25 ms·

Why is this sad. You should bw rooting for these LLMs to be as bad as possible..

MaximusLegroom 10mo ago
Rooting is useless. We should be taking conscious action to reduce the bosses' manipulation of our lives and society. We will not be saved by hoping to sabotage a genuinely useful technology.
- TechDebtDevin 10mo ago
  How is it useful other than for people making money off token outout. Continue to fry your brain.
  - nh23423fefe 10mo ago
    are you pretending to be confused?
    - ImaLuddite 10mo ago
      I see millions of kids cheating on their schoolwork, many adults substituting reading and thinking to GPUs. There's like 0.001% of people that use them to learn responsibly. You are genuinely a fool.
      - antonvs 10mo ago
        Hey, I wrote a long response to your other reply to me, but your comment seems to have been flagged so I can no longer reply there. Since I took the time to write that, I'm posting it here. I'm glad I was able to inspire a new username for you. But aren't you concerned that if you let other people influence you like that, you're frying your brain? Shouldn't everything originate in your own mind? > They don't provide any value except to a very small percentage of the population who safely use them to learn There are many things that only a small percentage of the population benefit from or care about. What do you want to do about that? Ban those things? Post exclamation-filled comments exhorting people not to use them? This comes back to what I said at the end of my previous comment: You might want to make sure you understand what you’re trying to achieve. Do you know the answer to that? > A language model is not the same as a convolution neural network finding anomalies on medical imagining. Why not? Aren't radiologists "frying their brains" by using these instead of examining the images themselves? The last paragraph of your other comment was literally the Luddite argument. (Sorry I can't quote it now.) Do you know how to weave cloth? No? Your brain is fried! The world changes, and I find it more interesting and challenging to change with it, than to fight to maintain some arbitrary status quo. To quote Ghost in the Shell: All things change in a dynamic environment. Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you. For me, it's not about "getting ahead" as you put it. It's about enjoying my work, learning new things. I work in software development because I enjoy it. LLMs have opened up new possibilities for me. In that 5 year future you mentioned, I'm going to have learned a lot of things that someone not using LLMs will not have. As for being dependent on Altman et al., you can easily go out and buy a machine that will allow you to run decent models yourself. A Mac, a Framework desktop, any number of mini PCs with some kind of unified memory. The real dependence is on the training of the models, not running them. And if that becomes less accessible, and new open weight models stop being released, the open weight models we have now won't disappear, and aren't going to get any worse for things like coding or searching the web. > Keep falling for lesswrong bs. Good grief. Lesswrong is one of the most misleadingly named groups around, and their abuse of the word "rational" would be hilarious if it weren't sad. In any case, Yudkowsky advocated being ready to nuke data centers, in a national publication. I'm not particular aware of their position on the utility of AI, because I don't follow any of that. What I'm describing to you is based on my own experience, from the enrichment I've experienced from having used LLMs for the past couple of years. Over time, I suspect that kind of constructive and productive usage will spread to more people.
        TechDebtDevin 10mo ago
        Out of respect the time you put into your response, I will try to respond in good faith. > There are many things that only a small percentage of the population benefit from or care about. What do you want to do about that? ---There are many things from our society that I would like to ban that are useful to a small percentage of the population, or at least should be heavily regulated. Guns for example. A more extreme example would be cars. Many people drive 5 blocks when they could walk to their (and everyone else's) detriment. Forget the climate, it impacts everyone ( break dust, fumes, pedestrian deaths). Some cities create very expensive tolls / parking fees to prevent this, this angers most people and is seen as irrational by the masses but is necessary and not done enough. Open Free societies are a scam told to us by capitalist that want to exploit without any consequences. --- I want to air-gap all computers in classrooms. I want students to be expelled for using LLMs to do assignments, as they would have been previously for plagiarism (that's all an llm is, a plagiarism laundering machine). ---During COVID there was a phenomenon where some children did not learn to speak until they were 4-5 years old, and some of those children were even diagnosed with autism. In reality, we didn't understand fully how children learned to speak, and didn't understand the importance of the young brain's need to subconsciously process people's facial expressions. It was Masks!!! (I am not making a statement on masks fyi) We are already observing unpredictable effects that LLMs have on the brain and I believe we will see similar negative consequences on the young mind if we take away the struggle to read, think and process information. Hell I already see the effects on myself, and I'm middle aged! > Why not? Aren't radiologists "frying their brains" by using these instead of examining the images themselves? --- I'm okay with technology replacing a radiologist!!! Just like I'm okay with a worker being replaced in an unsafe textile factory! The stakes are higher in both of these cases, and obviously in the best interest of society as a whole. The same cannot be said for a machine that helps some people learn while making the rest dependent on it. Its the opposite of a great equalizer, it will lead to a huge gap in inequality for many different reasons. We can all say we think this will be better for learning, that remains to be seen. I don't really want to run a worldwide experiment on a generation of children so tech companies can make a trillion dollars, but here we are. Didn't we learn our lesson with social media/porn? If Uber's were subsidized and cost only $20.00 a month for unlimited rides, could people be trusted to only use it when it was reasonable or would they be taking Uber's to go 5 blocks, increasing the risk for pedestrians and deteriorating their own health. They would use them in an irresponsible way. If there was an unlimited pizza machine that cost $20.00 a month to create unlimited food, people would see that as a miracle! It would greatly benefit the percentage of the population that is food insecure, but could they be trusted to not eat themselves into obesity after getting their fill? I don't think so. The affordability of food, and the access to it has a direct correlation to obesity. Both of these scenarios look great on the surface but are terrible for society in the long run. I could go on and on about the moral hazards of LLMs, there are many more outside of just the dangers of learning and labor. We are being told they are game changing by the people who profit off them.. In the past, empires bet their entire kingdom's on the words of astronomers and magicians who said they could predict the future. I really don't see how the people running AI companies are any different than those astronomers (they even say they can predict the future LOL!) They are Dunning Kruger plagiarism laundering machines as I see it. Text extruding machines that are controlled by a cabal of tech billionaires who have proven time and time again they do not have societies best interest at heart. I really hope this message is allowed to send!
