archagon

No, I don’t think we will!

I’d rather read a classic Fowler article than literally anything written by an LLM.

Indeed, writing well about complex topics has become more important than ever. (But it’s not clear to me if Fowler has any remaining interest in doing it.)

If they thought about it, then why isn't this very obvious failure point even mentioned in the technical breakdown?

Beautiful, thank you for sharing.

I find it disturbing how often supposed professionals make this claim.

God, that’s depressing. The mass suicide of an entire trade.

That’s amazing. I hope you write about this in depth one day.

“If you have a tech job” == good luck when you get laid off or want to start a business.

Wot? You are incredibly likely to have the same vulnerabilities as everyone else (as they exist in your LLM’s training corpus).

I feel like using LLMs as a sort of deep search to find bugs and security issues is going to end up relatively uncontroversial all around, if the externalities of LLM use are ever taken care of.

Fundamentally, the question is this: what is a large language model, what is it capable of, how does it differ from human cognition, and what can humans do that it cannot do?

A lot of people seem to believe that with more time and training, LLMs will surpass human intelligence. But they are fundamentally not like human intelligence. They do not reason, learn, conceptualize, think creatively or abstractly, even though we have some hacks to mimic these behaviors.

I posit that treating LLMs like GPU-powered brains that will eventually surpass us in most fields is pure science fiction if you know anything about how they work. I think they will remain astronomically powerful in some areas (pertaining to fuzzy deep search and recombining existing knowledge) and hilariously bad in others.

Whatever his technical chops may be, Carmack has slid fully and comfortably into the role of “influencer” over the last decade.

AI is not an abstraction and is not like moving up from assembly at all.

“Tech stories” = Nth OpenAI/Anthropic press release or LLM-generated thought piece. Such enrichment, much learning.

You don’t have to participate in the discussion, but it will take place regardless of your preferences.

AI is not an abstraction and it cannot be the foundation for the next layer up, like assembly can. I think you are categorically wrong.

So why are you commenting on it?

I think the vast majority of voters will have something to say about that.

That seems like folly, since some courts somewhere will surely, at some point, find these LLMs to be in (IMO, fairly obvious) violation of copyright and/or license terms. Especially when it’s geopolitically expedient. Especially as the rage over AI builds in the general populace.

Congrats! Now your product can’t be sold in X arbitrary countries. Or it’s auto-GPL licensed and you’re forced to release your code.

The job is to make widgets, not to use specific tools to make widgets. When has that ever been the case before? None of my bosses ever gave a shit what editors I used, for example. Certainly not the CEOs.

You sound weirdly angry and aggressive — like in a “back away slowly” kind of way. Relax, and stop gatekeeping the industry. As strange as it may sound to you, I expect that there will always be segments of it that don’t rely on LLMs.

Not OP, but…

“When you're in Hollywood and you're a comedian, everybody wants you to do other things. All right, you're a stand-up comedian, can you write us a script? That's not fair. That's like if I worked hard to become a cook, and I'm a really good cook, they'd say, ‘OK, you're a cook. Can you farm?’” —Mitch Hedberg

LLM-assisted coding is basically an entirely different career from software engineering, and not everyone wants to do that. (Ditto here; fortunately, I’m self-employed.)

That’s not how that works. I don’t usually have an inner monologue either, but I do have an abstract stream of thought. It’s not as if I am always acting on instinct.

Seconded. I guess it makes sense with tech leaders like Musk and DHH making white supremacy fun and cool again. But the internet always remembers, and will continue to remember when these things are not fun and cool anymore.

Meanwhile, a thread with more votes and comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49602582

Why on earth did the mods decide to remove flags on this?

Aid could have been tapered; advance warning could have been given. But Musk very publicly delighted in feeding USAID into the woodchipper, causing people to die as a direct result of his hasty actions. He simply did not give a fuck about the damage he caused.

This is not how changes to government policy are done. And yes, I’m livid and will eagerly vote anyone into office who will chase down this monster and force him (and his DOGE boys) to face justice. I am far from alone in this.

My point is that the most prominent tech CEO definitely killed people through reckless action, without apology or remorse. The actual number is unquestionably more than ten; almost certainly in the thousands; and, based (again) on research from people who study this kind of thing for a living, likely in the hundreds of thousands.

But even if he “only” killed 10 people (which we know for a fact based on reporting), that should be more than enough to make him persona non grata in polite society.

The actual numbers are more useful for the history books and eventual tribunals. Maybe that data can be gathered more definitively over time; I’m sure people are working on it as we speak.

“Musk gleefully fed USAID into the woodchipper which directly caused X deaths that could have been avoided through gradual tapering of aid.”

Simple question: how small does X have to be for you to not care?

Or do you genuinely believe that Musk’s antics caused zero excess deaths?

IIRC, I personally read three different articles where journalists on the ground described specific deaths (with names) from the sudden and unexpected cutoff of aid. And there were studies from top-ranked universities numbering deaths in the hundreds of thousands, extending to millions over time. I do not have these links on hand, but I’m sure you can find them if you’re genuinely interested.

That every Musk-adjacent article and PR summary isn’t prefaced with this basic, indisputable fact is repulsive.