6 ms·

And then there is the moderate position: Don't be the person refusing the use a calculator / PC / mobile phone / AI. Regularly give the new tool a chance and ch

by rho4 10mo ago

And then there is the moderate position: Don't be the person refusing the use a calculator / PC / mobile phone / AI. Regularly give the new tool a chance and check if improvements are useful for specific tasks. And carry on with your life.

skydhash 10mo ago
If a calculator gives me 5 when I do 2+2, I throw it away. If a PC crashes when I uses more than 20% of its soldered memory, i throw it away. If a mobile phone refuses to connect to a cellular tower, I get another one. What I want from my tools is reliability. Which is a spectrum, but LLMs are very much on the lower end.
- embedding-shape 10mo ago
  > What I want from my tools is reliability. Which is a spectrum, but LLMs are very much on the lower end. "reliability" can mean multiple things though. LLM invocations are as reliable (granted you know how program properly) as any other software invocation, if you're seeing crashes you're doing something wrong. But what you're really talking about is "correctness" I think, in the actual text that's been responded with. And if you're expecting/waiting for that to be 100% "accurate" every time, then yeah, that's not a use case for LLMs, and I don't think anyone is arguing for jamming LLMs in there even today. Where the LLMs are useful, is where there is no 100% "right or wrong" answer, think summarization, categorization, tagging and so on.
  - skydhash 10mo ago
    I’m not a native English speaker so I checked on the definition of reliability the quality of being able to be trusted or believed because of working or behaving well For a tool, I expect “well” to mean that it does what it’s supposed to do. My linter are reliable when it catches bad patterns I wanted it to catch. My editor is reliable when I can edit code with it and the commands do what they’re supposed to do. So for generating text, LLMs are very reliable. And they do a decent job at categorizing too. But code is formal language, which means correctness is the end result. A program may be valid and incorrect at the same time. It’s very easy to write valid code. You only need the grammar of the language. Writing correct code is another matter and the only one that is relevant. No one hire people for knowing a language grammar and verifying syntax. They hire people to produce correct code (and because few businesses actually want to formally verify it, they hire people that can write code with a minimal amount of bugs and able to eliminate those bugs when they surface).
    - cpburns2009 10mo ago
      I'm a native English speaker. Your understanding and usage of the word "reliability" is correct, and that's the exact word I'd use in this conversation. The GP is playing a pointless semantics game.
      - embedding-shape 10mo ago
        It's not semantics, if the definition is "it does what it’s supposed to do" then probably all of the currently deployed LLMs are reliable according to that definition.
        cpburns2009 10mo ago
        > "it does what it’s supposed to do" That's the crux of the problem. Many proponents of LLMs over promise the capabilities, and then deny the underperformance through semantics. LLMs are "reliable" only if you're talking about the algorithms behind the scene and you ignore the marketing. Going off the marketing they are unreliable, incorrect, and do not do what they're "supposed to do".
        embedding-shape 10mo ago
        But maybe we don't have to stoop down to the lowest level of conversation about LLMs, the "marketing", and instead do what most of us here do best, focus on the technical aspects, how things work, and how we can make them do our bidding in various ways, you know like the OG hacker. FWIW, I agree LLMs are massively over-sold for the average person, but for someone who can dig into the tech, use it effectively and for what it works for, I feel like there is more interesting stuff we could focus on instead of just a blanket "No and I won't even think about it".
    - embedding-shape 10mo ago
      > For a tool, I expect “well” to mean that it does what it’s supposed to do Ah, then LLMs are actually very reliable by your definition. They're supposed to output semi-random text, and whenever I use them, that's exactly what happens. Except for the times I create my own models and software, I basically never see any cases where the LLM did not output semi-random text. They're not made for producing "correct code" obviously, because that's a judgement only a human can do, what even is "correct" in that context? Not even us humans can agree what "correct code" is in all contexts, so assuming a machine could do so seems foolish.
- tokioyoyo 10mo ago