  - antonvs 10mo ago
    They’re fantastic learning tools, for a start. What you get out of them is proportional to what you put in. You’ve probably heard of the Luddites, the group who destroyed textile mills in the early 1800s. If not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite Luddites often get a bad rap, probably in large part because of employer propaganda and influence over the writing of history, as well as the common tendency of people to react against violent means of protest. But regardless of whether you think they were heroes, villains, or something else, the fact is that their efforts made very little difference in the end, because that kind of technological progress is hard to arrest. A better approach is to find ways to continue to thrive even in the presence of problematic technologies, and work to challenge the systems that exploit people rather than attack tools which can be used by anyone. You can, of course, continue to flail at the inevitable, but you might want to make sure you understand what you’re trying to achieve.
    - ImaLuddite 10mo ago
      [flagged]
    - melagonster 10mo ago
      Today, we found better ways to prevent machines from crushing children, e.g., more regulation from democracy.
      - melagonster 10mo ago
        Obviously, some people love that machine crushing kids in the past. Looks like they hope it happen again...
    - eru 10mo ago
      Arguably the Luddites don't get a bad enough rep. The lump of labour fallacy was as bad then as it is now or at any other time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy
      - 10mo ago
drusepth 10mo ago
Generally, any expert hopes their tool/paintbrush/etc is as performant as possible.
- eru 10mo ago
  And in general I'm all for increasing productivity, in all areas of the economy.
  - elbear 10mo ago
    To what goal?
    - eru 10mo ago
      To increase livings standards for the people.
      - elbear 10mo ago
        How do you reconcile that with people getting fired because they're replaced with technology?
        eru 10mo ago
        See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy Why does this need any reconciliation? That's working as expected: when productivity improves in some sectors, we don't need as much labour there as before, and thus it needs to be shuffled around. This can have all kinds of knock-on effects. As long as central bank is doing at least a halfway competent job, overall unemployment will stay low and stable. Ideally, you have people quit for a new job instead of getting fired, but in the grand scheme of things it doesn't make too much of a difference, as long as in aggregate they find new jobs. An interesting example is furnished by the US between early 2006 and late 2007: hundreds of thousand people left employment in construction, and during that same period, the overall US unemployment rate stayed remarkably flat (hovering around 4.5% to 4.7%). The US economy was robust enough to handle a housing construction bust. (Of course, after this was all done and dusted, some people declared that house prices were too high and the public demanded that they be brought down. So obligingly in 20008 the Fed engineered a recession that accomplished exactly that..)
onoesworkacct 10mo ago
That ship has sailed long ago. I'm rooting for biological cognitive enhancement through gene editing or whatever other crazy shit. I do not want to have some corporation's AI chip in my brain.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- TechDebtDevin 10mo ago
  Confirmed less wrong psyop victim
windexh8er 10mo ago
If we've learned anything so far it's that the parlor tricks of one-shot efficacy only gets you so far. Drill into anything relatively complex with a few hundred thousand tokens of context and the models all start to fall apart roughly the same. Even when I've used Sonnet 4.5 with 1M token context the model starts to flake out and get confused with a codebase of less than 10k LoC. Everyone seems to keep claiming these huge leaps and bounds, but I really have to wonder how many of these are just shilling for their corporate overlord. I asked Gemini 3 to solve a simple, yet not well documented problem in Home Assistant this evening. All it would take is 3-5 lines of YAML. The model failed miserably. I think we're all still safe.
- DrewADesign 10mo ago
  It depends on your definition of safe. Most of the code that gets written is pretty simple — basic crud web apps, WP theme customization, simple mobile games… stuff that can easily get written by the current gen of tooling. That already has cost a lot of people a lot of money or jobs outright, and most of them probably haven’t reached their skill limit a as developers. As the available work increases in complexity, I reckon more will push themselves to take jobs further out of their comfort zone. Previously, the choice was to upskill for the challenge and greater earnings, or stay where you are which is easy and reliable; the current choice is upskill or get a new career. Rather than switch careers to something you have zero experience in. That puts pressure on the moderately higher-skill job market with far fewer people, and they start to upskill to outrun the implosion, which puts pressure on them to move upward, and so on. With even modest productivity gains in the whole industry, it’s not hard for me to envision a world where general software development just isn’t a particularly valuable skill anymore.
  - windexh8er 10mo ago
    Everything in tech is cyclical. AI will be no different. Everyone outsourced, realized the pain and suffering and corrected. AI isn't immune to the same trajectory or mistakes. And as corporations realize that nobody has a clue about how their apps or infra run, you're one breach away from putting a relatively large organization under. The final kicker in this simple story is that there are many, many narcissistic folks in the C-suite. Do you really think Sam Altman and Co are going to take blame for Billy's shitty vibe coded breach? Yeah right. Welcome to the real world of the enterprise where you still need an actual throat to choke to show your leadership skills.
eru 10mo ago
> You should bw rooting for these LLMs to be as bad as possible.. Why?

