Comment by wewewedxfgdf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wewewedxfgdf | Hacker News Reader

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And when you show them evidence of the incredible things that can be done they stick their fingers in their ears and say "I'm not listening. I'm not listening. looping ad infinitum. OR they start saying "Oh yeah, prove it with hard numbers." when nothing about software productivity has ever been able to be proven with hard numbers. It becomes a semantic word game that you cannot win because nothing you say will get them to believe because they don't want to believe. The LLM haters are the most dogmatic of unbelievers.

Which I find weird - the greatest fun for me is making a computer do something awesome. I learned to program because I want that outcome.

I respect if you love the art and craft of hand programming but it's something else entirely to simply deny that LLM's are what they are - which is to say so amazing it is really beyond belief and they are getting more so every year.

If you're a hand programmer forever then fine, just don't make a fool of yourself by saying that everyone is lying about LLMs, to justify your choices.

> which is to say so amazing it is really beyond belief and they are getting more so every year.

We've normalized science fiction. Go back 5-10 years and ask anyone whether we'd soon have something like LLMs.

If you step back and try to look at LLMs without emotions and politics, you will be blown away by what this thing can do. We're talking to a machine, folks.

I just can't believe that LLM haters really like computers or technology, because we haven't seen anything this interesting in decades.

You prompted me to have a little sci-fi fantasy about a world where LLMs are exciting. It goes like this: imagine they were local-only, from the the start, and this was baked into the whole concept because each one has an owner, and it is trained on that owner's mind, in an intimate and slightly trippy process. None of its background information comes from any other source. It's possible to talk to somebody else's LLM, but this is rarely done because it would be awkward and intrusive, and difficult to interpret. Consequently, nobody ever dreams of connecting an LLM with any server. There is no giant ugly industry for training them. They are personal in every way and have nothing to do with the internet or any of its assholes, and do not represent some bland and inscrutable centralized source of truth. Their output always goes to the owner, is hard for other people to understand, and does not provide an opportunity to spam everybody else with vapid boilerplate. Now, I'm excited to own one of these!

Sounds a lot like the little voice, already inside our heads.

>We've normalized science fiction.

That is the thing I am mad about. We are getting bastardized versions of the science fictions of our childhood.

I fantasized about instant communicators across worlds, and we get mobile phones that work by planting a gazillion antennas across the globe. And people hail them as futuristic and say things like this.

I fantasied about human like robots and positronic brains, and we get a regurgitation of past humanity, in text, ensuring a future of total intellectual and artistic winter.

I fantasized a future with perfect health, but we get a million doctors and hospitals and a normalised dependency on medicines and an existence that is unthinkable without health insurance!

I fantasized about antigravity flying cars, and we get drones.

What ever it is, these things are blocking the path to the science fiction of my childhood.

So that is why I am not excited about these things. Not because I don't like computers and technology, but because I REALLY like them.

I used to like computers and technology, then I realized AI is really dangerous. Getting back on topic, I admit that AI is very useful and will become much more so between now and when it kills us all or permanently dis-empowers us in some other way.

> We've normalized science fiction. Go back 5-10 years and ask anyone whether we'd soon have something like LLMs.

LLMs are incredibly impressive. It just doesn't follow from that that they're capable of all the things proponents claim they are.

> I just can't believe that LLM haters really like computers or technology

In a lot of ways the reverse is true. The LLM coding ecosystem seems designed by people who are unaware or actively despise the fact that they have access to a computer, and almost the entire point of LLMs is to make interacting with computers less like interacting with computers and more like interacting with people.

> We're talking to a machine, folks.

And? I didn't sign up to talk to a machine.

Has it actually made your daily life better? All I see as a result of LLMs is endless slop everywhere, plateauing in the skill levels of coworkers, and badly informed people in management positions pushing the humans to meet impossible deadlines because "otherwise we'll replace you with a cheaper worker and an LLM".

I am an LLM optimist, but I'll be honest and say it hasn't made my life better. My optimism relies on the models plateauing, and people finally rebelling against the widespread slop to realize that LLMs are just another (very useful!) tool, but don't meaningfully replace people in any capacity.

What did you sign up for and what would make your life better in this context? Give us a north star

It has made my daily life better. It has built software for me that I've wanted but previously didn't have time for, for example.

Great! How does this software enhance your daily life? Has it given you more leisure time by leading to less work?

He literally said it made his life better. Building software with AI can also be a leisure activity.

It does 99%+ of running a side business for me that otherwise wouldn't possibly be profitable because the margins would be negative (no, I'm not going to go into details because the moat is too small and I'm just taking the profits I can until the window closes).

It also added functionality to my terminal that I didn't have time to add, and added functionality to my window manager I wanted but didn't have time to add, both of which improve my general quality of life - I spent 12+ hours in front of my machine a day, only part of which is work, so ergonomics matters.

Those are just a couple of examples.

>It has built software for me that I've wanted but previously didn't have time for..

Don't leave us hanging, let us know what was this software for?

See one of the other answers I just made.

Twice now you have said "I am an LLM optimist" and then spoken as an LLM pessimist.

> I just can't believe that LLM haters really like computers or technology, because we haven't seen anything this interesting in decades.

Yup. As someone who thinks computing has been in decline since Mac OS X 10.4, LLMs are the first major tech trend that I've been impressed by in 20 years.

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