It is not enough to simply say you have done something interesting (which is all that this blog post amounts to), we as humans want to know the story of it, it's that that makes it interesting. You can't get that story if you're just vibecoding it, much like how the one person involved in Wolfram Alpha spent a lot of tokens on an LLM that constructed alternative forms of logic, and came away from it thinking that it was worthless, the entire time wasted, because there was absolutely no way for a human to interact with it, those logics had no story or analogies or anything for a human to latch on to.

    - Multithreading (using all hyper-threads / CPU cores)
    - Video mode up to Full HD (1920x1080 / 16 bpp)
    - 64-iterative ray-casting
    - Pure DOS with Protected Mode (no drivers, no DPMI)

It is a seriously technically impressive demo, if not being the most visually impressive.

> not sure if this is just me, but after updating rsync, my cpu usage got so bad during my daily backups that i had to stop timeshift from running forever

Or, phrased differently - People are frustrated and annoyed that the tool they trusted with their backups and data are seeing a huge number of regressions and new bugs that break their entire backup infrastructure, all because the main dev is vibecoding that software. Vibecoding experts like Simon Wilson explicitly state that vibecoding is 'viable' in the sense of "only if you hold the tool in a specific way", and this person is either not doing that, or that statement is untruthful. If you actually read the thread in question and just skim over the argument two people are having, there are multiple reports from users in industrial and government settings that now have to go through whole processes to update this software, simply because the software has become immediately untrustworthy in a way that directly harms users and defeats the entire point of the software in question.

I think I would also be mad if I relied on this software for my 500gb+ backups, and I wonder how many more issues have been introduced that we simply won't learn about until a company has a $10 million dollar data loss because they were not testing their backups consistently.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rh50Cht9tUc

https://www.reddit.com/r/glutenfree/comments/81pvql/the_best...

There's also this guy's recipe which is apparently pretty good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZH-GUFBrz0

Personally I do a 'lazy pizza' which is just a really basic primitive bread (like how people would have made bread before yeast):

The original recipe was:

- 8oz doves farm self raising flour (or any celiac self raising flour. but doves is the og and the best IMHO)

- 1 large or medium egg

- 1 tsp baking powder

- cold water to mix (alternatively: a cup and a bit of water with 1tsp chia seeds in it, you want them in the water for about 10 - 20 minutes with regular (regular!) stirring. stirring every time they kinda coalesce at the bottom. it should look like frogs spawn by the time you're through.)

Oil pan well, put soft dough in (you want it like. soft enough that it starts to spread just a little. but not so wet that it's spreading a lot. you do NOT want it as dry as a normal non-celiac bread because there is no gluten to hold on to the water). flatten with oily silicon brush, then top. cook at 180°C for 20 minutes or so. You might want to cook it a little before topping if your toppings are cooked already. And honestly, I just eyeball the cooking time based on how it behaves.

The chia seeds help make it a little chewy, which apparently is part of how pizza dough usually reacts, as well as pulling and stabilising any moisture so it doesn't get soggy.

All of these systems are designed around the core idea of "a human acting irrationally or improperly is not at fault" and, furthermore, that a human can have a bad day and still avoid a mistake. They all steer someone around a possible fault. Hell, the reason why we divide the road into lanes is itself a forcing function to avoid traffic collisions!

So, where is the forcing function in large language models? What part of a large language model prevents gross misuse by laymen?

I can think of examples here and there, maybe. OpenAI had to add guard rails to stop people from poisoning themselves with botulism and boron, etc. But the problem here is that the LLM is probabilistic, so there's really no guarantee that those guard rails will hold. I seem to remember there being a paper from a few months back, posted here, that show AI guardrails cannot be proven to work consistently. In that context, LLMs cannot be considered "safe" or "reliable" enough for use. Eddie Burback has a very, very good video showing an absolute worst case result of this[1], that was posted here last year. Even then, off the top of my head Angela Collier has a really, really good video demonstrating that there's an absolute plethora of people who have succumbed, in large ways or small, to the bullshit AI can spew[2].

I feel like if most developers were actually serious about being an engineering discipline, like we claim, then we wouldn't have all jumped on the LLM bandwagon until they'd been properly tested and had a certain level of reliability. Instead there are a sizable chunk of people saying they've stopped coding by hand entirely, and aren't even reviewing the code! i.e. They've thrown out a forcing function that existed to prevent errorenous PRs being committed! And for some bizzare reason, after about 2 decades of people talking about type safety and how we need formal verification to reduce error, everyone seems to be throwing "reduction of error" out the window!

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavior-shaping_constraint (if you're curious about the term)

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRjgNgJms3Q

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pqF90rstZQ

The art of essay-writing seems to not be something people here care about any more. If a human didn't bother to write it, why should I bother to read it?! Just post up the bullet points you would feed the LLM, and let the people who want to do so, post it into their own LLMs so they can make the Content and shovel it into their eyeballs by themselves, instead.

> The difference is in the kind of errors machines make compared to ones that humans make.