Rooting is useless. We should be taking conscious action to reduce the bosses' manipulation of our lives and society. We will not be saved by hoping to sabotage a genuinely useful technology.

TechDebtDevin 10mo ago
How is it useful other than for people making money off token outout. Continue to fry your brain.
- nh23423fefe 10mo ago
  are you pretending to be confused?
  - ImaLuddite 10mo ago
    I see millions of kids cheating on their schoolwork, many adults substituting reading and thinking to GPUs. There's like 0.001% of people that use them to learn responsibly. You are genuinely a fool.
    - antonvs 10mo ago
      Hey, I wrote a long response to your other reply to me, but your comment seems to have been flagged so I can no longer reply there. Since I took the time to write that, I'm posting it here. I'm glad I was able to inspire a new username for you. But aren't you concerned that if you let other people influence you like that, you're frying your brain? Shouldn't everything originate in your own mind? > They don't provide any value except to a very small percentage of the population who safely use them to learn There are many things that only a small percentage of the population benefit from or care about. What do you want to do about that? Ban those things? Post exclamation-filled comments exhorting people not to use them? This comes back to what I said at the end of my previous comment: You might want to make sure you understand what you’re trying to achieve. Do you know the answer to that? > A language model is not the same as a convolution neural network finding anomalies on medical imagining. Why not? Aren't radiologists "frying their brains" by using these instead of examining the images themselves? The last paragraph of your other comment was literally the Luddite argument. (Sorry I can't quote it now.) Do you know how to weave cloth? No? Your brain is fried! The world changes, and I find it more interesting and challenging to change with it, than to fight to maintain some arbitrary status quo. To quote Ghost in the Shell: All things change in a dynamic environment. Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you. For me, it's not about "getting ahead" as you put it. It's about enjoying my work, learning new things. I work in software development because I enjoy it. LLMs have opened up new possibilities for me. In that 5 year future you mentioned, I'm going to have learned a lot of things that someone not using LLMs will not have. As for being dependent on Altman et al., you can easily go out and buy a machine that will allow you to run decent models yourself. A Mac, a Framework desktop, any number of mini PCs with some kind of unified memory. The real dependence is on the training of the models, not running them. And if that becomes less accessible, and new open weight models stop being released, the open weight models we have now won't disappear, and aren't going to get any worse for things like coding or searching the web. > Keep falling for lesswrong bs. Good grief. Lesswrong is one of the most misleadingly named groups around, and their abuse of the word "rational" would be hilarious if it weren't sad. In any case, Yudkowsky advocated being ready to nuke data centers, in a national publication. I'm not particular aware of their position on the utility of AI, because I don't follow any of that. What I'm describing to you is based on my own experience, from the enrichment I've experienced from having used LLMs for the past couple of years. Over time, I suspect that kind of constructive and productive usage will spread to more people.
      - TechDebtDevin 10mo ago
        Out of respect the time you put into your response, I will try to respond in good faith. > There are many things that only a small percentage of the population benefit from or care about. What do you want to do about that? ---There are many things from our society that I would like to ban that are useful to a small percentage of the population, or at least should be heavily regulated. Guns for example. A more extreme example would be cars. Many people drive 5 blocks when they could walk to their (and everyone else's) detriment. Forget the climate, it impacts everyone ( break dust, fumes, pedestrian deaths). Some cities create very expensive tolls / parking fees to prevent this, this angers most people and is seen as irrational by the masses but is necessary and not done enough. Open Free societies are a scam told to us by capitalist that want to exploit without any consequences. --- I want to air-gap all computers in classrooms. I want students to be expelled for using LLMs to do assignments, as they would have been previously for plagiarism (that's all