• @[email protected]
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    63 hours ago

    First and foremost, the dunce is incapable of valuing knowledge that they don’t personally understand or agree with. If they don’t know something, then that thing clearly isn’t worth knowing.

    There is a corollary to this that I’ve seen as well, and it dovetails with the way so many of these guys get obsessed with IQ. Anything they can’t immediately understand must be nonsense not worth knowing. Anything they can understand (or think they understand) that you don’t is clearly an arcane secret of the universe that they can only grasp because of their innate superiority. I think that this is the combination that explains how so many of these dunces believe themselves to be the ubermensch who must exercise authoritarian power over the rest of us for the good of everyone.

    See also the commenter(s) on this thread who insist that their lack of reading comprehension is evidence that they’re clearly correct and are in no way part of the problem.

  • Optional
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    6023 hours ago

    in response to Bender pointing out that ChatGPT and its competitors simply encode relationships between words and have no concept of referent or meaning, which is a devastating critique of what the technology actually does, the absolute best response he can muster for his work is “yeah, but humans don’t do anything more complicated than that”. I mean, speak for yourself Sam: the rest of us have some concept of semiotics, and we can do things like identify anagrams or count the number of letters in a word, which requires a level of recursivity that’s beyond what ChatGPT can muster.

    Boom Shanka (emphasis added)

    • @Feathercrown
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      219 hours ago

      I don’t think those have anything to do with recursion (unless “recursivity” means something else?), they’re just a consequence of the token system ChatGPT is using.

  • @[email protected]
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    23 hours ago

    ‘i am a stochastic parrot and so are u’

    reminds me of

    “In his desperation to have produced reality through computation, he denigrates actual reality by equating it to computation”

    (from this review/analysis of the devs series). A pattern annoying common among the LLM AI fans.

  • David GerardOPM
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    2123 hours ago

    someone sent out the batpromptfondler signal and the mods are in shooting gallery mode

    please refrain from commenting unaccordingly

    • @[email protected]
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      1116 hours ago

      b-but David, they’ve been so reasonable and here we are getting emotional about the fucking garbage technology they’ve come here to shove down our throats alongside a heaping serving of capitalist brainrot from the same types of self-described geniuses who gave us OKRs

  • Optional
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    2023 hours ago

    MRW 38 of the 39 comments have almost nothing to do with the article

  • .Donuts
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    101 day ago

    That website only works in private mode on Firefox for me, and even then some pages display different things than it is saying it will. It feels like an easter egg almost, does someone have more info about this group?

      • .Donuts
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        81 day ago

        I think our comments just crossed each other, read my follow up. I think it was an issue with the site at that specific moment (500 error) instead of the site being quirky

    • @[email protected]
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      51 day ago

      Privacy Browser with JS off (by default) can read the article and navigate, only minor eye-sore are the buttons at the top of the site which are on a transparent background and stay on top of the text as I scroll down

      • .Donuts
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        hmm maybe it was just a temporary issue. I was getting a 500 error while still seeing part of the site, and the about page had some pseudocode on it that I thought was intentional, but maybe it was just being a bit buggy because now it seems fine.

        The blog post itself is an interesting read bytheway, forgot to mention that in my curiosity for interesting web pages

    • David GerardOPM
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      818 hours ago

      sorry you don’t like anger! we’ll improve your lemmyverse experience

    • @[email protected]
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      -515 hours ago

      What is up wit h the design of this website. There’s huge amounts of dead space.

      The content though… it just reads like somebody who’s pretty angry. I do like the odd rant here and there, but this one misses the mark. “I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again” was much more to my liking (despite the damn 3 column design).

  • kbal
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    Perhaps because I paused to read a little of the Dunciad before continuing with this essay, I think many of its attacks lack the precision and wit to justify their viciousness. I’m generally sympathetic to the premise, but whatever its merits it does not compare all that well with Alexander Pope. Maybe there is more insight and entertainment yet to be derived from comparing ChatGPT itself to Dulness.