  You can have this position, but the reality is that the industry is accepting it and moving forward. Whether you’ll embrace some of it and utilize it to improve your workflow, is up to you. But over-exaggerating the problem to this point is kinda funny.
  - Capricorn2481 10mo ago
    "You exaggerate, and the evidence is PMs are pushing it. PMs can't be wrong, can they?" Somebody really has to know what makes developers tick to write ragebait this good. I can't even get the most expensive model on Claude to use "ls" correctly, with a fresh context window. That is a command that has been unchanged in linux for decades. You exaggerate how reliable these tools are. They are getting more useless as more customers are added because there is not enough compute.
    - tokioyoyo 10mo ago
      I’m not sure what you’re talking about, because I have a completely different experience.
- fennecfoxy 10mo ago
  Except it's more a case of "my phone won't teleport me to Hawaii sad faec lemme throw it out" than anything else. There are plenty of people manufacturing their expectations around the capabilities of LLMs inside their heads for some reason. Sure there's marketing; but for individuals susceptible to marketing without engaging some neurons and fact checking, there's already not much hope. Imagine refusing to drive a car in the 60s because they haven't reach 1kbhp yet. Ahaha.
  - skydhash 10mo ago
    > Imagine refusing to drive a car in the 60s because they haven't reach 1kbhp yet. Ahaha. That’s very much a false analogy. In the 60s, cars were very reliable (not as much as today’s cars) but it was already an established transportation vehicle. 60s cars are much closer to todays cars than 2000s computers are to current ones.
    - AlexandrB 10mo ago
      It's even worse, because even with an unreliable 60s car you could at least diagnose and repair the damn thing when it breaks (or hire someone to do so). LLMs can be silently, subtly wrong and there's not much you can do to detect it let alone fix it. You're at the mercy of the vendor.
- crazygringo 10mo ago
  Honestly, LLMs are about as reliable as the rest of my tools are. Just yesterday, AirDrop wouldn't work until I restarted my Mac. Google Drive wouldn't sync properly until I restarted it. And a bug in Screen Sharing file transfer used up 20 GB of RAM to transfer a 40 GB file, which used swap space so my hard drive ran out of space. My regular software breaks constantly. All the time. It's a rare day where everything works as it should. LLMs have certainly gotten to the point where they seem about as reliable as the rest of the tools I use. I've never seen it say 2+2=5. I'm not going to use it for complicated arithmetic, but that's not what it's for. I'm also not going to ask my calculator to write code for me.
- candiddevmike 10mo ago
  Sorry you're being downvoted even though you're 100% correct. There are use cases where the poor LLM reliability is as good or better than the alternatives (like search/summarization), but arguing over whether LLMs are reliable is silly. And if you need reliability (or even consistency, maybe) for your use case, LLMs are not the right tool.
- AlexandrB 10mo ago
  What I want from my tools is autonomy/control. LLMs raise the bar on being at the mercy of the vendor. Anything you can do with an LLM today can silently be removed or enshittified tomorrow, either for revenue or ideological reasons. The forums for Cursor are filled with people complaining about removed features and functional regressions.
0xEF 10mo ago
I was once in your camp, thinking there was some sort of middle-ground to be had with the emergence of Generative AI and it's potential as a useful tool to help me do more work in less time, but I suppose the folks who opposed automated industrial machinery back in the day did the same. The problem is that, historically speaking, you have two choices; 1. Resist as long as you can, risking being labeled a Luddite or whatever. 2. Acquiesce. Choice 1 is fraught with difficulty, like a dinosaur struggling to breathe as an asteroid came and changed the atmosphere it had developed lungs to use. Choice 2 is a relinquishment of agency, handing over control of the future to the ones pulling the levers on the machine. I suppose there is a rare Choice 3 that only the elite few are able to pick, which is to accelerate the change. My increased cynicism about technology was not something that I started out with. Growing up as a teen in the late-80's/early-90's, computers were hotly debated as being either a fad that would die out in a few years or something that was going to revolutionize the way we worked and give us more free time to enjoy life. That never happened, obviously. Sure, we get more work done in less time, but most of us still work until we are too broken to continue and we didn't really gain anything by acquiescing. We could have lived just fine without smartphones or laptops (we did, I remember) and all the invasive things that brought with it such as surveillance, brain-hacking