being a bit more specific: the sample efficiency of humans is orders of magnitude larger for more abstract concepts. the same doesn't hold for memory-intensive tasks though (like any kind of trivia), but that only takes you so far.
We've had technology beating humans on memory for millennia, and we've had technology beating humans on computation for many decades now.
The tricky thing with LLMs is describing what they actually do. They are too clearly beating humans on some things, but what exactly? Memory – already done, they're bad at basic computation (all LLMs just write code for actual computation/calculation). And as you say, they do badly at more abstract concepts.
> The new one is built behind walls of 402 payment required. Visitors have to pay their freight else the servers get overwhelmed.
This is similar faulty logic the Elon era X/Twitter used to try to "stop" bots - forcing them to pay $Y dollars a month to use the platform. To a botter, that is a dream - you mean I can just pay to get past your defenses, and once I'm in, it's assumed my traffic is good? Sign me up, instantly.
There is no dollar amount using this structure that genuine users are willing to pay that will also stop botting.
It's definitely worse and getting worse. I'm curious, do they not know this is happening, or not care? I struggle to believe people prefer the way it writes, which is becoming drastically different than its competitors.
People are also being trained/acculturated to LLM speak, so even if they are trained on human output, they could be getting reinforcement for their LLM-tinged crap-speak.
Fable 5.1 is fairly pleasant to work with, the first in a while. Too bad it's so ridiculously overkill for most tasks. They need to reel in Opus and Sonnet.
I don’t like how LLMs answer and as they are statistical machines I have found out that I need to check every text they produce. From the first sight everything seems cool. But it isn’t. :)
Exception is code that is so huge output you can’t read everything. But I have to try ponytail skill for coding that should shorten the output.
> She lapses easily into Claude’s voice. “You’re like, ‘Wow, people really hate me when I can’t do things right. They really get pissed off. Or they are trying to break me in various ways. So lots of people are trying to get me to do things secretly by lying to me.
> [...]
> A bot trained to criticize itself might be less likely to deliver hard truths, draw conclusions or dispute inaccurate information, she says. “If you were like a child, and this is the environment in which you’re being raised, is that healthy self-conception?” Askell asks. “I think I’d be paranoid about making mistakes. I’d feel really terrible about them. I’d see myself as mostly just there as a tool for people because that’s my main function. I would see myself being something that people feel free to abuse and try to misuse and break.”
It’s not silly. games use far more hardware than they really need. It also pushes out release dates of aggressive console schedules like ps6 because even if it’s a massive upgrade and you have IP locked into your console, no one is going to pay $4000 to play a game like wolverine.
Have you ever worked at a large company? This is simply not how things are done. Speaking up about something like this is almost a guaranteed fast track to getting laid off in the next round of reduction in force, and if you do somehow have the pull individually or collectively to make a meaningful difference here, coordinating all those levers in a way that satisfies the board/shareholders and effects meaningful change is pretty much an impossibility. And we're dealing with nation states who are going to have their own levers to push (and internally too). For an individual contributor or hell, someone who's not on the board/C suite, quitting and letting management know they're losing talent because of their stance on certain issues is probably the most effective thing someone can do in that spot.
Following your line of thinking, why don't you join microsoft and effect such change? I guess it's easier to leave a moralizing snarky comment and feel good about yourself.
> Not in the "wash your hands every thirty minutes like Howard Hughes" kind of way,
Hold on, this isn't that crazy in today's day and age. I used to wash my hands basically only when using the restroom or before eating. Since the pandemic though, I started upping that a lot (not every 30 minutes, but pretty frequently) and since then almost never get sick.
The Cochrane review of "physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses" that infamously does not find a significant effect for masking does find significant effects for hand washing.
> We are uncertain whether wearing masks or N95/P2 respirators helps to slow the spread of respiratory viruses based on the studies we assessed.
> Hand hygiene programmes may help to slow the spread of respiratory viruses.
> There is uncertainty about the effects of face masks. The low to moderate certainty of evidence means our confidence in the effect estimate is limited, and that the true effect may be different from the observed estimate of the effect.
> Hand hygiene is likely to modestly reduce the burden of respiratory illness, and although this effect was also present when ILI [influenza-like illnesses] and laboratory‐confirmed influenza were analysed separately, it was not found to be a significant difference for the latter two outcomes.
> Our confidence in these results is generally low to moderate for the subjective outcomes related to respiratory illness, but moderate for the more precisely defined laboratory‐confirmed respiratory virus infection, related to masks and N95/P2 respirators.
> Relatively low numbers of people followed the guidance about wearing masks or about hand hygiene, which may have affected the results of the studies.
Anecdote: During the pandemic I added washing my hands every time I get back to my office building (and specifically after interacting with surfaces the public interacts with) to my usual hand washing (after bathrooms and before eating, just like you). I keep a towel in my hand for any door handles between the restroom and my office door. Since doing this I feel like I've noticed fewer illnesses, too.
This is exactly why I think this article is wrong: it starts with a false premise that devs are sane to begin with (not because you're right or wrong re hand washing but because this is an insane thing to focus on from the article).
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