186 karma · joined May 22, 2025
You have to justify it, but most places have sections in the document where you request review to justify it. It’s not any different from giving one patient heart medicine that you think works and another patient a sugar pill.
Real life use is full of ill posed questions open ended statements inaccurate assessment of symptoms, and conclusory remarks sprinkled in between. Real use of chat bots for Health by non-clinicians looks very different than scenario based evaluation.
One of the things that people need to come to grips with is that like Wikipedia people will use ChatGPT because it is there. And the alternative is to be rich and have a primary care doctor that you can reach out to at a moments notice. Until that is different people will use these web services. It’s the same thing as Wikipedia or WebMD.
This isn’t like AI image generation where you’re going to convince yourself that you can tell the difference based on how you think it looks. Do you really think no one in the production chain of any of the software that you use picked up copilot in the last two years?
What signal are you hoping to receive that this is happening?
You said that none of this was in production and then when people pointed out that it was obviously in production, you shifted the goal post to some other measure that you just imagined in your head.
Which is what was questioned.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14928
Was Gemini worse than no tool at all there?
We have no idea, and most people are just guessing in a way that flatters some understanding of art that they have. We also frankly have no idea what the permanent relationship of humans to art is even without AI.
The television is less than 100 years old. There aren’t very many, but there are some people alive today who were alive before the television was created. The computer is about 80 years old. The whole idea of photography and of recorded audio is less uthan 150 years old.
We are still living in the aftershocks of industrial production of art. It is foolish to imagine that in the midst of this chaos, we can point the way forward with ease.
Finally, someone pointing out all of this is just people announcing what has been in play for half a century.
It’s a huge practical problem to try and figure out authentic nature over the Internet. It’s already clear that people will pay for it, but it’s not at all clear that they will get it. If we imagine that the tools get better and more sophisticated than there is no reason whatsoever to assume that the tools won’t be deployed to give the impression that is needed to make money.
I don’t think any of the above survives if we allow for AI to be used as it is currently being used. It only survives if you pretend that ahead of us is some invisible gate past which this technology will not go.
None of this happened because of AI. We could if we want blame smartphones for it, but I think that’s also pretty dubious. We will probably succeed in blaming AI for this. If there is a history, it will get the dates wrong in the 21st-century as to when America lobotomized itself.
We are really not prepared for how few people can competently read and write coming to adulthood right now. It doesn’t matter because we’re gonna speed run the results. Kicking out immigrants en masse means that we can’t even lean on countries that teach their kids how to read and write.
That doesn't mean your agent won't improve with a better onboarding regime, but that's a unidirectional process. You can insinuate things into context, but that's not automatically 'learned' and it can be lost at compaction and will be discarded when the session ends. An agent who is onboarded might write better onboarding docs, that's true! But "agents are onboarded mindfully with project docs, then write project docs, which are used to onboard." That's a real lift, but it's best expressed as "we should have been writing good docs and tests all along, but that shit was exhausting; now robots do it."
Don't get me wrong, a fractal onboarding regime is the way. It's just...not a self-improving loop without allowing contextual latch to stand in for learning.
Why would it matter that the discovery wasn't just novel but felt like an unconventional one to me, someone who is probably a total outsider to that field?
Both of those feel subjective or at least hard to sustain.
Look. What I'm trying to tell people is that the easy explanations for how these models worked circa GPT-2 is just not cutting it anymore. Neither is setting some subjective and needlessly high bar for...what exactly? What? Do we decide to pay attention to AI after it does all the above? That seems a bit late to the party for cheering on or resisting it.
Some new shit is afoot. Folk need to pay attention, not think they got it figured out already.
This statement (The one I was replying to) is fundamentally unbounded. There's nothing that can't be explained as a combination of "A" and "B" in "training data" because practically speaking we can express anything as such where the combination only needs to be convex along some high-dimensional semantic surface. Add on to that my scare quotes around "training data" because very few people have any practical idea of what is or isn't in there, so we can just make claims strategically. Do we need to explain a success? It was in the training data. A failure, probably not in the training data. Will anyone call us on this transparent farce? Not usually, no.
If a statement can--at will--explain everything and nothing, what's it worth?
You'd be surprised if an LLM couldn't write *any* program?