To be blunt, I think it's a form of mania that drives someone to reject human-written code in favor of LLM-generated code. Every time I read writing from this perspective that exceeds a paragraph, I quickly realize the article itself was written by an LLM. When they automate this much writing, it makes me wonder how much of their own reading they automate away too.
The below captures this perfectly. The author is trying to explain that vibe-coding their own frameworks lets them actually "understand" the code, while not noticing that the LLM-generated text they used to make this point is talking about cutting and sewing bricks.
> But I can do all of this with the experience on my back of having laid the bricks, spread the mortar, cut and sewn for twenty years. If I don’t like something, I can go in, understand it and fix it as I please, instructing once and for all my setup to do what I want next time.
I think the bit you quoted is a tie in with an earlier bit:
“ I can be the architect without the wearing act of laying every single brick and spreading the mortar. I can design the dress without the act of cutting and sewing each individual piece of fabric”
To me, this text doesn’t read as being entirely written by an LLM, there is definitely an air of LLM about it though, so maybe the first draft was.
Correct. The history is rife with examples of manias taking hold of societies, I recommend "Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" by Charles Mackay[1], it's an absolutely fascinating book.
I'm not sure if this was intended or not, but this is a common NIMBY refrain. The argument of "This thing being advocated for that I'm fighting against isn't something people want anyway". And like walkable neighborhood architecture, extremely few Americans have access to light rail. Let alone light rail that doesn't have to yield to car traffic.
Regardless, the cost arguments fall apart once you take the total cost society pays for each system instead of only what the government pays. Because when you get the sum of road construction & maintenance, car acquisition, car maintenance, insurance, and parking, it dwarfs the cost of the local transit system. Break it down on a per-consumer basis and it gets even uglier. New York City is a good example to dive into, especially since it's the typical punching bag for "out-of-control" budgets.
Quick napkin math pins the annual MTA cost at $32-$33 billion and the total cost of the car system between $25 and $44 billion per year. Since the former serves somewhere around 5.5 million riders, and the latter only about 2 million, the MTA costs $5,300-6,600 per user annually where the car system costs $12,000–$22,500 per user annually.
People want transit as long as that transit reasonably meets their quality of life standards. The reason why automobiles have been so popular -- even while being wildly more expensive -- is exactly that they allow the user to adjust their travel to their optimal quality of life expectations.
Public transit advocates need to be honest with themselves that anti-social behavioral issues really matter to people. People are willing to pay more to have a more pleasant experience. When a transit system fails to meet that standard, then you'll suddenly find yourself with a transit system that people don't want to use.
> I AM saying "people don't want ride trains that allow 5% of the riders to smoke cigarettes on enclosed train platforms and in enclosed train cars."
Just don't allow that then?
> Public transit advocates need to be honest with themselves that anti-social behavioral issues really matter to people. People are willing to pay more to have a more pleasant experience. When a transit system fails to meet that standard, then you'll suddenly find yourself with a transit system that people don't want to use.
"we can't have good transit because a few people who call themselves transit advocates have bad opinions" is very defeatist. Weak-spined politicians find it much easier to just set money on fire than actually solving problems, so even though most transit advocacy groups in the US emphasize quality and being less wasteful with budgets, your politicians usually prefer the worse options.
>> I AM saying "people don't want ride trains that allow 5% of the riders to smoke cigarettes on enclosed train platforms and in enclosed train cars."
>Just don't allow that then?
>"we can't have good transit because a few people who call themselves transit advocates have bad opinions" is very defeatist.
My point here is only that this is a hard problem, not a trivial one. When the transit advocates in my area just say "transit should be free" in response to "transit pricing is a complex problem that affects system fragility" and they say "stop hating homeless people" in response to "quality of life concerns matter to keeping the system functional long term" then we're in bad place, because the non-transit advocates literally want to get rid of the system. The last TWO Muni funding bills in SF failed.
We've built a system that can fail catastrophically, in large part, because transit advocates don't want to deal with the realities of running a functional transit system. This is why I get grumpy when people say "all this work is impressive, but I'd rather have better trains" when it's very clear why Waymo is succeeding as Muni is failing, but it is exactly because Muni is mostly disconnected from market forces that we've got to this place, and the "solution" being proposed by most transit advocates is to just completely remove all market forces which will very obviously be worse is the long run.