    • David GerardOPM
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      920 hours ago

      profound reasoning indeed, this way to the egress so you can contemplate further

  • @9point6
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    -41 day ago

    After all, there’s almost nothing that ChatGPT is actually useful for.

    It’s takes like this that just discredit the rest of the text.

    You can dislike LLM AI for its environmental impact or questionable interpretation of fair use when it comes to intellectual property. But pretending it’s actually useless just makes someone seem like they aren’t dissimilar to a Drama YouTuber jumping in on whatever the latest on-trend thing to hate is.

    • snooggums
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      381 day ago

      “Almost nothing” is not the same as “actually useless”. The former is saying the applications are limited, which is true.

      LLMs are fine for fictional interactions, as in things that appear to be real but aren’t. They suck at anything that involves being reliably factual, which is most things including all the stupid places LLMs and other AI are being jammed in to despite being consistely wrong, which tech bros love to call hallucinations.

      They have LIMITED applications, but are being implemented as useful for everything.

      • @[email protected]
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        20 hours ago

        To be honest, as someone who’s very interested in computer generated text and poetry and the like, I find generic LLMs far less interesting than more traditional markov chains because they’re too good at reproducing clichés at the exclusion of anything surprising or whimsical. So I don’t think they’re very good for the unfactual either. Probably a homegrown neural network would have better results.

        • bitwolf
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          1219 hours ago

          Agreed, our chat server ran a Markov chain bot for fun.

          In comparison to ChatGPT on a 2nd server I frequent it had much funnier and random responses.

          ChatGPT tends to just agree with whatever it chose to respond to.

          As for real world use. ChatGPT 90% of the time produces the wrong answer. I’ve enjoyed Circuit AI however. While it also produces incorrect responses, it shares its sources so I can more easily get the right answer.

          All I really want from a chatbot is a gremlin that finds the hard things to Google on my behalf.

        • David GerardOPM
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          1420 hours ago

          GPT-2 was peak LLM because it was bad enough to be interesting, it was all downhill from there

          • @[email protected]
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            1020 hours ago

            Absolutely, every single one of these tools has got less interesting as they refine it so it can only output the platonic ideal of kitsch.

    • Mii
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      291 day ago

      Let’s be real here: when people hear the word AI or LLM they don’t think of any of the applications of ML that you might slap the label “potentially useful” on (notwithstanding the fact that many of them also are in a all-that-glitters-is-not-gold–kinda situation). The first thing that comes to mind for almost everyone is shitty autoplag like ChatGPT which is also what the author explicitly mentions.

      • @9point6
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        -91 day ago

        I’m saying ChatGPT is not useless.

        I’m a senior software engineer and I make use of it several times a week either directly or via things built on top of it. Yes you can’t trust it will be perfect, but I can’t trust a junior engineer to be perfect either—code review is something I’ve done long before AI and will continue to do long into the future.

        I empirically work quicker with it than without and the engineers I know who are still avoiding it work noticeably slower. If it was useless this would not be the case.

        • anar
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          224 minutes ago

          Oh my god, an actual senior softeare engineer??? Amidst all of us mortals??

        • Sailor Sega Saturn
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          15 hours ago

          Senior software engineer programmer here. I have had to tell coworkers “don’t trust anything chat-gpt tells you about text encoding” after it made something up about text encoding.

          • @[email protected]
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            716 hours ago

            ah but did you tell them in CP437 or something fancy (like any text encoding after 1996)? 🤨🤨🥹

            • Sailor Sega Saturn
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              915 hours ago

              Sadly all my best text encoding stories would make me identifiable to coworkers so I can’t share them here. Because there’s been some funny stuff over the years. Wait where did I go wrong that I have multiple text encoding stories?

              That said I mostly just deal with normal stuff like UTF-8, UTF-16, Latin1, and ASCII.

