For every interesting problem AI solves there are a long tail of really dumb things that AI performs that humans would never do. Some days I am in awe of one-shot magic eight-ball output and other days I'm so frustrated by the sheer stupidity of what it produces. It remains to be seen whether that long tail of stupidity can ever be resolved in the current form of LLMs.
At some point I was thinking that maybe I am too hard on the AI and that humans routinely produce exceptionally stupid code, however after a while I've realized that this is only partially true. AI produces a class of mistakes that humans would almost certainly not make because creating even the context of the mistake would require a level of skill that would preclude such mistakes. It's like if you took a mid/senior engineer and randomly lobotomized them mid-task.
Exactly, when you hire a junior engineer the distribution of code quality is fairly well known. By the time an engineer becomes senior, you can generally expect similar level of quality across any given task. Whereas with AI, sometimes the output is senior and in the middle of a task you'll get unpredictable low quality output. This makes the system both frustrating and unreliable. Now apply that to other domains like self-driving vehicles, where perhaps 80% of the time on a generally stress free freeway it does fine, and then randomly it may decide mid drive to slam on the brakes because of a random variance in the sensor stack.
I supervise quite a few Masters students. In my particular setting, believe me, LLM stupid for the top three chatbots is easier to work with than real human stupid now. We passed that threshold earlier this year.
It worked for humans. It took a lot of us, but eventually we accepted zero as a number. Then negative numbers. Then "imaginary numbers" as a useful trick, and then as meaningful.
In our case, hundreds of millions, but we got there.
When it comes to any good or service, there are only two choices: the user pays, or other people pay. The status quo is that drivers pay a lot for roads through gasoline taxes and vehicle registration fees, but the rest of society (including non-drivers) pay through income taxes, sales taxes, and property taxes. Moreover, a lot of taxes paid for road construction/maintenance are not proportional to how much you drive; a driver doing double the miles in a year is paying less than twice of another driver.
Please explain your ideal scenario of who pays for roads. And if your answer is "someone else" (e.g. "taxes", "government", "corporations", "billionaires"), further explain why "someone else" can't use the same argument to make you pay.
> but the rest of society (including non-drivers) pay through income taxes, sales taxes, and property taxes.
The rest of society also pays for the transportation costs of consumer goods, which include diesel and gas taxes which end up funding roads. Every time you buy something that rode on a truck, a fraction of the price you pay is road taxes.
You would pay little to no taxes if you completely removed yourself from society and lived deep in the wilderness, but I but you aren't going to do that. I wonder why that is?
I agree with most of this, I just have sort of turned a blind eye to what the code actually probably looks like. Reviews are rapid, and I’ll admit I do feel like I’m betraying my inner programmer by just optimizing directly against the claims of token bot. But the way I see it, as long as the numbers don’t lie I’m okay with the process.
Single greatest thing I did to fix my circadian rhythm was get a sunset/sunrise lighting alarm. I have some hue lights and a "Hatch" alarm clock that both do sunrise lighting and some light morning noise that gradually increases lighting early in the morning. Even when its dark outside, my body has accustomed to it so much that I didn't even notice day light savings at all. Best investment for myself and my daughter I've ever done.
I do the same in the evening. Gradually fading the light low till they turn off one by one, over the course of an hour and a half. It has the reverse effect and makes me sleepy.
I struggled with isolation for a long time but I found that there are some hobbies that have helped me.
- join jiu jitsu (people here are so supportive, it such a solid community and it gets you crazy active)
- join a church you like (believe it or not, there are great ones out there where you can find people that care about you the way God wants to have a personal relationship. In those communities people care about whats going on in your life and it gets your caring about other people. And as a bonus, people will put together pot lucks, bbqs, outings. Gets you in planning mode)
- I started reading books again, novels. Evenings without my family being together in a house alone was rough for a long while. I stopped watching shows in the evenings now and have a much more consistent bedtime routine that involves reading an actual fun book. This has gotten me out of my head, out of my laptop, out of the screen and enjoying stories again. Highly recommend!
If you're ever struggling, feel free to reach out. I am starting a discord server for this community because this seems to come up a lot and HN comments doesn't seem to be a great place to have consistent connection.
https://discord.gg/Hzu3UrthHn
The discomfort you feel is real but manageable. It's good news because you just need to be consistent in doing 1 small thing each day or each week. For me it was, I'm going to go to church and find a small group I'm interested in. Then from there I added in - I'm going to learn guitar and see an actual professional teacher to teach me so I have an in person contact with someone who cares about my progress. Then it was, I'm actually going to regularly have real phone calls with my family (my mom, my brother, etc). I have a daughter so it's much easier for me, but I also live remotely so there's that.
Welcome to late stage capitalism. Where non of the incentives have anything to do with helping people and reducing costs for things people care about - energy, food, healthcare, basic needs.
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