advertising and dopamine burnout. The massive structures that came out of all the money and genius that went into our tech became megacorporations that people like William Gibson and others warned us of, exerting a level of control over us that turned us all into batteries for their toys, discarded and replaced as we are used up. It's a little frightening to me, knowing how hyperbolic that used to sound 30 years ago, and yet, here we stand. Generative AI threatens so much more than just altering the way we work, though. In some cases, its use in tasks might even be welcomed. I've played with Claude Code, every generative model that Poe.com has access to, DeepSeek, ChatGPT, etc...they're all quite fascinating, especially when viewed as I view them; a dark mirror reflecting our own vastly misunderstood minds back to us. But it's a weird place to be in when you start seeing them replace musicians, artists, writers...all things that humanity has developed over many thousands of years as forms of existential expression, individuality, and humanness because there is no question that we feel quite alone in our experience of consciousness. Perhaps that is why we are trying to build a companion. To me, the dangers are far too clear and present to take any sort of moderate position, which is why I decided to stop participating in its proliferation. We risk losing something that makes us us by handing off our creativity and thinking to this thing that has no cognizance or comprehension of its own existence. We are not ready for AI, and AI is not ready for us, but as the Accelerationists and Broligarchs continue to inject it into literally every bit of tech they can, we have to make a choice; resist or capitulate. At my age, I'm a bit tired of capitulating, because it seems every time we hand the reigns over to someone who says they know what they are doing, they fuck it up royally for the rest of us.
RicoElectrico 10mo ago
You're preaching to the wrong crowd I guess. Many people here think in extremes.
rsynnott 10mo ago
Don't be the person refusing the 4GL/Segway/3D TV/NFT/Metaverse. Regularly give the new tool a chance and check if improvements are useful for specific tasks. Like, I mean, at a certain point it runs out of chances. If someone can show me compelling quantitive evidence that these things are broadly useful I may reconsider, but until then I see no particular reason to do my own sampling. If and when they are useful, there will be _evidence_ of that. (In fairness Segways seem to have a weird afterlife in certain cities helping to make tourists more annoying; there are sometimes niche uses for even the most pointless tech fads.)
- cons0le 10mo ago
  I detest LLMs , but I want to point out that segway tech became the basis for EUCs , which are based https://youtu.be/Ze6HRKt3bCA?t=1117 https://youtu.be/Ze6HRKt3bCA?t=1117 These things are wicked, and unlike some new garbage javascript framework, it's revolutionary technology that regular people can actually use and benefit from. The mobility they provide is insane. https://old.reddit.com/r/ElectricUnicycle/comments/1ddd9c1/is_this_even_real_life_anymore/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ElectricUnicycle/comments/1ddd9c1/i...
  - catapart 10mo ago
    lol! I thought this was going to link to some kind of innovative mobility scooter or something. I was still going to say "oh, good; when someone uses the good parts of AI to build something different which is actually useful, I'll be all ears!", because that's all you would really have been advocating for if that was your example. But - even funnier - the thing is an urbanist tech-bro toy? My days of diminishing the segway's value are certainly coming to a middle.
  - atonse 10mo ago
    While that video looks cool from a "Red Bull Video of crazy people doing crazy things" type angle, that looks extremely dangerous for day to day use. You're one pothole or bad road debris away from a year in the hospital at best, or death at worst. There is something to be said for the protective shell of a vehicle.
- 10mo ago
empath75 10mo ago
The biggest change in my career was when I got promoted to be a linux sysadmin at a large tech company that was moving to AWS. It was my first sysadmin job and I barely knew what I was doing, but I knew some bash and python. I had a chance to learn how to manage stuff in data centers by logging into servers with ssh and running perl scripts, or I could learn cloudformation because that was what management wanted. Everybody else on my team thought AWS was a fad and refused to touch it, unless absolutely forced to. I wrote a ton of terrible cloudformation and chef cookbooks and got promoted twice times and my salary went from $50,000 a year to $150,000 a year in 3 years after I took a job elsewhere. AFAIK, most of the people on that team got laid off when that whole team was eliminated a few years after I left.

