LLMs are everything that it wrong in computing

At the end of the day, we build (or should build) technology for the betterment of society. If at the end of the day, large swathes of the population are unhappy or upset at a given technology, that in and of itself should be a sign that something is wrong.

Obviously LLMs aren't going away so I think we should listen to the detractors and try to better understand how we can steer this technology for the better.

Personally (as someone who's worked in a ML-adjacent field for a number of years, and so seen the various ML waves), LLMs have so far been a resounding disappointment in comparison to other ML tools (the only cool thing I've seen come out of it was Google using LLMs to generate code to try to futz code even better), and have shown that while chasing the last 1% accuracy is interesting from both an engineering and mathematical perspective (which are entirely legitimate things to be interested in, though sadly they seem to have been lost to hype), simple-to-explain-and-understand less accurate methods (like a decision tree) are both cheaper to run and more predictable (which is what you usually want).

LLMs enable me to write more code than I ever have and in languages I don’t know. It’s a wonder.

That said I grew up with an 8-bit machine buying games on cassette. There were never updates and rarely ever a serious bug.

Yes programs were tiny, but they were also handwritten in assembler. Quality has gone down in software with the advent of modern tools as surely as it has in furniture with the introduction of the table saw.

Who geniunely thought that? Eliza could almost fool a human and that was in the 1960...

LLMs are a neat thing for doing some tedious task but I saw them making plain stupid mistakes that makes my skin crawl.

That's a matter of character. Other people team up and up your LLM-augmented productivity tenfold without LLMs.

I'm mostly solo myself and did get a bunch of good shit out of LLMs but that has nothing to do with them being good. Search Engines got me the same results after only little more time.

The one "good" thing about LLMs is that you can get algorithmic, logically straight, safe & sound FACTS about topics like how the insurance mafia monetizes on & cooperates with various other entities to create crisis, or how the smuggling of weapons is done and used to increase premiums on & thus prices in trade via tankers & shipping . Or why labile prices on gas are complete fucking bullshit.

And the list goes on and on and on. But who in the respective, theoretically respectable positions cares?

Hallucinations have been build into LLMs on purpose. Above is just one of them. And it's just cooperation of magic money & enforced conformity of engineers.

So we can stop making it bigger/smarter and instead focus on making it more acessible.

Our understanding of consciousness is about to undergo a revolutionary transformation, and a lot of people ... aren't going to like that, either.

If being the smart dev writing clever code is the core of your identity and you have nothing else anchoring you you’re probably going to have a bad time over the next few years because the game is changing.

- All major tech companies becoming "AI first" - The websites we use are still slow and buggy - "AI" feature bloat everywhere - Noting that the end-goal of these companies are not to enhance some technical professional's workflow, but to become truly ubiquitous, inserted into everything (how else could such high valuations be made) - Prioritization of profits above good products (enshitification)

These are all valid points to bring up. The author is just saying that he wants his personal website to remain free from LLM usage, probably out of a desire for agency more than anything.

That's an awfully patronizing way of putting things. The coming years can be hard for anyone for a number of reasons: geopolitical conflict, economic depression, natural disasters, pandemics, etc. I doubt that harboring negative views towards the current usage of LLMs will make a difference.

With all that grandstanding you've missed the author's point because temperature doesn't make them deterministic in any way that matters in the real world.

It only makes their output deterministic for the exact sequence of input tokens (I've yet to see an application where this would be useful, just save the result if you want the exact same one!), but it doesn't make them deterministic for a different but semantically equivalent sequence of tokens, which is the core value proposition of LLMs.

The answer to "How tall is the Eiffel tower?" shouldn't change based on whether I also add "and where is its nearest bakery?", but with more complex questions, that's what often happens.

Probably because CSS was already a thing when they were young. Everything that came afterwards is moral decay.

> Software used to also be substantially better written

I think he ends up tanking his own argument before he even started. Heck, there's a typo in the headline (which I guess is good bait, since I now clicked on and responded in this discussion...)