Sweet, this makes me immediately want to go buy a kobo! I love ifixit.

He doesn’t let his PR hacks tell him what to do!

They are, for sure. I mean in some sense, the explain-ability is why it’s correct…you might need to explain why it’s correct to a judge one day!

Ah, well in that case I won’t take your word for it that it’s good. I’ll take your word for it that it’s working for you for now… Again in a legal context, that’s like “I got chat GPT to write this contract, and it’s working great,” but of course…it won’t be when things go wrong haha!

I have to take your word for it because I don’t know what good code looks like lol. Again, to compare to what I’m familiar with, you can also ask an LLM to draft you a purchase agreement for shares of a private company, and if you’re not a lawyer it’ll look good…and it’ll be able to sound like it’s explaining to you why it’s good…but it will not be good haha

I’ll have to take your word for it! “figuring out” sounds like a higher-order process than a large language model is capable of to me, but if what they do is as good, then great.

I think I’m just skeptical because of how horrendously bad LLM output is in my field of expertise (despite looking fine to a lay person), so I immediately analogize that to other areas. The output of law and coding are both really about language, and the process of creating that output on the part of a lawyer or coder are really about language, so I can see how one might think LLMs would be able to recreate what lawyers and coders do. But boy it doesn’t strike me as remotely plausible that LLMs will ever get there, at least for law. I have no doubt some yet-unimagined technology could get us there, but “next word prediction” just isn’t gonna be it.

I’m not a coder, so I can’t speak to the quality of code generated by these models. I am a lawyer, and every time I see stuff that lay people think is impressive in my field, I can’t help but guffaw and think “none of this is going to function, and no one will know for years. We’re so fucked…and then one day we’ll have to clean all this up and it’s gonna be so much work.” I kind of assume it’ll be similar for code? Like…it’ll obviously be somewhat better because there is a lot of testing you can actually do, whereas in law “testing” takes many years…and by the time you find out something doesn’t work, the burden of having done it wrong all this time, thinking it was right is catastrophic (which is why lawyers are so conservative about language that they “know works.”

I can see how little features can get added and these tools can deliver on those projects fast…but like…can they do bigger things with consistency? Can they like…set things up well? I’m not saying it’s impossible, but…I guess i’m thinking about Go. It took a long time for neural networks to get to be good at 19 x 19. They got good at 9 x 9 pretty fast. But as the game gets more complicated, it’s way WAY harder to do good long-term strategy. And the machines got there, no doubt. But the entire universe of Go is a 19x19 grid, on which the spaces are black or white or empty. How much more complicated is a language? Even a programming language? infinitely more complex, of course!

So I worry that we’re going to have individual features that work well, but systems that cannot function…looking like the uhhh…weasley house in Harry Potter…but without the magic to hold it up lol.

AI is a broad term; of course neural networks and machine learning have been important in a lot of research etc. That’s all great. LLMs…it’s all anyone wants to talk about (maybe image generation too) and it’s junk for any application that matters.

If looms could only make burlap, and the capitalists tried to make burlap underwear a thing, I think the luddites would be wise to say to the public “hey, don’t buy this crap…it’s uncomfortable!” Of course, in reality, auto-looms did a lot of the same stuff traditional weavers could do. I think pointing out that when techbros say LLMs output is great, pointing out that LLMs output is generally garbage is effective. Luddites couldn’t really say that the output was significantly inferior (or maybe it was and people didn’t notice…jesus I hope that’s not the case with this garbage!).

Maybe that’s what we disagree about. To me, the auto-looms are only making burlap and I don’t see any reason to think they’re going to get much better. And they’re lighting the planet on fire :P

I am not willing to capitulate to this kind of BS: “LLMs are very useful and they’re clearly here to stay.” I just think that’s horseshit. That’s what the capitalists who are selling them want you to think, but I genuinely believe if you ever look at it in a critical context you’ll see.

I mean…looms actually seem useful. My experience with large language models is that they’re only useful when the output doesn’t really matter. Like…they’re fine if you’re “searching” for things that aren’t really defined and you don’t really care about the answer (i.e. “what are the five trendiest coffeeshops in Barcelona that are likely to have english speaking staff?” it can’t actually know any of that…what’s “trendy” even mean? Whatever, who cares, go to a coffee shop on your vacation, have a nice time).

But when it matters you just cannot rely on them…They can’t be relied on to use the correct words when precision of language matters, they can’t do “research” or “analysis” in any meaningful sense…like maybe better than a sharp middle-schooler? But not as well as a dumb undergrad.

And I don’t see any reason, understanding what the technology is to think they’ll get better at those things. It’s predictive in nature. You know…like maybe it’ll go from 60% reliable to 90% reliable over the next hundred years because they’ll find some way to focus on high-quality and relevant training data, while still using gigantic training data to get the model up and running…? But since it’s fundamentally a predictive model (trying to predict what a good answer would look like), it’s never going to be able to actually be relied upon for answers to questions when it matters.

And idk what the cost would be when factoring in all the externalities…environmental destruction, energy consumption…hell, even the infrasound from data centers fucking up everyone’s brain…like…there’s just no way this makes any economic sense. Right now it’s all mega-subsidized, but when that comes to an end…is it gonna cost $10 per prompt on average? $50? Idk, but I know everyone using it now will not want to pay for it.

I guess everyone else learned the playbook and started beating them at it

WOAH what a thing to come out of one’s mouth. Like…abusers always have mountains of justifications but something like this…it seems like it’s gotta cut through all the delusion…that’s not a thing a good person can feel, let alone say! Like…realizing you feel that way about someone should be a huge wakeup call that you’re a monster and need to do some serious work on yourself. Saying it out loud…wowee

When you know you know sometimes! Me and my wife were a bit like this.

Cooking is always welcome.

Naw it’s not one sided, you just didn’t hear about the guy who got banned for accusing 4 people of being CIA agents.

Nebula, means tv, and dropout =/ none will be the next YouTube but it’s nice to have options I guess

Jeffrey Sachs is a cool smart and good guy. He gets how things work and wants things to go well for people.

Y’arr matey, that be so. Alas, thar be treasure buried here if ye have the wits te find it.

Andor was so goooooooooooooood.

I think season 2 was an improvement on season one, and the ending hit pretty hard. But I think Narkina 5 was the most powerful arc.

So many killer lines.

“One way out”

“I can’t swim”

So powerful. One way out for Kino Loy.

Also “how nice for you” … fuckin DEVESTATING.

Andor was amazing. It’s a genuine masterpiece. I love it so much.

I feel like, despite obviously surviving, Andor somehow did lose something at the end (if you’ve seen rogue one the end of Andor hits hard)

Andor is the best piece of Star Wars media and the best TV show I’ve ever seen. You don’t need to like Star Wars. I don’t know if seeing Star Wars would even increase your enjoyment. I think seeing Rogue One would probably be good but otherwise just jump in. No space wizards or laser swords or destiny or whatever. It’s so adult and grounded. I can’t believe Disney let them make this.