You may be right but it seems like a different type of tool when it does the thinking for you. I feel like your analogy is closer to a good autocomplete rather than an agentic LLM loop. Agents feel like a genuinely different technology.
Maybe it’s more like an HVAC installer has a tool which tells them where to position the furnace. After many years, will they forget why the furnace should go there? Or maybe it’s like the HVAC installer has a tool which auto attaches the pipes. Hopefully it attached cold to cold and hot to hot, but the HVAC installer hasn’t had to do this in a while so they kind of forgot how to do it manually, and so will just trust the tool.
I was primarily pushing back on anti-screens in its absolute sense, and being somewhat pedantic. However, I largely agree with you, especially considering how screens are most often used today.
If it were a human (going off of memory as it has been a while), they would probably be using mathscinet and their university library to obtain copies of these papers online. Many old papers are digitized and available by these means. I’m sure the AI companies have it all easily accessible and/or the entirety of mathscinet is in the training data. The “personal correspondence” is possibly lifting from another paper or journal but yeah that is a bit odd that they wouldn’t source where they lifted that from directly.
I can’t say if the citations are accurate because I didn’t check.
I am skeptical of using AI for a tutor and would not give it to my kid, but I find the staunch no-screens sentiment equally ridiculous and similar to saying no-books.
Do you have kids? Are you telling me that you and the other parent spend (or spent) 100% of your time with your 5 year old? We spend a ton of time with our kid but also he watches educational TV. Unless you are privileged enough to have a nanny, having your kid constantly with another person is unrealistic to me. Then it is a matter of what they will do alone, and I don't see how a screen is inherently worse than other solo activities. I played video games and tinkered with DOS when I was a young kid and learned a lot, which led to my current career.
Screens are a medium. I don't see how they are inherently bad, although it is probably correct that screens carry the most bad content out of any information medium. But my kid has learned how crayons and instruments are made by watching Mr Rogers, and I simply don't see how he would have learned that via some other medium in the same amount of detail (visual and auditory together). He has seen jazz and classical musicians explain and play their instruments. He has seen how adults interact with each other and respect one another through Mr Rogers and (older) Sesame Street. I've then seen this translate into his real world behaviors. You think that is fundamentally bad?
You would learn way more by asking an LLM how postgres works. Nobody is even reading this Rust code. There are 7000 commits over 2 weeks. What is being learned from that?
Genuine question - do you feel that you understand a code change well enough by only viewing diffs, enough to push the Claude code as “your own”? I can see this for some types of PRs but for anything that is relatively complex or touches multiple files, I personally have to open an editor and navigate through the code paths to really grok if an AI’s (or a human’s for that matter) change is correct.
Is this something people widely vary on? I suspect a lot of people are not like me given that I do see people saying things such as “I rarely use my ide/editor any more” with AI, hence my question to you. Maybe I’m just bad at keeping the code base all in my head.
I do agree with you that I feel that I am coding less myself and I do miss that for sure. But the job demands otherwise.
Every time people point out a limitation or constraint of LLMs, I see a comment that is to the effect of “but humans…”. I don’t understand why this comparison is relevant to this particular thread. Is it just an amusing similarity?
The point is that there is a 0% chance you can meaningfully understand the impact and consequences of what a 10k line change is doing in a couple hour review, so there’s no way for you to know if it’s “bad” in any sense other than it’s so awful that it’s obvious on a skim (which is what 10k lines in a couple hours is).
The entire PR description is filled with LLMisms. I find this style so hard to read, it’s almost nauseating these days. My eyes start to glaze over and I stop reading pretty quickly after. I’m having to deal with this a lot at work these days unfortunately. I mean, did anyone even read or verify this output? When I read this type of stuff, I have the nagging suspicion that I am the proofreader and I have to do the verification myself. At that point, what are we even doing? I can generate Claude output myself…
I know I’m being overly dramatic but this sort of thing feels so wrong and inhuman(?) to me for some reason.
I think the answer to your question depends on what you mean by a “completely egalitarian world”. Depending on the answer, I would ask: why does the kid desire to charge people to earn money in a society like that in the first place?
But yes, I think a lot of people would say there should be a cap on how much more wealth someone has compared to the median, for many reasons, such as the amount of political power it would yield him. The thought experiment uses a harmless activity for earning the wealth, but criticism of wealth inequality is often based on what happens _after_ the wealth is earned too. If in this example you will claim the world remains perfectly (socially) egalitarian and the kid will be benevolent, then maybe we can let him keep his wealth in the thought experiment. But that’s not the world we live in, and possibly never will be.
> As an AI optimist, I think all forced labor should eventually be done by AI. People can then spend their time pursuing their own hobbies. Just as many people still play Go after AlphaGo appeared, because they genuinely love the game.
And what sort of economic system do you imagine will be in place to support billions of people being able to just play Go all day long? How do you imagine the large capitalistic global powers transitioning into that state?
The sibling has pointed out some things and you can check that, but —
This has AI fingerprints all over it and it was clear to me too. The fact that not only do people not notice this, but also that the comment pointing it out is dead and I can’t even reply to it, is sad/scary/funny. The internet of people is literally dying before our eyes and HN just flags anyone helping to sound the alarm.
> What all these theories have in common is the underlying belief that our brain/mind works as the machines we build
It’s interesting to note that this is not a new phenomenon. If you read writers from the past, they were always comparing the body or the brain to whatever the modern machine, or idea of a machine, was at the time, whether a steam engine or automata.
> The logical conclusion is that the brain makes me
The logical conclusion under the popular axiomatic framework of materialism, for sure.
But there are other possible logical conclusions depending on your philosophical foundations, e.g. the brain could be a receiver for consciousness which is translated into our worldly experience from somewhere else.
I would not trust LLMs with the final word on anything financial.
Not exactly accounting, but ChatGPT (whatever the paid model was in March) told me that paying down principal early would have virtually no effect on interest over the remainder of the loan. It was confused by the fact that it was a short balloon with payments amortized using a 30 year schedule. I did the math by hand to check and told it it was incorrect and it gave me the classic “oh yeah, sorry about that”. It’s the type of thing where for someone that is knowledgeable about the domain, it wouldn’t pass the sniff test. I am not sure if LLMs have a sniff test.
I can’t imagine how hard this will hallucinate when there are layers of accounting, tax codes, etc. But who will notice when it sounds so convinced it is right?
This doesn't make any sense to me, and seems like the exact opposite of what eBay is, but maybe we use eBay differently? When I use it, I am looking for something specific. The chance a random location nearby has that thing is basically 0. If I want to peruse random thrift items, I would go to a thrift store.
Honestly, even if that takes into account housing and everything, doesn't that seem... pathetic? All of the automation and technological advancement and productivity gains over the past 45 years, and average workers in the US see a measly 15% higher real wage over that timespan. Compared to the obscene (real) wealth increase by those at the top during the same span, this seems pathetic to me.
Maybe it’s more like an HVAC installer has a tool which tells them where to position the furnace. After many years, will they forget why the furnace should go there? Or maybe it’s like the HVAC installer has a tool which auto attaches the pipes. Hopefully it attached cold to cold and hot to hot, but the HVAC installer hasn’t had to do this in a while so they kind of forgot how to do it manually, and so will just trust the tool.