Those most-intelligent of humans who carefully memorized verbally the most important civilizational facts known had the same reaction to the invention of writing.
You are clearly a wizard of a prior era. But it is a new era.
"For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem [275b] to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."
That is a fictional objection raised by the Egyptian god Amun to the Egyptian god Thoth, who was supposed by the Egyptians to have invented music and writing, and was supposed by the Greeks to have invented absolutely everything else too, including botany, surveying, and government.
It's also a critique of writing, written by Plato, to impress on us that Socrates was great orator (or arguer) and was better that way. But it's not somebody's reaction to the invention of writing. It's an imagined reaction to the invention of writing.
Be wonderful if you approached a translated piece, by first considering the time and culture that produced it. Understanding the intent, rather than quoting it out of place.
This is a political critique, on the rule of law (writing) over attempting to treat things on a case by case basis (philosophy).
Quoting it, without understanding it, is part of that author's complaint.
Tangential: I have no issue with it, but this seems by README writing style to be AI-assisted. As time goes on, whether AI was used or not will become far less a point of interest - if the project is good it is good.
The unceremonious use of (what I speculate is) AI-assistance is becoming more normal. I think a lot of people who were die-hard skeptics will just quietly protest less and less. Also, for people who use it well and poorly alike, the urge to not advertise any AI-use at all is common today. People who know how to use it well don't feel the need to explain themselves to unreasonable absolutist skeptics.
I'm not convinced a problem is actually here. I certainly wouldn't believe LLMs, an optional tool, make any part of this fundamentally worse. Maybe superficially for people who can't adapt.
> I can't wait to see Apple Verified™ photos of UFOs flying over the Golden Gate Bridge.
While I'm on board with you about the inabsolute security of this (relative to what's typically expected of cryptographic systems), the fact that their 'verified' state requires a live certification and can be revoked means that the sensor responsible for obviously faked images will see those images and that device no longer certified.
It all relies a lot on trust in Apple, and integration with Apple, and relatively unmotivated attackers.
Certainly not always. There's a hedonic adjustment which happens however, where some tasks go very smoothly without much specification and a lot of "you know what I mean" to the LLM, while others then require you to get painfully specific after it badly misinterprets your intent.
Or maybe you can just get too spoiled with it grokking your intent, then become so vague that your vague ideas are actually just bad ideas. Certainly has happened to me.
After almost 4 years with LLMs, if my prompt is too vague that I don’t know how to ask precisely, I use this prompt “I have this idea… {description here} How would ideal prompt look like to make idea realize?” And in second round I polish prompt myself. It usually works.
> In my work with LLM-included software, I built a tool that evaluates text output relative to a baseline of what's expected. It helps to ensure things don't drift over time.
Is that hotel example real? Curious how exactly you employ this technique—my naive idea was, if talking software development, a sort of 'sanity-check auto-linter agent' catch errors on a regular basis (every 10 seconds, every write, w/e).
Well, it's a real example! No, it's not a true story that I'm aware of, but there are plenty of examples of real chatbots run amok.
I refactored the tool out of my application and it's available now at https://endpointevaluator.com . There's nothing there someone couldn't build themselves, but then you have to spend that time building and maintaining it. I think the ongoing and long term cost of maintaining all this LLM-generated software is under-appreciated. So hopefully there is still space for outsourcing tools that are generic enough to be used by many and provide good value for cost.
Part of the boon of this will just be dealing with less employees.
Not so much reducing cost by reducing headcount, but reducing liability; it's the legal labyrinth which is the barrier to entry to scale business. While it is present elsewhere, it's universal in employment.
The real question is "how big can a business be before it requires a legal department?" That an AI can automate many rote tasks and have some expertise means the benefits of scale with less of the risk.
Oh please. Not only is this needlessly cynical but it demonstrates no ability to think for yourself. "Broad categories I don't like are excited about this, therefore it won't work."
Of course you'd feel no need to justify all the exceptions when people you don't like are excited about a movie, food item or video game. Yuur justification for cynicism is vacuous, which will obscure realistic concerns.
I really have no idea what you're on about. There's TONS of examples of people abusing this already. Will someone make an actual product to help guide a company? For sure. Will it be abused immediately, of course! Is that cynical? Sure, but it's also true.
"No ability to think for myself", ok bud.
"Broad categories I don't like" - found the crypto bro. If by those categories you mean spammy low effort people with no knowledge, ethics or desire to add something valuable to the world then yes - I don't like that category of people.
"Yuur justification for cynicism is vacuous, which will obscure realistic concerns" - Your poor grammar is obscuring your actual meaning. "Yuur"?
Hey enjoy the incoming flood of 100x the email spam, phone/sms spam, AD spam, everything spam, shit non-products, etc. Yeah that sounds like a great time, don't mind this cynical guy here who just "dislikes some kinds of people".
> they'll raze the ground to ashes before anyone can use it for legitimate means.
You were so cynical you thought this one category of people would literally prevent any fruitful use. Now you simply argue with me whether the category exists at all.
> I really have no idea what you're on about. There's TONS of examples of people abusing this already.
I do take your point, that someone against using twitter for training data in AI who then uses a service that might be violating copyright seems hypocritical. But first of all, the people voicing these opinions may not be the same person, despite commenting on the same website.
But more directly addressing your point, I do think you could easily find a consistent moral stance that thinks taking tweets to train AI is worse than republishing those same tweets on a website. An argument can be made that the person writing those tweets wants to be heard, so republishing the tweet is in line with (your best guess of) what they want. Whereas consumption of the tweet for AI training is less likely to be consistent with the wants of the original author.
That's the type of moral stance which doesn't encode well into reality. I don't even agree with it, but it is surely consistent enough from your end. The real issue is that it crosses so many practical legal boundaries, mainly around intent that it will never survive as representative of your actual morals—through the grinder that is the modern legal system.
'Prediction' gets overloaded with optimization. Predictions are binary, optimizations are fuzzy.
If you're saying it's predicting, then each result should be falsifiable.
The result of an LLM output should be able to be scored against what it is supposedly predicting. Of course, that isn't possible, because it isn't predicting anything when giving novel outputs, otherwise that thing would exist independently.
You are clearly a wizard of a prior era. But it is a new era.
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