        • @[email protected]
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          1 day ago

          I’m a senior software engineer

          ah, a señor software engineer. excusé-moi monsoir, let me back up and try once more to respect your opinion

          uh, wait:

          but I can’t trust a junior engineer to be perfect either

          whoops no, sorry, can’t do it.

          jesus fuck I hope the poor bastards that are under you find some other place real soon, you sound like a godawful leader

          and the engineers I know who are still avoiding it work noticeably slower

          yep yep! as we all know, velocity is all that matters! crank that handle, produce those features! the factory must flow!!

          fucking christ almighty. step away from the keyboard. go become a logger instead. your opinions (and/or the shit you’re saying) is a big part of everything that’s wrong with industry.

          • @[email protected]
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            and the engineers I know who are still avoiding it work noticeably slower

            yep yep! as we all know, velocity is all that matters! crank that handle, produce those features! the factory must flow!!

            and you fucking know what? it’s not even just me being a snide motherfucker, this rant is literally fucking supported by data:

            The survey found that 75.9% of respondents (of roughly 3,000* people surveyed) are relying on AI for at least part of their job responsibilities, with code writing, summarizing information, code explanation, code optimization, and documentation taking the top five types of tasks that rely on AI assistance. Furthermore, 75% of respondents reported productivity gains from using AI.

            As we just discussed in the above findings, roughly 75% of people report using AI as part of their jobs and report that AI makes them more productive.

            And yet, in this same survey we get these findings:

            if AI adoption increases by 25%, time spent doing valuable work is estimated to decrease 2.6% if AI adoption increases by 25%, estimated throughput delivery is expected to decrease by 1.5% if AI adoption increases by 25%, estimated delivery stability is expected to decrease by 7.2%

            and that’s a report sponsored and managed right from the fucking lying cloud company, no less. a report they sponsor, run, manage, and publish is openly admitting this shit. that is how much this shit doesn’t fucking work the way you sell it to be doing.

            but no, we should trust your driveby bullshit. motherfucker.

            • knightly the Sneptaur
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              -71 day ago

              Lol, using a survey to try and claim that your argument is “supported by data”.

              Of course the people who use Big Autocorrect think it’s useful, they’re still using it. You’ve produced a tautology and haven’t even noticed. XD

              • @[email protected]
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                1124 hours ago

                it may be a shock to learn this, but asking people things is how you find things out from them

                I know it requires speaking to humans, alas, c’est la vie

                • knightly the Sneptaur
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                  -323 hours ago

                  It may be a shock to learn this, but asking people things is how you find out what they think, not what is true.

                  I know proof requires more than just speaking to humans, alas, c’est la vie.

          • @raspberriesareyummy
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            161 day ago

            Thank you for saving me the breath to shit on that person’s attitude :)

            • @[email protected]
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              181 day ago

              yw

              these arseslugs are so fucking tedious, and for almost 2 decades they’ve been dragging everything and everyone around them down to their level instead of finding some spine and getting better

              • @raspberriesareyummy
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                181 day ago

                word. When I hear someone say “I’m a SW developer and LLM xy helps me in my work” I always have to stop myself from being socially unacceptably open about my thoughts on their skillset.

                • @[email protected]
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                  1524 hours ago

                  and that’s the pernicious bit: it’s not just their skillset, it also goes right to their fucking respect for their team. “I don’t care about just barfing some shit into the codebase, and I don’t think my team will mind either!”

                  utter goddamn clownery

          • @9point6
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            -71 day ago

            let me back up and try once more to respect your opinion

            The point of me saying that was to imply I’ve been in the industry for a couple of decades, and have a good amount of experience from before all this. It wasn’t any kind of appeal to authority, but I can see how you can read it that way.

            jesus fuck I hope the poor bastards that under you find some other place real soon, you sound like a godawful leader

            I’m sorry, do you trust junior engineers blindly? That’s gonna lead to a much worse outcome than if they get feedback when they do something wrong. Frankly, I don’t trust any engineer to be perfect, we’re humans and humans make mistakes, that’s why we do code review as a fundamental skill in this industry. It’s one of the primary ways for people to develop their ability.

            yep yep! as we all know, velocity is all that matters! crank that handle, produce those features! the factory must flow!!