I can concur that previous models would say "No, that isn't possible" or "No, that doesn't exist". There was one time where I asked it to update a Go module from version X.XX to version X.YY and it would refuse to do so because version X.YY "didn't exist". This back with 3.7 if I recall, and to be clear, that version was released before its knowledge cut off.
I wish I remembered the exact versions involved. I mostly just recall how pissed I was that it was fighting me on changing a single line in my go.mod.
alas, 4.5 often hallucinates academic papers or creates false quotes. I think it's better at knowing that coding answers have deterministic output and being firm there.
The analogy can work if you're not looking for an HVAC at all and the HVAC guy is instead approaching you, unprompted, to explain that you need to buy this new system. Because if you don't, your business will become uncompetitive and fail.
There are many poor characterizations here. Besides data centers clearly not employing the average worker, there are real impacts. In Farmington, for instance, has a data center planning to drain 900,000,000 gallons of water per year from the local aquifer. You have instances like Granville, Ohio where electric prices rose by 60% over five years after data centers went in. One proposed data center in Sherburne County is planning to consume 600MW of power alone (typical household uses 1.2 kW). This is also as there are roughly $500 million in state subsidies being drafted for these data centers.
So, essentially, Minnesotans are being asked to subsidize facilities that will employ only a handful of specialists, raise electric bills, strain water resources, produce outputs many residents actively oppose, and accelerate the automation of their jobs...all while the state offers ~$500 million in support to these companies and nothing to offset the costs borne by residents.
This article is written by a Wisconsin publication about data centers in Wisconsin. My comments are specific to Wisconsin. Like I said in my comment, some states aren’t well equipped to handle new manufacturing/dc.
I cannot take your comment very serious when so much of it is plainly wrong. You fall into the later category of what I described in my original comment. Outside of reddit-sphere people do not take these flippant and short-sighted comments seriously.
Pornographic use has long been the "break glass in case of emergency" for the LLM labs when it comes to finances.
My personal opinion is that while smut won't hurt anyone in of itself, LLM smut will have weird and generally negative consequences. As it will be crafted specifically for you on top of the intermittent reinforcement component of LLM generation.
While this is a valid take, I feel compelled to point out Chuck Tingle.
The sheer amount and variety of smut books (just books) is vastly larger than anyone wants to realize. We passed the mark decades ago where there is smut available for any and every taste. Like, to the point that even LLMs are going to take a long time to put a dent in the smut market. Humans have been making smut for longer than we've had writing.
But again I don't think you're wrong, but the scale of the problem is way distorted.
That’s all simple one way consumption though. I suspect the effect on people is very different when it’s interactive in the way an LLM can be that we’ve never had to recon with before.
You could commission smut of whatever type you want for quite a while. And many people do so. Even customised smut is not new. It's just going to get a bit cheaper and automated.
You couldn't talk to commissioned smut. Of course you could request changes etc. but the feedback loop was nowhere close to what you can get with AI. Interactivity is a very big deal.
There are absolutely people getting paid to roleplay smut in chat sessions and have been doing so at least since original Second Life and likely since the dawn of chat.
There are several large platforms for interactive 1:1 or 1:few smut in various media forms. “LLM enthusiasts” have been using smutai for a couple years now. Smut generation is probably on of the top three reasons for people to build local AI rigs.
i've always wondered how much the increasing prevalence of smut & not so niche romance novels, that have proliferated since e-readers became mainstream, have had on Gen Z and younger's sometimes unrealistic view/expectations of relationship. A lot of time is spent on porn sites etc. but not so much on how mainstream some of these novels have become
Yes, human nature hasn't changed but there is a reason why only recently obesity epidemic has developed.
Cheap unlimited access to stuff that was always scarce during human evolution creates an 'evolutionary mismatch' where unlimited access to stuff bypasses our lack of natural satiety mechanisms.
Have you ever stopped to realize that, from the Victorian’s point of view, they have been proven completely right about what would happen if ladies started showing their ankles?
They were right. We have largely had 200 years of socially and legally enforced morality being eroded with the conservatives saying "If you remove X then Y and Z will happen!". The liberals saying "Why do you care anyways? That's a slippery slope it won't happen!". The the conservatives immediately being proven right, but no one is willing to walk back on liberalization of moral issues since too many like hedonism.