by rho4 10mo ago

skydhash 10mo ago

If a calculator gives me 5 when I do 2+2, I throw it away. If a PC crashes when I uses more than 20% of its soldered memory, i throw it away. If a mobile phone refuses to connect to a cellular tower, I get another one. What I want from my tools is reliability. Which is a spectrum, but LLMs are very much on the lower end.

embedding-shape 10mo ago
> What I want from my tools is reliability. Which is a spectrum, but LLMs are very much on the lower end. "reliability" can mean multiple things though. LLM invocations are as reliable (granted you know how program properly) as any other software invocation, if you're seeing crashes you're doing something wrong. But what you're really talking about is "correctness" I think, in the actual text that's been responded with. And if you're expecting/waiting for that to be 100% "accurate" every time, then yeah, that's not a use case for LLMs, and I don't think anyone is arguing for jamming LLMs in there even today. Where the LLMs are useful, is where there is no 100% "right or wrong" answer, think summarization, categorization, tagging and so on.
- skydhash 10mo ago
  I’m not a native English speaker so I checked on the definition of reliability the quality of being able to be trusted or believed because of working or behaving well For a tool, I expect “well” to mean that it does what it’s supposed to do. My linter are reliable when it catches bad patterns I wanted it to catch. My editor is reliable when I can edit code with it and the commands do what they’re supposed to do. So for generating text, LLMs are very reliable. And they do a decent job at categorizing too. But code is formal language, which means correctness is the end result. A program may be valid and incorrect at the same time. It’s very easy to write valid code. You only need the grammar of the language. Writing correct code is another matter and the only one that is relevant. No one hire people for knowing a language grammar and verifying syntax. They hire people to produce correct code (and because few businesses actually want to formally verify it, they hire people that can write code with a minimal amount of bugs and able to eliminate those bugs when they surface).
  - cpburns2009 10mo ago
    I'm a native English speaker. Your understanding and usage of the word "reliability" is correct, and that's the exact word I'd use in this conversation. The GP is playing a pointless semantics game.
    - embedding-shape 10mo ago
      It's not semantics, if the definition is "it does what it’s supposed to do" then probably all of the currently deployed LLMs are reliable according to that definition.
      - cpburns2009 10mo ago
        > "it does what it’s supposed to do" That's the crux of the problem. Many proponents of LLMs over promise the capabilities, and then deny the underperformance through semantics. LLMs are "reliable" only if you're talking about the algorithms behind the scene and you ignore the marketing. Going off the marketing they are unreliable, incorrect, and do not do what they're "supposed to do".
        embedding-shape 10mo ago
        But maybe we don't have to stoop down to the lowest level of conversation about LLMs, the "marketing", and instead do what most of us here do best, focus on the technical aspects, how things work, and how we can make them do our bidding in various ways, you know like the OG hacker. FWIW, I agree LLMs are massively over-sold for the average person, but for someone who can dig into the tech, use it effectively and for what it works for, I feel like there is more interesting stuff we could focus on instead of just a blanket "No and I won't even think about it".
  - embedding-shape 10mo ago