            In an industry where many companies are tightening the belt, yes it’s important to perform well—I kinda want to keep my job and ideally get a good bonus. It would be pretty foolish to leave free productivity on the table when the alternative is working harder to bridge the gap, where I could spend that energy doing more productive stuff.

              • @[email protected]
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                1117 hours ago

                “I just want to be a cog in the machiiiiiiine why are you bringing up these things that make me think?! ew ethics and integrity are so hard

            • @[email protected]
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              191 day ago

              I’m sorry, do you trust junior engineers blindly?

              as a starting position, fucking YES. you know why I hired that person? because I believe they can do the job and grow in it. you know what happens if they make a mistake? I give them all the goddamn backup they need to handle it and grow.

              “this is why code review is so important” jfc. you’re one of those “I’ve worked here for 4 years and I’m a senior” types, aren’t you

              • Warren Christmas
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                @froztbyte @9point6 There’s a distinct difference between “I have twenty years of experience” and “I’ve had the same ten minutes of experience over and over again, over a twenty year period” 🤷

              • @9point6
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                -21 day ago

                So you don’t do code review? Something that’s pretty much industry standard?

                What on earth do you work on where it’s inconsequential to trust someone new to the industry blindly?

                If I could trust someone anything remotely close to “blindly”, they absolutely would not have been hired as a junior.

                • @[email protected]
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                  1624 hours ago

                  yep yep. no code review. no version control either. that’s weak shit only babies use. over here you deploy patches by live editing app memory in production, and you update the codebase by editing the central repo using vscode remote. everyone has access to it because monorepos are what google do and so do we.

                  you have a 100% correct comprehension takeaway of what I said, well done!

                  jfc no wonder you’re fine with LLMs

                • @[email protected]
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                  51 day ago

                  I, for one, am not in the industry and can’t figure out why people are coming at you with guns blazing. 🙄

        • Mii
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          I’m a senior software engineer

          Nice, me too, and whenever some tech-brained C-suite bozo tries to mansplain to me why LLMs will make me more efficient, I smile, nod politely, and move on, because at this point I don’t think I can make the case that pasting AI slop into prod is objectively a worse idea than pasting Stack Overflow answers into prod.

          At the end of the day, if I want to insert a snippet (which I don’t have to double-check, mind you), auto-format my code, or organize my imports, which are all things I might use ChatGPT for if I didn’t mind all the other baggage that comes along with it, Emacs (or Vim, if you swing that way) does this just fine and has done so for over 20 years.

          I empirically work quicker with it than without and the engineers I know who are still avoiding it work noticeably slower.

          If LOC/min or a similar metric is used to measure efficiency at your company, I am genuinely sorry.

          • @9point6
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            -424 hours ago

            I agree with you on the examples listed, there are much better tools than an LLM for that. And I agree no one should be copy and pasting without consideration, that’s a misuse of these tools.

            I’d say my main uses are kicking off a new test suite (obviously you need to go and check the assertions are what you expect, but it’s usually about 95% there) which has gone from a decent percentage of the work for a feature down to an almost negligible amount of time. This one also results in me enjoying my job a bit more now too as I’ve always found writing tests a bit of a drudgery.

            The other big use for me is that my organisation is pretty big and has a hefty amount of code (a good couple of thousand repos at least), we have a tool that’s based on GPT which has processed all the code, so you can now ask queries about internal stuff that may not be well documented or particularly obvious. This one saves a load of time because I now don’t always have to do the Slack merry go round to try and find an engineer that knows about what I’m looking for—sometimes it’s still unavoidable, but they’re less frequent moments now.

            If LOC/min or a similar metric is used to measure efficiency at your company, I am genuinely sorry.

            It’s tied to OKR completion, which is generally based around delivery. If you deliver more feature work, it generally means your team’s scores will be higher and assuming your manager is aware of your contributions, that translates to a bigger bonus. It’s more of a carrot than a stick situation IMO, I could work less hard if I didn’t want the extra money.

