer and LLM xy helps me in my work" I always have to stop myself from being socially unacceptably open about my thoughts on their skillset.
and that’s the pernicious bit: it’s not just their skillset, it also goes right to their fucking respect for their team. “I don’t care about just barfing some shit into the codebase, and I don’t think my team will mind either!”
utter goddamn clownery
Please, señor software engineer was my father. Call me Bob.
The point of me saying that was to imply I've been in the industry for a couple of decades, and have a good amount of experience from before all this. It wasn't any kind of appeal to authority, but I can see how you can read it that way.
I'm sorry, do you trust junior engineers blindly? That's gonna lead to a much worse outcome than if they get feedback when they do something wrong. Frankly, I don't trust any engineer to be perfect, we're humans and humans make mistakes, that's why we do code review as a fundamental skill in this industry. It's one of the primary ways for people to develop their ability.
In an industry where many companies are tightening the belt, yes it's important to perform well—I kinda want to keep my job and ideally get a good bonus. It would be pretty foolish to leave free productivity on the table when the alternative is working harder to bridge the gap, where I could spend that energy doing more productive stuff.
as a starting position, fucking YES. you know why I hired that person? because I believe they can do the job and grow in it. you know what happens if they make a mistake? I give them all the goddamn backup they need to handle it and grow.
"this is why code review is so important" jfc. you're one of those "I've worked here for 4 years and I'm a senior" types, aren't you
@froztbyte @9point6 There's a distinct difference between "I have twenty years of experience" and "I've had the same ten minutes of experience over and over again, over a twenty year period" 🤷
yep. on topic of which, this excellent post
So you don't do code review? Something that's pretty much industry standard?
What on earth do you work on where it's inconsequential to trust someone new to the industry blindly?
If I could trust someone anything remotely close to "blindly", they absolutely would not have been hired as a junior.
yep yep. no code review. no version control either. that’s weak shit only babies use. over here you deploy patches by live editing app memory in production, and you update the codebase by editing the central repo using vscode remote. everyone has access to it because monorepos are what google do and so do we.
you have a 100% correct comprehension takeaway of what I said, well done!
jfc no wonder you’re fine with LLMs
I, for one, am not in the industry and can’t figure out why people are coming at you with guns blazing. 🙄
it's because he has shit for brains
fuck you
"I just want to be a cog in the machiiiiiiine why are you bringing up these things that make me think?! ew ethics and integrity are so hard"
Nice, me too, and whenever some tech-brained C-suite bozo tries to mansplain to me why LLMs will make me more efficient, I smile, nod politely, and move on, because at this point I don't think I can make the case that pasting AI slop into prod is objectively a worse idea than pasting Stack Overflow answers into prod.
At the end of the day, if I want to insert a snippet (which I don't have to double-check, mind you), auto-format my code, or organize my imports, which are all things I might use ChatGPT for if I didn't mind all the other baggage that comes along with it, Emacs (or Vim, if you swing that way) does this just fine and has done so for over 20 years.
If LOC/min or a similar metric is used to measure efficiency at your company, I am genuinely sorry.
Good. Thanks for telling us your opinion's worthless.
~~Senior software engineer~~ programmer here. I have had to tell coworkers "don't trust anything chat-gpt tells you about text encoding" after it made something up about text encoding.
ah but did you tell them in CP437 or something fancy (like any text encoding after 1996)? 🤨🤨🥹
Sadly all my best text encoding stories would make me identifiable to coworkers so I can't share them here. Because there's been some funny stuff over the years. Wait where did I go wrong that I have multiple text encoding stories?
That said I mostly just deal with normal stuff like UTF-8, UTF-16, Latin1, and ASCII.
Oh my god, an actual senior softeare engineer????? Amidst all of us mortals??
It's useful insofar as you can accommodate its fundamental flaw of randomly making stuff the fuck up, say by having a qualified expert constantly combing its output instead of doing original work, and don't mind putting your name on low quality derivative slop in the first place.
actually you know what? with all the motte and baileying, you can take a month off. bye!
Petition to replace "motte and bailey" per the Batman clause with "lying like a dipshit".
Isn't this a case of 'the good bits are not original and the original bits are not good'. According to wikipedia it is from 2005.
Does a sealion have bootlicker nature? Ugh.