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Comment by skeledrew | Hacker News Reader

Humans also work because they've been trained on a massive corpus of materials, spanning like an average 15 year period or more. And humans too need to be prompted, sometimes everyday, with meetings and whatnot to produce exactly what is required.

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I used to do software dev without meetings. It worked just fine. I would send whatever I did once it was done, and get direction on where to take it next. Maybe this breaks down in companies with more than a few leaders, or where the leaders can't otherwise keep in sync.

Also gave me plenty of opportunities to go above and beyond. I miss when that felt safe.

> I used to do software dev without meetings. It worked just fine. I would send whatever I did once it was done, and get direction on where to take it next.

You didn’t collaborate with other engineers? Or what if the spec you were given was unclear in places? Forgive me, but the style you describe sounds incredibly collaborative, super transactional.

Funny story actually, there were a few other engineers but not very much collaboration. They were resistant to sharing source code or algorithm details, so I had to essentially reverse engineer how their other products worked. I was good enough at it that I came up with several features they didn't know were possible. They eventually ended up letting me go and cloned my design, which I thought was weird, but it was developed for them in the first place so not a big deal.

The lengths to which devs will go not to collaborate.

To be fair, it's a very secretive industry, and betrayals are quite common. Worse, a lot of those betrayals are done on pure impulse without even thinking through the consequences first, so you can't actually build incentives against it because they'll just be ignored.

Maybe those were some very detailed requirements you were getting, the deliveries were straight-forward, or you already knew the space pretty well. Or you're the only dev there. Somehow most teams just keep tripping over each other and need near constant management to ensure they're delivering what the stakeholders expect.

They weren't particularly detailed, but I did know the space quite well. I was a heavy user of other products of that type, and knew very well what I wanted out of one.

The problem is that your case is extremely rare. Most people work on systems that they never would use themselves or even know existed if not for working on it.

Wherever I work, I try to turn the system into something I would use myself. I am not always successful in this, but it drives a lot of my UX decisions, and it seems to work fairly well.

This depends entirely on how well the requirements have been communicated, right? If you could go for long periods without meetings on large projects, it means either you had great PMs or you’re very good at collecting relevant info and planning in advance. Or, it could mean that your target was quite flexible and open to interpretation. I don’t doubt it, and I’ve known some developers who could do what you did, deliver something great without that much back and forth. I’ve also known many developers (probably most TBH) who will focus on problems the customers don’t have and endlessly go down rabbit holes that have no bottom. Heads down software engineering for big-O and data structures seems to be a lot more fun for some people than fixing weird hard to repro bugs with vague repro instructions that customers complain about. Many very good devs still need to check in and iterate and get some steering, especially if the requirements have not been well or fully explained… which in my own experience has been more or less always. ;)

Maybe my definition of meetings is different than yours. To me, meetings are voice or video calls where multiple people talk about progress and direction, raise issues to the others, etc. and the leaders can make calls across the whole team at once. Staying in constant communication doesn't count as much because it's more async and incremental.

You’re right, my definition sounds different. Your comment left me with the impression that you meant you weren’t talking to anyone. Meetings in my book are any scheduled discussions, regardless of how many people are involved. 1:1s are still meetings.

1:1 meetings are still meetings, but casual messages about progress and direction (without a scheduled time block or synchronous call or whatever ) don't count to me.

> Humans also work because they've been trained on a massive corpus of materials,

Massive? My introduction to programming (from noob to beginner level) has been like only 10 books worth of content. Including some alternative pathways like 3D, security, system administration,... To this day, I don't think I've reached 50 books of materials. And If I counted everything it would be still small.

Human learning is very efficient (not time wise, but cost wise, and even training data wise).

Only if you ignore the billion years of pretraining…

You're forgetting all the schooling before that, which taught you how to read, do math, etc. And the general daily experiences of just being a human being interacting with the world. Magnitudes more data taken in than any language model.

> Magnitudes more data taken in than any language model.

Ah, yes, I can fondly recall reading and internalizing every word available on the internet when I was young...

A picture is worth a thousand words. How much video data was your brain trained on?

You should check out how much raw data just your eyes process for every second they're open (although a significant amount is discarded before it gets to the vision center, but still). Then consider the other senses also constantly doing their thing.

The vast majority of people don't internalize most things. Some internalize even less. It can become a big issue with things like dissociative disorders. (I have some experience with that)

LLMs don't internalize per se (assuming something akin to conscious intent). The foundation of a model is comparable to a human's daily experiences of just being, then the fine-tuning is comparable to formal schooling, and finally the prompting is comparable to meetings for workplace tasks.

I said nothing of LLMs. I don't compare the process of LLM training to any form of human education because they are fundamentally dissimilar. LLMs are engineered mathematics and cannot self-train yet.

There are of course parallels. Anyone who's done ML should be able to see it at least. But yes, there are fundamental differences in methodology due to the mode and level of access: with a human, the only way is to go through the senses and there's no - easy - way to affect the learning substrate; with a LLM, data is directly injected into the substrate, which is also human-architected.

Organic beings have more than just the senses, they also have higher level concepts and complex internal incentives. This is more important than the senses being the only method of access, I think.

Language models currently are mutated in the direction of exactly producing the desired output data, but gradually enough that they generalize across inputs in a way that appears understanding. It is more similar to compression, though, at least before a randomizing sampling strategy is applied during decode.

Anyway, circling back to my original topic: no organic being has the capability to integrate all the data arriving from their senses! They typically get more and more selective with experience, picking out only the pieces of information that are still important. Some are more selective than they're supposed to be, by choice or not (such as with dissociative disorders). In any case, the raw quantity of data coming through the senses becomes almost entirely irrelevant.

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