There's another difference, and that is that other humans can learn and study that mental model (which is why "readable code" is a goal — the code is a physical manifestation of the model that you, the programmer, has to learn), and then the model can be tweaked and taught back to the original programmer, who can then think of that tweak in the future. Programming is inherently (in most cases) a collaborative art, because you're working with people to collectively develop a mental model and refine it, smoothing it down until (as Christopher Alexander said) there are no misfits between the model and the domain.

Fundamentally, LLM do not construct a consistent mental model of the codebase (this can be seen if you, uh, read LLM code,), and this is Bad for a lot of reasons. It's bad for long-term maintainability, it's bad for modelling this code accurately and it's behaviour as a system, it's bad for testing and verifying it, etc. Pretty much all of the tasks around program design require you to have that mental model.

You can absolutely get an LLM to show you a mental model of the code, but there is absolutely nothing that can 100% guarantee you that that's the thing it's using. Proof of this is to look at how they summarise documents, to look at how inaccurate a lot of documentation they generate is, and to look at how inaccurate a lot of their code summaries are. Those would be accurate if the LLM was forming a mental model while it worked. It's a program to statistically generate plausible text, the fact that we got the program to do more than that in the first place is very interesting and can imply a lot of things, but at the end of the day, whatever you ask for it, it will generate text. There is absolutely no guarantee around accuracy of that text and there effectively can never be.

Now, HDMI, on the other hand... yeesh

Call your loved ones :(

Oh absolutely, I think that people in STEM should receive at least a cursory education in the Arts, and likewise I think people in the Arts should receive at least a cursory education in STEM. It doesn't have to be detailed, but it would be cool to have cross-disciplinary collaboration introduced into the higher learning ecosystem!

An issue I've consistently seen is STEM professionals musing in their own time about Sociology and Psychology, and their musings are almost always wrong — there's this arrogance to it where they think that instead of reading a book on Sociology 101, they think that they can reason about it from first principles, or computational principles. It used to happen a lot in spaces I occupied (notably, the community around 100 rabbits were incredibly fond of this), and I kept interjecting, like- no people have done studies on this, yes they are rigorous studies, this has been investigated in detail for about a hundred years and the answer to all your questions are literally answered in an introductory book on the subject.

Despite that, they used to just ignore me, and instead preferred to muddle on with this broken, strange understanding of the topic. You can see the same kind of strange mix of arrogance and intelligence within the Less Wrong community as a whole. Rational Wiki has a very good page somewhere that covers a number of their efforts to break into other fields, and how, without a willingness to open their minds and submit themselves to the knowledge of others, they have found their ideas and ventures broken in some fundamental way, without understanding why.

I think that without said cross-disciplinary education, there's a risk of CS professionals not understanding how deep and vastly more complex other STEM fields are (CS is entirely human constructions, Molecular Biology however deals with the very messy reality of evolution throwing things at the wall for four billion years). Some of the most notable and influential individuals in Computer Science have initially studied under non-CS fields (Alan Kay, David Knight, Larry Wall), and you can see very clearly (or at least, it feels very clear to me) how this has influenced their work within CS in very positive ways. Learning of ideas that are new and different to your native field of study seem to encourage a kind of creativity that many are searching for. So it seems a complete and utter shame that more people aren't willing to find humility and wide-eyed glee at the prospect of learning other fields from undergraduate material up.

For a lot of sciences, we are very lucky that it is still possible. But the reason why scientists do not allow such an open dialogue with laypeople is because the majority of answers are going to boil down to either "that question doesn't make any sense, and i would have to spend the entire rest of the session teaching you why" or "we already did these experiments a bunch of times in the last hundred years, and found out the result, but the result is tricky because of so and so mitigating factors, and for me to explain these results and how to even interpret them in the first place (e.g. explaining how it was measured, explaining the theory behind why we chose that method to measure it, explaining what the numbers we get mean, etc.) would take the entire rest of the session"

And then of course, there's the frequent crackpots. Pretty much anyone within a science discipline who is even decently well known, especially if they're in physics, gets multiple emails a day from crackpots about how their theories are going to "totally blow a hole in the established knowledge", and at some point you hit a point where you're stuck between "spending 4 hours drafting a response to someone who has not bothered to put in the time to learn physics, and wouldn't listen to you anyway because they think they know it all", and "getting actual work done in your field". The scientists I know do take time out of their day to answer actual questions from inquisitive folk, but the difficulty is that thanks to the addition of ChatGPT, those questions are getting more and more cramped out by the crackpots armed with a hallucinating dictionary.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47904589

Points: 9

# Comments: 0

I certainly don't buy it, and IIRC only 15% of the broader workforce use genAI for their jobs. Offices are having to force people to use it, and even then people don't like it. Programming is an outlier in this regard because, it turns out, most of what we've been doing is solving the same tasks over and over again in different domains (which is what A Pattern Language was designed to solve). Most other work is not like this.

