My friends are understanding that I don't play games with rootkit anti cheat (whether on Linux or Windows). There are enough games that we can play other games together still, and when they want to play the games with such anti-cheat (e.g. Helldivers 2) they simply play without me. No big deal.
> Though I guess people would argue you can just ask a LLM now instead of reading my book.
I would certainly not argue that. LLMs do not understand anything, and are thus prone to non-deterministic inaccuracies in their output. Due to that, I think it is extremely foolish to use one for learning unfamiliar topics. Give me a book every time, because (if it's a good book) I am guaranteed to actually learn something. Not so with LLMs.
Additionally, no matter how good LLMs get, they're always going to prioritize the most cookie cutter answers to questions because they're looking for the "best match" - the most common answer.
With books the author can give advice that's not as widely known and is thus much less likely to show up in an LLM output.
> You get that feeling pretty often with an indie game.
I've never had that feeling about any game. Indie games tend to be higher quality (because they are made by people who prioritize the game above business), but I think you're strongly overstating how good they are.
Depending on your house setup you might not be able to. My washer and dryer are in my basement, and I can't hear them at all (neither when they are running, nor the sound they make when they finish). Moreover, the timer listed on the machine when you start the cycle is not accurate (particularly for the dryer, which is frequently off by 30+ minutes). This means that I have no idea when my clothes are done except by going to the basement to check. That's not the end of the world, but it would be genuinely nice to be able to get them on my wireless network and have them send me a notification.
Perhaps that doesn't apply to you and how your home is set up. Fair enough. But that doesn't mean the use case doesn't exist.
We exist in a world where proprietary software exists, and always will exist. I want to be able to run said software if it's the best tool for the job, not be hobbled by an idealistic stance of "all software should be free so we don't bother to support proprietary software".
> Coding AIs design software better than me, review code better than me, find hard-to-find bugs better than me, plan long-running projects better than me, make decisions based on research, literature, and also the state of our projects better than me.
That is just not true, assuming you have a modicum of competence (which I assume you do). AIs suck at all these tasks; they are not even as good as an inexperienced human.
For all we know, you both could comparing using a Nokia 3310 and a workstation PC based on the hardware, but you both just say "this computer is better than that computer".
There are a ton of models out there, ran in a ton of different ways, that can be used in different ways with different harnesses, and people use different workflows. There is just so many variables involved, that I don't think it's neither fair nor accurate for anyone to claim "This is obviously better" or "This is obviously impossible".
I've been in situations where I hit my head against some hard to find bug for days, then I put "AI" (but what? No one knows) to it and it solves it in 20 minutes. I've also asked "AI" to do trivial work that it still somehow fucked up, even if I could probably have asked a non-programmer friend to do it and they'd be able to.
The variance is great, and the fact that system/developer/user prompts matter a lot for what the responses you get, makes it even harder to fairly compare things like this without having the actual chat logs in front of you.
> was the apparent benefit so incredibly variable?
Yes, lots of people were very vocally against horseless-carriages, as they were called at the time. Safety and public nuisance concerns were widespread, the cars were very noisy, fast, smoky and unreliable. Old newspapers are filled with opinions about this, from people being afraid of horseless-carriages spooking other's horses and so on. The UK restricted the adoption of cars at one point, and some Canton in Switzerland even banned cars for a couple of decades.
Horseless-carriages was commonly ridiculed for being just for "reckless rich hobbyists" and similar.
I think the major difference is that cars produced immediate, visible externalities, so it was easy for opposition to focus on public safety in public spaces. In contrast, AI has less physically visible externalities, although they are as important, or maybe even more important, than the ones cars introduced.
yeah I agree about the negative externalities but I'm curious about the perceived benefits. did anybody argue that cars were actually slower than horse and carriage? (were they at first?)
The cars were obviously faster than the typical horse transportation and I don't think anyone tried to argue against that, but laws typically restricted cars so they couldn't go faster than horses, at least in highly populated areas like cities. As others mentioned too, the benefit of not needing roads to go places were highlighted as a drawback of cars too. People argued that while cars might go faster, the result would be that the world would be worse off in total.
sure but my point is people could agree they were faster at least. that is decidedly not true for LLMs. maybe due to alignable vs non-alignable differences
Is this a trick question? Yes it was. A horse could go over any terrain while a car could only really go over very specific terrain designed for it. We had to terraform the world in order to make the automobile so beneficial. And it turned out that this terraforming had many unintended consequences. It's actually a pretty apt comparison to LLMs.
who would I be trying to trick if it was? you didn't answer the question anyways. I'm not wondering whether cars were seen as strictly better than horses in all situations. I'm wondering if people disagreed so vehemently about whether cars were faster road transportation than horses
LLMs generate the most likely code given the problem they're presented and everything they've been trained on, they don't actually understand how (or even if) it works. I only ever get away with that when I'm writing a parser.
It matters if AGI is the goal. If it remains a tool to make workers more productive, then it doesn't need to truly understand, since the humans using the tools understand. I'm of the opinion AI should have stood for Augmented (Human) Intelligence outside of science fiction. I believe that's what early pioneers like Douglas Engalbert thought. Clearly that's what Steve Jobs and Alan Kay thought computing was for.
AGI is such a meaningless concept. We can’t even fully design what human intelligence is (and when a human fails it meaning they lack human intelligence). It’s just philosophy.
If it empirically works, then sure. If instead every single solution it provides beyond a few trivial lines falls somewhere between "just a little bit off" and "relies entirely on core library functionality that doesn't actually exist" then I'd say it does matter and it's only slightly better than an opaque box that spouts random nonsense (which will soon include ads).
Late 2025 models very rarely hallucinate nonexistent core library functionality - and they run inside coding agent harnesses so if they DO they notice that the code doesn't work and fix it.
This sounds like you're copy-pasting code from ChatGPT's web interface, which is very 2024.
Agentic LLMs will notice if something is crap and won't compile and will retry, use the tools they have available to figure out what's the correct way, edit and retry again.
Depends on how he defined "better". If he uses the word "better" to mean "good enough to not fail immediately, and done in 1/10th of the time", then he's correct.
If anything, the fact that it's hard to come up with an example of a language like this is even more evidence that this probably isn't what anyone has ever meant by that term.
I've heard that, but anecdotally, neither of my two teenagers care at all. Maybe it used to matter in the past, but these days all the kids seem to be on Discord and any phone will do.
The obvious solution here is actually to pay for search. Then the company actually cares about keeping you happy, because you are their source of revenue.
In principle, yes, but in practice the privacy claims are unverifiable. A for-pay search provider may stick track you and serve you ads (in the ranking of results) and will probably do an even better job than Google at it since they can verify your identity through payment and profile you accurately no matter what device you use.
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