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Comment by throwgfgfd25 | Hacker News Reader

> In part this is because I've had more time to think, but there's more to it, when you see the thing "coming alive".

Yep. I have two printed prototypes of different approaches to a mechanism on my desk that only exist because of months of staring at CAD in the evenings, learning new things, doing research.

They are not radical (they may be slightly novel in places; I have never seen 3D printed mechanisms like them).

I don't know if I could describe them in words at all, but if I could, it would only be because I worked through them in CAD in the first place.

For anything other than a trivial object I just can't see how you'd even come up with the words without having worked through the design -- what, on paper in 2D in pencil? After doing the maths? That's CAD in reverse.

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Yeah words and images (especially sketches) are fuzzy. I think we tend to think they are more precise than they are because we are so good at communicating, but often this is only after having a relationship with the other person. It is easy to ignore the frustration and frequency of miscommunication and blame it on other things, like your manager being dumb. When in fact, both might be true.

There's definitely things I think I could describe in words, but without a doubt could be communicated faster by sketching. There more complicated things where I think it would just be faster to cad up the damn thing. It's like math (or code). The language(s) are precise and annoying because of that precision, but they're still the easiest way to do the things we want to do, which is why we use them. Natural language's flexibility is great for abstraction and big ideas but not so great when it comes to precision. Things get very wordy very fast when you get into the details. And I'm sure everyone knows the value of arguing with your friend or coworker over those tiny things, even if it doesn't seem important. If you don't, you probably need to work on teams more often or make more friends lol

> And I'm sure everyone knows the value of arguing with your friend or coworker over those tiny things, even if it doesn't seem important.

Not to mention that in this case, this disagreement over the meaning of ultra-fine detail will be happening with an LLM, which does not really understand the words.

I'm an ML researcher and I seriously do not understand how people are avoiding the stupid loops. Like where I tell the LLM all the conditions, what works and what doesn't work, and then it tells me to do the thing that I just said doesn't work (while at the beginning of the response it even acknowledges this!). So then I say "x doesn't work, here's the output" and then it says "sorry for the confusion, you're right. Instead let's <insert bunch of useless words> then do x" where x is the same thing...

I can't be the only one, right? I feel like I'm being gaslit lol

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