For the arts, and for most media, what humans have been craving for about a decade now is authenticity. They want a real person they can connect to, an artist whose work makes them feel seen. The artists who have recognized this with a good command of media have been growing sustainably and there's a big industry in this now. There is a certain proportion of people who like the slop, sure. But the actual fact of the matter is that the younger generations, 20 - 30yros, can smell slop from a mile away, and adding slop to advertising, to your media, to your art, actually makes it sell worse. Exactly because it is inauthentic. Talk to literally anyone in advertising whose company tried AI ads. You see an uptick among 50-60 year olds, and a massive, massive downturn among 16 - 30 yros.

From a media executive standpoint, most of the media properties that are inauthentic have been failing massively, with a handful of them able to turn a quick buck before they fail. Execs are verrrry slowly learning the fact that media produced for a very quick ROI and for the branding and marketing potential tend to fizzle out quickly, whereas passion projects are sustainable income, a well you can keep going back to. Whether or not they value that well as much as independent creatives do... ehhhh.

For programming, there's not much to stop people from using the stuff because barely any higher-up supports "building bridges safely". What executives want from programming is a quick ROI, they don't even care if customers complain. So what I forsee for programmers is that the field is going to be gradually flooded with people using genAI. This will drive the cost of our labour downwards, while people are expected to give 10x or 20x the output that they did 5 years ago "because AI makes them fast". This turns every job into a rush job which makes the software system as a whole much less stable. I forsee a number of Horizon IT level problems in the next 10 years. But by then, programming will be much more on the level of a truck job where you have to piss in a bottle and keep driving, or a sales call job where your manager will pull you up if you're 5% under par. Just remember, everyone jumping on the AI train did this to our field.

But, it's not inevitable. It's only inevitable if we all keep shouting that the AI bros have won, from the rooftops. That's the hype keeping this bubble alive. The entire AI bubble currently rests on marketing, and the first step in bursting that bubble is to simply not believe the lies that you are being sold.

I'm a little off being thirty years old. I've played musical instruments of my own accord since I was 3 years old learning violin in an orchestra. I did folk music through my teens. I know about 5+ instruments and I've gigged at pubs, fields, parks, events, and a wedding. I have never touched genAI for music, and I really do not need to. I've listened to the output of genAI for music. It's samey, repetitive, and bland. "Slop" is a very good descriptor. Frankly I can't see a single reason why I would want to destroy my entire creative process and have it output by a black box. Why would I contract someone else to play my own music, let alone a machine?! Baffling. Most of the people around my own age are getting super into vinyl and cassettes and records because they like the fact that you can hold something in your hands. Because they like connecting to an artist. AI slop does not give them that, cannot give them that, and artists who think that the AI slop is better than them are a) obviously not very good in the first place, b) foregoing their own personal development as an artist in service of chasing trends. Trend chasers have never lasted long in creative work, and honestly, they're selecting themselves out of the pool. They're selecting for an audience who no more likes their work than the work of any other sloptist. You can't see me but I'm giving a biiiiig fucking shrug right now, like the jurassic park guy. Nobody cares about sloptists, sloppers, soupies. They don't care about the art, they only care about the profit, and people can smell that a mile off.

"You need to learn that the product of your writing is yourself. You are the artwork. The time you spend writing will change you, it will make your better at expressing yourself. You'll have a wonderful time, but you'll also grow as a person, you'll become more empathetic. The product of your writing is you. You are the artwork." - Brandon Sanderton

https://www.youtube.com/clip/Ugkx9ldrFvp0RO1HNyPg8Xafh0NYlC2...

I think that the people inside the US healthcare system mean well, but unfortunately the system itself is setup purely to generate exponential profits off illness. I think that the range of therapy, and sometimes medication that we have available to us is a fucking godsend and I'm glad that it's improving, but the number of gates in front of getting any of it are often completely impossible for someone who is in physical or mental peril.

Both me and my wife have been homeless, and there is -no support- for this. There's "support" on paper, but the reality of it is that most shelters have turn you away because they're underfunded and overfilled. Receiving support is a difficult thing to navigate when you're doing well, which makes a lot of the hurdles impossible to navigate when you're not doing well.

It would be cheaper and vastly more effective to simply give people UBI, a place to stay (there are hundreds of thousands of places with no homeowner and actively rotting in the UK, because they've been bought up by a conglomerate and neglected), and addiction support/mental health support. The research even supports the efficacy of doing this, and various pilot programs show that it's vastly more effective and cheaper. But hah! It doesn't seem like it should work because of the lies that have been told about the homeless, and it's not convenient to the narrative of "you just gotta work harder. I guess it's your fault you're poor" so I guess we're not getting it anytime soon.

I want to be clear. I am 100% on-board with AI being absolutely shit.

Buuuut, this has always been the case. Before it was scammers taking images from the web and undercutting you with prints, now it's scammers stealing your artistic style.

It sucks, but it's not a brand new problem. What makes it particularly bad now is that there's a much larger flood of it.