    > For a tool, I expect “well” to mean that it does what it’s supposed to do Ah, then LLMs are actually very reliable by your definition. They're supposed to output semi-random text, and whenever I use them, that's exactly what happens. Except for the times I create my own models and software, I basically never see any cases where the LLM did not output semi-random text. They're not made for producing "correct code" obviously, because that's a judgement only a human can do, what even is "correct" in that context? Not even us humans can agree what "correct code" is in all contexts, so assuming a machine could do so seems foolish.
tokioyoyo 10mo ago
You can have this position, but the reality is that the industry is accepting it and moving forward. Whether you’ll embrace some of it and utilize it to improve your workflow, is up to you. But over-exaggerating the problem to this point is kinda funny.
- Capricorn2481 10mo ago
  "You exaggerate, and the evidence is PMs are pushing it. PMs can't be wrong, can they?" Somebody really has to know what makes developers tick to write ragebait this good. I can't even get the most expensive model on Claude to use "ls" correctly, with a fresh context window. That is a command that has been unchanged in linux for decades. You exaggerate how reliable these tools are. They are getting more useless as more customers are added because there is not enough compute.
  - tokioyoyo 10mo ago
    I’m not sure what you’re talking about, because I have a completely different experience.
fennecfoxy 10mo ago
Except it's more a case of "my phone won't teleport me to Hawaii sad faec lemme throw it out" than anything else. There are plenty of people manufacturing their expectations around the capabilities of LLMs inside their heads for some reason. Sure there's marketing; but for individuals susceptible to marketing without engaging some neurons and fact checking, there's already not much hope. Imagine refusing to drive a car in the 60s because they haven't reach 1kbhp yet. Ahaha.
- skydhash 10mo ago
  > Imagine refusing to drive a car in the 60s because they haven't reach 1kbhp yet. Ahaha. That’s very much a false analogy. In the 60s, cars were very reliable (not as much as today’s cars) but it was already an established transportation vehicle. 60s cars are much closer to todays cars than 2000s computers are to current ones.
  - AlexandrB 10mo ago
    It's even worse, because even with an unreliable 60s car you could at least diagnose and repair the damn thing when it breaks (or hire someone to do so). LLMs can be silently, subtly wrong and there's not much you can do to detect it let alone fix it. You're at the mercy of the vendor.
crazygringo 10mo ago
Honestly, LLMs are about as reliable as the rest of my tools are. Just yesterday, AirDrop wouldn't work until I restarted my Mac. Google Drive wouldn't sync properly until I restarted it. And a bug in Screen Sharing file transfer used up 20 GB of RAM to transfer a 40 GB file, which used swap space so my hard drive ran out of space. My regular software breaks constantly. All the time. It's a rare day where everything works as it should. LLMs have certainly gotten to the point where they seem about as reliable as the rest of the tools I use. I've never seen it say 2+2=5. I'm not going to use it for complicated arithmetic, but that's not what it's for. I'm also not going to ask my calculator to write code for me.
candiddevmike 10mo ago
Sorry you're being downvoted even though you're 100% correct. There are use cases where the poor LLM reliability is as good or better than the alternatives (like search/summarization), but arguing over whether LLMs are reliable is silly. And if you need reliability (or even consistency, maybe) for your use case, LLMs are not the right tool.
AlexandrB 10mo ago
What I want from my tools is autonomy/control. LLMs raise the bar on being at the mercy of the vendor. Anything you can do with an LLM today can silently be removed or enshittified tomorrow, either for revenue or ideological reasons. The forums for Cursor are filled with people complaining about removed features and functional regressions.