an llm is, a plagiarism laundering machine). ---During COVID there was a phenomenon where some children did not learn to speak until they were 4-5 years old, and some of those children were even diagnosed with autism. In reality, we didn't understand fully how children learned to speak, and didn't understand the importance of the young brain's need to subconsciously process people's facial expressions. It was Masks!!! (I am not making a statement on masks fyi) We are already observing unpredictable effects that LLMs have on the brain and I believe we will see similar negative consequences on the young mind if we take away the struggle to read, think and process information. Hell I already see the effects on myself, and I'm middle aged! > Why not? Aren't radiologists "frying their brains" by using these instead of examining the images themselves? --- I'm okay with technology replacing a radiologist!!! Just like I'm okay with a worker being replaced in an unsafe textile factory! The stakes are higher in both of these cases, and obviously in the best interest of society as a whole. The same cannot be said for a machine that helps some people learn while making the rest dependent on it. Its the opposite of a great equalizer, it will lead to a huge gap in inequality for many different reasons. We can all say we think this will be better for learning, that remains to be seen. I don't really want to run a worldwide experiment on a generation of children so tech companies can make a trillion dollars, but here we are. Didn't we learn our lesson with social media/porn? If Uber's were subsidized and cost only $20.00 a month for unlimited rides, could people be trusted to only use it when it was reasonable or would they be taking Uber's to go 5 blocks, increasing the risk for pedestrians and deteriorating their own health. They would use them in an irresponsible way. If there was an unlimited pizza machine that cost $20.00 a month to create unlimited food, people would see that as a miracle! It would greatly benefit the percentage of the population that is food insecure, but could they be trusted to not eat themselves into obesity after getting their fill? I don't think so. The affordability of food, and the access to it has a direct correlation to obesity. Both of these scenarios look great on the surface but are terrible for society in the long run. I could go on and on about the moral hazards of LLMs, there are many more outside of just the dangers of learning and labor. We are being told they are game changing by the people who profit off them.. In the past, empires bet their entire kingdom's on the words of astronomers and magicians who said they could predict the future. I really don't see how the people running AI companies are any different than those astronomers (they even say they can predict the future LOL!) They are Dunning Kruger plagiarism laundering machines as I see it. Text extruding machines that are controlled by a cabal of tech billionaires who have proven time and time again they do not have societies best interest at heart. I really hope this message is allowed to send!
- antonvs 10mo ago
  They’re fantastic learning tools, for a start. What you get out of them is proportional to what you put in. You’ve probably heard of the Luddites, the group who destroyed textile mills in the early 1800s. If not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite Luddites often get a bad rap, probably in large part because of employer propaganda and influence over the writing of history, as well as the common tendency of people to react against violent means of protest. But regardless of whether you think they were heroes, villains, or something else, the fact is that their efforts made very little difference in the end, because that kind of technological progress is hard to arrest. A better approach is to find ways to continue to thrive even in the presence of problematic technologies, and work to challenge the systems that exploit people rather than attack tools which can be used by anyone. You can, of course, continue to flail at the inevitable, but you might want to make sure you understand what you’re trying to achieve.
  - ImaLuddite 10mo ago
    [flagged]
  - melagonster 10mo ago
    Today, we found better ways to prevent machines from crushing children, e.g., more regulation from democracy.
    - melagonster 10mo ago
      Obviously, some people love that machine crushing kids in the past. Looks like they hope it happen again...
  - eru 10mo ago
    Arguably the Luddites don't get a bad enough rep. The lump of labour fallacy was as bad then as it is now or at any other time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy
    - 10mo ago

