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Comment by newswasboring | Hacker News Reader

This is yet another example of "cool thing existed before, LLMs democratized it". Other recent instances include pass through modding posts on X, or the whole reverse engineer your TV thing. It's unimpressive to experts, but non experts are losing their god damned mind. Both are responding normally.

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The situation would be improved by non-experts acknowledging that they are and not hyping stuff up on <social media thing here> though.

But that's the content economy I guess.

Just because something is human doesn't mean that it is good

I only mildly agree with you. Yes the content economy has made online discourse unbearable, but I saw someone reverse their TV to make their UI like a pokemon GBA game. That is undeniably cool as fuck and would not have happened without the llms. So I think experts also need to acknowledge that things are cool af right now and not just be the guys who rain on the parade, you know?

Nah. Raining on parades is good, actually.

It forces people to actually learn and understand the tools they're wielding, so that they can withstand said rain with no issue.

The people getting washed away by it would be a threat to sanity at large otherwise.

Maybe we are talking past each other. Surely you are not against the very tinkerer mentality of having fun with new tech?

Yes, we seem to be talking past each other.

I wonder. I mean I agree that it's cool af but if an LLM could do it that must mean someone else has been able to do it before (in whole or in parts) and yet you didn't hear about that, the lone hacker doing something cool af in their spare time, you only hear about the billion-dollar product of the stratospherically hyped startup.

That is not cool at all.

Yup, someone was able to, but nobody did. At least I can't find a pre-LLM application like this. That's my point, LLMs are not better than a RE expert, I'm quite sure of it, but it has now put that expertise in hands of random people with weird ideas. Things are about to get super weird and I at least am here for it. I hate these techbro companies as much as the next guy but computing has been in the hands of big institutions (original computing was for military applications for example, even early unix was developed in that context). People railed against the military use of computing while using it to create beautiful things we still use today.

A phrase has been rolling in my head since all this LLM stuff started, you don't hate AI you hate capitalism. Every objection I've heard for LLMs are basically an issue of the benefits and power being concentrated in a small set of hands.

I don't think we're "democratizing" anything if it's just two companies who can make it and it costs billions or trillions even. That's like the polar opposite of "democratizing".

(Two companies can make it work best, tbc).

Unless we use the tools from those companies to write more efficient LLMs and release them freely

Who is "we" and how are these "we" going to train foundation-scale LLMs? With what money? What compute?

This is a nuanced point. The way power is concentrated in few hands is bad in general for humanity. But surely it's use is not that restricted yet and people can basically do 90% of what they want with it. Maybe I should phrase this as democratization of applications? Not sure, I don't have the vocab yet to explain clearly I suppose.

I’ve seen all the examples of Silicon Valley Tech democratizing things. Is this yet another example? If so I’ll take a pass.

Then you don't hate AI, you hate capitalism. Or at least the current iteration of capitalism.

B.o.t.h.

I would love for you to elaborate on the non economic side of your argument. Just the tools like llms or coding agents or image generators, why do you hate them?

I have been down the thought-path of programming language design which eventually found its implementation in code generation. Not black box code generation (like what compilers often are in practice) but code generation that would then sometimes need tweaking. This was never thought to be principled enough to go beyond the drawing board. It was too primitive. First you have to have discipline enough to version control the generated and the tweaked bits properly. You also need to keep tweaks in sync. If one part needs a manual tweak, you need to redo it on each regeneration. Or for another part. Then you have to read all of this code. Another burden. And code is slow to read. (for some entities)

That was all too primitive. Which is why I think of GenAI as Flintstone Engineering. Take on marvellous technology and apply it in the most dumb way possible. The immediate savior is indeed v--- coding, because then you effectively have a black box code generator and avoid most of the drawbacks. Short of that you need something not stupid on top like enabling formal verification, specifications (for hooomans), and rich tests (again readable by hooomans).

Next is the non-determinism. I did not get into technology to V---. I got into it because it was precise, oh so very stupidly precise. People then reply but hooomans are non-deterministic too. Heh, but I have millions of years of experience with the “non-determinism” of “hooomans”. And I am one as well. I don’t have that for some alien species, or for uncanney valley machines.

And the above is just for the idealized world where I pretend to be an autonomous professional. Closer to “economics” but still in the professional bubble is the alienation of talking to a sycophantic chatbot. I am now having back and forths with it to get it to understand “my” needs. So that it can program for me, the thing that I got into the profession for.

(Three years ago: people complaining about people getting into programming “for the money” (to eat). Now: people puzzled that people are attached to the act of programming.)

Zoom one step out and you are still in the professional context. Now you have to deal with people who send you messages that were maybe LLM generated. And these are the people who will relay a message from someone else by pasting it into the message. Not with a preamble that someone else wrote it. Not with a blockquote. The same kinds of people who will shamelessly admit to not bothering to write a message that they apparently expect you to read.

(How many people are now euphorically talking about they can heave useless and redundant work on other people by loosing their chatbots on systems made for hooomans? It saves them time. Again shameless.)

Further out, companies and organizations can now communicate between themselves with LLMs. Is anyone home?

As a hobby, people are submitting plausible-looking code to maintainers. It looks correct. I guess? Until some subject expert goes through it and says that the train of thought makes no sense, the code makes no sense. Did you LLM write the code? Did you LLM write the commit message? Both. Now you have code submitters that might not even have anyone home on the account while the maintainers have to pick up the pieces. Joy? Cooperation?

All close to my work as an “autonomous” professional. But I reject the idea that you have the glorious tech on one side and “economics” on the other side. I always should ask what technology is doing to people and for who it is doing it (paraphrased from Doctorow).

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