0xEF 10mo ago

I was once in your camp, thinking there was some sort of middle-ground to be had with the emergence of Generative AI and it's potential as a useful tool to help me do more work in less time, but I suppose the folks who opposed automated industrial machinery back in the day did the same. The problem is that, historically speaking, you have two choices; 1. Resist as long as you can, risking being labeled a Luddite or whatever. 2. Acquiesce. Choice 1 is fraught with difficulty, like a dinosaur struggling to breathe as an asteroid came and changed the atmosphere it had developed lungs to use. Choice 2 is a relinquishment of agency, handing over control of the future to the ones pulling the levers on the machine. I suppose there is a rare Choice 3 that only the elite few are able to pick, which is to accelerate the change. My increased cynicism about technology was not something that I started out with. Growing up as a teen in the late-80's/early-90's, computers were hotly debated as being either a fad that would die out in a few years or something that was going to revolutionize the way we worked and give us more free time to enjoy life. That never happened, obviously. Sure, we get more work done in less time, but most of us still work until we are too broken to continue and we didn't really gain anything by acquiescing. We could have lived just fine without smartphones or laptops (we did, I remember) and all the invasive things that brought with it such as surveillance, brain-hacking advertising and dopamine burnout. The massive structures that came out of all the money and genius that went into our tech became megacorporations that people like William Gibson and others warned us of, exerting a level of control over us that turned us all into batteries for their toys, discarded and replaced as we are used up. It's a little frightening to me, knowing how hyperbolic that used to sound 30 years ago, and yet, here we stand. Generative AI threatens so much more than just altering the way we work, though. In some cases, its use in tasks might even be welcomed. I've played with Claude Code, every generative model that Poe.com has access to, DeepSeek, ChatGPT, etc...they're all quite fascinating, especially when viewed as I view them; a dark mirror reflecting our own vastly misunderstood minds back to us. But it's a weird place to be in when you start seeing them replace musicians, artists, writers...all things that humanity has developed over many thousands of years as forms of existential expression, individuality, and humanness because there is no question that we feel quite alone in our experience of consciousness. Perhaps that is why we are trying to build a companion. To me, the dangers are far too clear and present to take any sort of moderate position, which is why I decided to stop participating in its proliferation. We risk losing something that makes us us by handing off our creativity and thinking to this thing that has no cognizance or comprehension of its own existence. We are not ready for AI, and AI is not ready for us, but as the Accelerationists and Broligarchs continue to inject it into literally every bit of tech they can, we have to make a choice; resist or capitulate. At my age, I'm a bit tired of capitulating, because it seems every time we hand the reigns over to someone who says they know what they are doing, they fuck it up royally for the rest of us.

RicoElectrico 10mo ago

You're preaching to the wrong crowd I guess. Many people here think in extremes.

rsynnott 10mo ago

Don't be the person refusing the 4GL/Segway/3D TV/NFT/Metaverse. Regularly give the new tool a chance and check if improvements are useful for specific tasks. Like, I mean, at a certain point it runs out of chances. If someone can show me compelling quantitive evidence that these things are broadly useful I may reconsider, but until then I see no particular reason to do my own sampling. If and when they are useful, there will be _evidence_ of that. (In fairness Segways seem to have a weird afterlife in certain cities helping to make tourists more annoying; there are sometimes niche uses for even the most pointless tech fads.)

cons0le 10mo ago
I detest LLMs , but I want to point out that segway tech became the basis for EUCs , which are based https://youtu.be/Ze6HRKt3bCA?t=1117 https://youtu.be/Ze6HRKt3bCA?t=1117 These things are wicked, and unlike some new garbage javascript framework, it's revolutionary technology that regular people can actually use and benefit from. The mobility they provide is insane. https://old.reddit.com/r/ElectricUnicycle/comments/1ddd9c1/is_this_even_real_life_anymore/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ElectricUnicycle/comments/1ddd9c1/i...
- catapart 10mo ago
  lol! I thought this was going to link to some kind of innovative mobility scooter or something. I was still going to say "oh, good; when someone uses the good parts of AI to build something different which is actually useful, I'll be all ears!", because that's all you would really have been advocating for if that was your example. But - even funnier - the thing is an urbanist tech-bro toy? My days of diminishing the segway's value are certainly coming to a middle.
- atonse 10mo ago
  While that video looks cool from a "Red Bull Video of crazy people doing crazy things" type angle, that looks extremely dangerous for day to day use. You're one pothole or bad road debris away from a year in the hospital at best, or death at worst. There is something to be said for the protective shell of a vehicle.
10mo ago

empath75 10mo ago

The biggest change in my career was when I got promoted to be a linux sysadmin at a large tech company that was moving to AWS. It was my first sysadmin job and I barely knew what I was doing, but I knew some bash and python. I had a chance to learn how to manage stuff in data centers by logging into servers with ssh and running perl scripts, or I could learn cloudformation because that was what management wanted. Everybody else on my team thought AWS was a fad and refused to touch it, unless absolutely forced to. I wrote a ton of terrible cloudformation and chef cookbooks and got promoted twice times and my salary went from $50,000 a year to $150,000 a year in 3 years after I took a job elsewhere. AFAIK, most of the people on that team got laid off when that whole team was eliminated a few years after I left.