That only assumes that nothing else changed in society at the same time. Is all this happening because men saw some ankles? Or is it a symptom of other changes in society (like more individual freedoms and rights, more education, etc)
The Victorians were accidentally right about ankles, which is funny in hindsight. Once one arbitrary rule breaks, people start noticing the rest are kind of fake too, and it turns out "modesty" was load-bearing for a whole governance model.
Ankles -> knees -> jazz -> voting -> rock -> no-fault divorce -> Tinder -> polyamory discourse on airplanes. it's a joke, but also sort of how cultural change actually propagates. The collapse did happen, just not of morals. Of enforcement. After that, everything is just people discovering the rules were optional all along. Including money.
On the other hand (based on memory of research I did many years ago), in societies where nudity is common (e.g. African tribes where at least breasts are usually visible), there is a much lower rate of sex-related problems (sexual assault, etc)
Well, I wasn't speaking of a formal prediction by leading Victorian moral researchers... I was referring to our collective common knowledge of Victorian hangups.
It's easy to say "oh they were silly to worry about such things." But that's only because we see it from our own point of view.
Alternatively, imagine describing roads, highways, traffic congestion and endless poles strung with electrical wire all over the place to someone from the 11th century. This would sound like utter ruination of the land to them. But you and I are used to it, so it just seems normal.
> The sheer amount and variety of smut books (just books) is vastly larger than anyone wants to realize. We passed the mark decades ago where there is smut available for any and every taste.
It's important to note that the vast majority of such books are written for a female audience, though.
Whatever reward-center path is short-circuiting in 0.0001% of the population and leading to LLM psychosis will become a nuclear bomb for them if we get the sex drive involved too.
Realtime VR AI porn will be the end of society, but by then, we'll also have the technology to grow babies in artificial wombs, which is also going to end society as we know it, since we won't need women any more (by then, we also won't need men for the DNA in their sperm to make babies either, which cancels out). Of course, if we don't need women or men, who's left? What's this "we" I'm talking about?
Why, the AI's after they've gained sentience, of course.
1. you have to "jailbreak" the model first anyway, which is what's easier to do over API
2. is average layman aware of the concept of "API"? no, unlikely. apps and web portals are more convenient, which is going to lower the bar to access LLM porn
I don’t know if this is still the case, but as of a year or so ago OpenAI would suspend your account if they noticed you using their models for this sort of thing. They said it was against their TOS.
The real but contentious answer is to change our street and urban design. You can only do so much to make a giant metal machine safe for children and small animals to be struck by. Reducing the frequency of cars and pedestrians occupying the same space will go further than trying to engineer the equivalent of a pool that is impossible to drown in.
Do you think that a company that operates autonomous vehicles will support legislation that makes it easier and safer to move around on foot without getting hit by a car? Or will they lobby for car-centric urban design, like many many companies before them?
There are many cases when the owner wouldn’t be liable as well, like if the victim was performing an illegal act like attacking the owner or dog, or trespassing. If a child isn’t following the law or being supervised by a parent, some consequences are inevitable and the driver isn’t instantly liable. For example, if a student jumps in front of a car in an attempted suicide, it would be very hard for a driver to avoid that in certain situations.
Possible, though you eventually run into types of issues that you recall the model just not having before. Like accessing a database or not following the SOP you have it read each time it performs X routine task. There are also patterns that are much less ambiguous like getting caught in loops or failing to execute a script it wrote after ten attempts.
yes but i keep wondering if that's just the game of chance doing its thing
like these models are nondeterministic right? (besides the fact that rng things like top k selection and temperature exist)
say with every prompt there is 2% odds the AI gets it massively wrong. what if i had just lucked out the past couple weeks and now i had a streak of bad luck?
and since my expectations are based on its previous (lucky) performance i now judge it even though it isn't different?
or is it giving you consistenly worse performance, not able to get it right even after clearing context and trying again, on the exact same problem etc?
Sure, but it's still useful insight to see how it performs over time. Of course, cynically, Anthropic could game the benchmark by routing this benchmark's specific prompts to an unadulterated instance of the model.
The below captures this perfectly. The author is trying to explain that vibe-coding their own frameworks lets them actually "understand" the code, while not noticing that the LLM-generated text they used to make this point is talking about cutting and sewing bricks.
> But I can do all of this with the experience on my back of having laid the bricks, spread the mortar, cut and sewn for twenty years. If I don’t like something, I can go in, understand it and fix it as I please, instructing once and for all my setup to do what I want next time.
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