drusepth 10mo ago

Generally, any expert hopes their tool/paintbrush/etc is as performant as possible.

eru 10mo ago
And in general I'm all for increasing productivity, in all areas of the economy.
- elbear 10mo ago
  To what goal?
  - eru 10mo ago
    To increase livings standards for the people.
    - elbear 10mo ago
      How do you reconcile that with people getting fired because they're replaced with technology?
      - eru 10mo ago
        See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy Why does this need any reconciliation? That's working as expected: when productivity improves in some sectors, we don't need as much labour there as before, and thus it needs to be shuffled around. This can have all kinds of knock-on effects. As long as central bank is doing at least a halfway competent job, overall unemployment will stay low and stable. Ideally, you have people quit for a new job instead of getting fired, but in the grand scheme of things it doesn't make too much of a difference, as long as in aggregate they find new jobs. An interesting example is furnished by the US between early 2006 and late 2007: hundreds of thousand people left employment in construction, and during that same period, the overall US unemployment rate stayed remarkably flat (hovering around 4.5% to 4.7%). The US economy was robust enough to handle a housing construction bust. (Of course, after this was all done and dusted, some people declared that house prices were too high and the public demanded that they be brought down. So obligingly in 20008 the Fed engineered a recession that accomplished exactly that..)

onoesworkacct 10mo ago

That ship has sailed long ago. I'm rooting for biological cognitive enhancement through gene editing or whatever other crazy shit. I do not want to have some corporation's AI chip in my brain.

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
TechDebtDevin 10mo ago
Confirmed less wrong psyop victim

windexh8er 10mo ago

If we've learned anything so far it's that the parlor tricks of one-shot efficacy only gets you so far. Drill into anything relatively complex with a few hundred thousand tokens of context and the models all start to fall apart roughly the same. Even when I've used Sonnet 4.5 with 1M token context the model starts to flake out and get confused with a codebase of less than 10k LoC. Everyone seems to keep claiming these huge leaps and bounds, but I really have to wonder how many of these are just shilling for their corporate overlord. I asked Gemini 3 to solve a simple, yet not well documented problem in Home Assistant this evening. All it would take is 3-5 lines of YAML. The model failed miserably. I think we're all still safe.

DrewADesign 10mo ago
It depends on your definition of safe. Most of the code that gets written is pretty simple — basic crud web apps, WP theme customization, simple mobile games… stuff that can easily get written by the current gen of tooling. That already has cost a lot of people a lot of money or jobs outright, and most of them probably haven’t reached their skill limit a as developers. As the available work increases in complexity, I reckon more will push themselves to take jobs further out of their comfort zone. Previously, the choice was to upskill for the challenge and greater earnings, or stay where you are which is easy and reliable; the current choice is upskill or get a new career. Rather than switch careers to something you have zero experience in. That puts pressure on the moderately higher-skill job market with far fewer people, and they start to upskill to outrun the implosion, which puts pressure on them to move upward, and so on. With even modest productivity gains in the whole industry, it’s not hard for me to envision a world where general software development just isn’t a particularly valuable skill anymore.
- windexh8er 10mo ago
  Everything in tech is cyclical. AI will be no different. Everyone outsourced, realized the pain and suffering and corrected. AI isn't immune to the same trajectory or mistakes. And as corporations realize that nobody has a clue about how their apps or infra run, you're one breach away from putting a relatively large organization under. The final kicker in this simple story is that there are many, many narcissistic folks in the C-suite. Do you really think Sam Altman and Co are going to take blame for Billy's shitty vibe coded breach? Yeah right. Welcome to the real world of the enterprise where you still need an actual throat to choke to show your leadership skills.

eru 10mo ago

> You should bw rooting for these LLMs to be as bad as possible.. Why?