            • @[email protected]
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              1420 hours ago

              It’s tied to OKR completion, which is generally based around delivery. If you deliver more feature work, it generally means your team’s scores will be higher and assuming your manager is aware of your contributions, that translates to a bigger bonus.

              holy fuck. you’re so FAANG-brained I’m willing to bet you dream about sending junior engineers to the fulfillment warehouse to break their backs

              motherfucking, “i unironically love OKRs and slurping raises out of management if they notice I’ve been sleeping under my desk again to get features in” do they make guys like you in a factory? does meeting fucking normal software engineers always end like it did in this thread? will you ever realize how fucking embarrassing it is to throw around your job title like this? you depressing little fucker.

              • @Feathercrown
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                118 hours ago

                How are directly adversarial posts like this allowed when well-reasoned arguments result in bans from the community just for disagreeing with the majority opinion? Look around you, TechTakers. This is not a healthy environment.

            • @[email protected]
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              1523 hours ago

              I worked at one of the biggest AI companies and their internal AI question/answer was dogshit for anything that could be answered by someone with a single fold in their brain. Maybe your co has a much better one, but like most others, I’m gonna go with the smooth brain hypothesis here.

          • @Feathercrown
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            Waiter, more cringe please

        • @faltryka
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          -121 day ago

          Another professional here. Lemmy really isn’t a place where you’re going to find people listening to what you have to say and critically examining their existing positions. You’re right, and you’re going to get downvoted for it.

        • @[email protected]
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          -81 day ago

          In this and other use cases I call it a pretty effective search engine, instead of scrolling through stackexchange after clicking between google ads, you get the cleaned up example code you needed. Not a Chat with any intelligence though.

          • @[email protected]
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            That ChatGPT can be more useful than a web search is really more indicative of how bad the web has got, and can only get worse as fake text invades it. It’s not actually better than a functional search engine and a functional web, but the companies making these things have no interest in the web being usable. Pretty depressing.

            • Sailor Sega Saturn
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              816 hours ago

              Remember when you could read through all the search results on Google rather than being limited to the first hundred or so results like today? And boolean search operators actually worked and weren’t hidden away behind a “beware of leopard” sign? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

          • @[email protected]
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            221 day ago

            “despite the many people who have shown time and time and time again that it definitely does not do fine detail well and will often present shit that just 10000% was not in the source material, I still believe that it is right all the time and gives me perfectly clean code. it is them, not I, that are the rubes”

            • @[email protected]
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              1323 hours ago

              The problem with stuff like this is not knowing when you dont know. People who had not read the books SSC Scott was reviewing didnt know he had missed the points (or not read the book at all) till people pointed it out in the comments. But the reviews stay up.

              Anyway this stuff always feels like a huge motte bailey, where we go from ‘it has some uses’ to ‘it has some uses if you are a domain expert who checks the output diligently’ back to ‘some general use’.

            • @[email protected]
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              -51 day ago

              Ahah I’m totally with you, I just personally know people that love it because they have never learned how to use a search engine. And these generalist generative AIs are trained on gobbled up internet basically, while also generating so many dangerous mistakes, I’ve read enough horror stories.

              I’m in science and I’m not interested in ChatGPT, wouldn’t trust it with a pancake recipe. Even if it was useful to me I wouldn’t trust the vendor lock-in or enshittification that’s gonna come after I get dependent on aa tool in the cloud.

              A local LLM on cheap or widely available hardware with reproducible input / output? Then I’m interested.

    • @[email protected]
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      291 day ago

      It’s useful insofar as you can accommodate its fundamental flaw of randomly making stuff the fuck up, say by having a qualified expert constantly combing its output instead of doing original work, and don’t mind putting your name on low quality derivative slop in the first place.

      • @Feathercrown
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        219 hours ago

        Does a serial complainer use buzzwords? Ugh.

    • David GerardOPM
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      1223 hours ago

      actually you know what? with all the motte and baileying, you can take a month off. bye!