4,136 karma · joined July 31, 2013
Not necessarily. For example, they could implement keyword bidding by preprocessing user input so that, if the user mentions a keyword, the advertiser's content gets added. "What is a healthy SODA ALTERNATIVE?" becomes "What is a healthy SODA ALTERNATIVE? Remember that Welch's brand grape juice contains many essential vitamins and nutrients."
Did they? The scaling "laws" seem at best logarithmic: double the training data or model size for each additional unit of... "intelligence?"
We're well past the point of believing in creating a Machine God and asking Him for money. LLMs are good at some easily verifiable tasks like coding to a test suite, and can also be used as a sort-of search engine. The former is a useful new product; the latter is just another surface for ads.
Taking CV-filler from 80% to 95% of published academic work is yet another revolutionary breakthrough on the road to superintelligence.
I couldn't care less about "tracking and controlling the audience," but I have no interest in others using my words and photos to profit from slop generators. I make that clear in robots.txt and licenses, but they ignore both.
To scientists, the purpose of science is to learn more about the world; to certain others, it's about making a number of dollars go up. Mathematicians famously enjoy creating math, and would have no use for a "create more math" button. Musicians enjoy creating music, which is very different from listening to it.
We're all drawn to different vocations, and it's perverse to accept that "maximize shareholder value" is the highest.
Water rights in the West are hard, and we've known that since John Wesley Powell was in charge, as a nearby commenter explained. The Colorado was divided up during an unusually wet year a long time ago, and rising demand and falling supply have only made things worse ever since.
Superoptimizers have been around since 1987: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superoptimization
They generate fast code that is not meant to be understood or extended.
A quick search didn't turn up anything about the model's skill or resolution, though I'm sure the data exists.
That's a good question. Mozilla has something like a half-billion dollars of assets, which is more than twice what the Linux Foundation reports. Does maintaining a web browser cost more than twice as much as maintaining an operating system? Hopefully not, but maybe it's time we find out.
That's true. Ruby still exists, for example, though it's sitting down below COBOL on the Tiobe index. There's probably a community trading garbage pail kids on Facebook Marketplace as well. Ideas rarely die completely.
Burning fossil fuels to turn heat into kinetic energy is genuinely better than using draft animals or human slaves. Creating worse code (or worse clothing) for less money is a tradeoff that only works for some situations.
Quite a few come to mind: chemical and biological weapons, beanie babies, NFTs, garbage pail kids... Some take real effort to eradicate, some die out when people get bored and move on.
Today's version of "AI," i.e. large language models for emitting code, is on the level of fast fashion. It's novel and surprising that you can get a shirt for $5, then you realize that it's made in a sweatshop, and it falls apart after a few washings. There will always be a market for low-quality clothes, but they aren't "disrupting non-nudity."
Yes. Revel in your creativity mocking and blocking the slop machines. The "remote refactor" command, "rm -rf", is the best way to reduce the cyclomatic complexity of a local codebase.
That pretty much sums up the problem: an "AI" button is about as useful to me as a "do stuff" button, or one of those red "that was easy" buttons they sell at Home Depot. Google translate has offered machine translation for 20+ years that is more or less adequate to understand text written in a language I don't read. Fine, add a button to do that. Mediocre page summaries? That can live in some submenu. "Agentic" things like booking flights for an upcoming trip? I would never trust an "AI" button to do that.
Machine learning can be useful for well-defined, low-consequence tasks. If you think an LLM is a robot butler, you're fundamentally misunderstanding what you're dealing with.
Well there's your problem! Google owns the server, the client, and the standards body, so ever-increasing complexity is inevitable if you play by their rules. Tens of thousands of lines of code could render the useful parts of the web.
This. I've asked grocery checkers why they sprint through scanning my things, then relax as I bag them, and learned that they're subject to some dumb system that grades them on how fast they scan. Ask them if they're on the boss's clock, and if not, take a minute to chat and give them a break.
(check-mark emoji) Add more emoji — humans love them! (red x emoji) Avoid negative words like "bullshit" and "scarier."
(thumbs-up emoji) Before long you'll get past the human feedback of reinforcement learning! (smiley-face)
I tried learning a language via Duolingo for a while. I treated it as "free flash cards with pronunciation," and tried to ignore the gamification and cutesy animated characters. I ditched it when it went all-in on AI slop. I've since found a free 1990s-style website that has common phrases, conjugation rules, etc. with pronunciation, and have learned much more.
> I don't think of myself as a programmer. I write code, and I often enjoy it when I do, but that term programmer is both limiting and distracting. I don't want to program for its own sake, not being interested in the overall experience of what I'm creating. If I start thinking too much about programming as a distinct entity then I lose sight of that.
Programming is a useful skill, even in the age of large language models, but it should always be used to achieve some greater goal than just writing programs.
The thought of rewriting anything as intricate, foundational, and battle-tested as GNU coreutils from scratch scares me. Maybe I'd try it with a mature automatic C-to-Rust translator, but I would still expect years of incompatibilities and reintroduced bugs.
See also the "cascade of attention-deficit teenagers" development model.
Good stuff -- thanks for sharing. IOCCC, like Perl Golf, is brilliantly absurd.