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kescusay

@ kescusay @lemmy.world

Posts

18
Comments

709
Joined

3 yr. ago

Developer and refugee from Reddit

Moderating

Not The Onion lemmy.world

4d ago

Microsoft executive vice president bemoans employees sending him "AI slop," saying "This is a doom loop."
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kescusay @lemmy.world 4d ago
It is terrible for a first draft if you're aiming for something that reads like a human being's actual thoughts. Don't let an LLM think for you and create the first draft of "your" thoughts. At most, if you absolutely must, use it as a spell checker. But write your words yourself.
No one wants to know what ChatGPT thinks. We might want to know what you think... But only if it's actually you doing the thinking.

6d ago

Husband jailed for using robot vacuum to catch his wife cheating - Dexerto

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kescusay @lemmy.world 6d ago

Locking this post, as people are behaving horribly in the comments.

1w ago

Hillary showing zero lessons learned from her defeat

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kescusay @lemmy.world 1w ago

Not me. This shit source should be banned from the community.

2w ago

Anthropic expected to tell investors it sees over $30 trillion in potential revenue, WSJ reports

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kescusay @lemmy.world 2w ago

It's already happening. Software instability is becoming a major problem.

2w ago

Anthropic expected to tell investors it sees over $30 trillion in potential revenue, WSJ reports

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kescusay @lemmy.world 2w ago

Honest answer? Not much... yet. As the stupidity of "tokenmaxxing" and replacing developers with hallucinations-and-plagiarism engines really comes into focus, I expect developer hiring to ramp back up.

2w ago

Two Dan Sullivans to appear on Alaska’s US Senate ballot in November’s midterm elections

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kescusay @lemmy.world 2w ago

He probably is. Maybe if Republicans stopped cheating, lying, and behaving like abysmal, horrid monsters at every conceivable turn and using every dirty trick in the book, Democrats wouldn't have decided that they need to fight fire with fire.

I'm not condoning this, but it is an utterly predictable outcome after decades of Democrats trying to take the high road while Republicans turn taking the low road into an art form.

2w ago

Anthropic expected to tell investors it sees over $30 trillion in potential revenue, WSJ reports

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kescusay @lemmy.world 2w ago

Meanwhile, in the real world, my company has locked down usage of Anthropic's top-tier models, because costs were out of control. Even the low-end models are usage-capped, and developers are starting to write code by hand again.

And we're busily setting up local models we control ourselves on our network edge. We'll probably end up with a modest budget for frontier models (until the model providers collapse), but most of the coding will be done by local models and developers themselves.

And that seems to be the way the entire industry is going, unless Anthropic starts subsidizing tokens with investor money again.

In conclusion: Get fucked, Dario.

2w ago

80% of developers find AI coding more addictive than helpful

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kescusay @lemmy.world 2w ago

As I've mentioned elsewhere, not if by "information" you mean semantic content that a mind can process. What they have are vector fields (essentially just numbers) with statistically more or less likely relationships.

If I say, "take me out to the ballgame" to an LLM, the tokens representing the words in the next verse of the song are statistically "close" in the vector database, so it's likely to generate them. But that doesn't mean it actually knows the lyrics... or even has those lyrics recorded in a regular database anywhere.

That's why they hallucinate. The model determines that the next token is something nonsensical, but it has no way of understanding that it has made a mistake. In a sense, it actually hasn't made a mistake. It's done exactly what it's designed to do. It's just that in the case of hallucinations, its output isn't useful.

2w ago

80% of developers find AI coding more addictive than helpful

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kescusay @lemmy.world 2w ago

They're information, but not the same information that was used to create them.

2w ago

80% of developers find AI coding more addictive than helpful

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kescusay @lemmy.world 2w ago

No, they really don't. That's not how they work. At least, not if the "information" you're talking about is real semantic content that real minds can process.

Every piece of information you think an LLM has access to is actually just converted into a stream of additional tokens that are fed into the model to (hopefully usefully) modify the next tokens it predicts. That's not the same thing as having actual access to information. Tokens are just numbers with statistically more (or less) likely relationships to each other.

I'm not trying to downplay LLMs. They're architecturally interesting and have genuine uses. I'm just trying to head off a bit of technical inaccuracy.

2w ago

Canada Vows to Match Punishing U.S. Tariffs ‘Dollar for Dollar’ as Trump Fails to Reach Deal

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kescusay @lemmy.world 2w ago

Just a reminder that it's illegal for Trump to unilaterally impose these tariffs without congressional approval. Again. Again.

2w ago

80% of developers find AI coding more addictive than helpful

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kescusay @lemmy.world 2w ago

The important thing to remember is that it actually has zero access to information, because that's not how LLMs work.

At their core, they're vector databases, and they're trying to probabilistically come up with the next most likely token in a stream of tokens found in the DB. You can manipulate the stream by injecting text such as the content of existing files (which becomes more tokens) into the stream, but it never actually understands any of it.

That's why hallucinations are inherently unavoidable. It's really all just hallucinations. It's just that you can sometimes get useful text from their hallucinations if they happen to comport with reality.

4w ago

Terabytes of credentials leaked in massive supply-chain attack

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kescusay @lemmy.world 4w ago

Jesus Tapdancing Christ...

4w ago

Which fictional universe do you wish you lived in?

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kescusay @lemmy.world 4w ago

1000%. Functionally unlimited lifespan in which to explore the universe, in a super-intelligent ship that contains the sum of civilizational knowledge? Hell yeah, sign me up!

4w ago

Terabytes of credentials leaked in massive supply-chain attack

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kescusay @lemmy.world 4w ago

Isn't this the breach that was widely reported on in March? And they're just now disclosing the scale of the exposure?

4w ago

Linus Torvalds says AI has made 'huge' Linux kernel updates the new normal

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kescusay @lemmy.world 4w ago

Ugh. If this makes my Linux systems less stable, I don't even know what the fuck I'm going to do. I won't go back to Windows, I'm not buying Macs (which have their own software problems anyway), and my hardware probably won't work with any BSD variant.

4w ago

Why Is Everyone In Tech So Sad?

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kescusay @lemmy.world 4w ago

We're sad because a lot of people have bought into overly-hyped bullshit factories made by assholes who claim they can replace us.

They can't, but our employers are currently too uninformed (or addicted to the bullshit, or desperate to prop up their stock prices) to realize that the bullshit factories aren't capable of replacing us.

That's causing a lot of turmoil in the form of unnecessary layoffs and rehires, worsening software quality, and general job insecurity.

4w ago

Harry Potter fans force relocation of £430m undersea cable to avoid Dobby’s ‘grave’

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kescusay @lemmy.world 4w ago

You should read His Dark Materials or The Old Kingdom. Both series are much, much more thoughtfully put together. Their plotting and characterization really put HP to shame.

4w ago

Why Normal People Aren’t Using AI Agents

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kescusay @lemmy.world 4w ago

The difference here is that a cheap AI chip won't fix the fundamental software problems with LLMs. We might reach a point where they can produce output faster, but as long as what's actually going on is probabilistic next-token prediction in a static vector database, that just means faster mistakes as well.

There's an odd psychosis going around where people become convinced that actual AGI can be derived from this technology. People who should know better just shut their brains off when it comes to token prediction, because they've had very compelling "conversations" with the predictor. They forget that the actual model is static, has no internal state, and doesn't even "remember" what you've said to it.

What it has is a context window, and your entire conversational history - both what you've said and how it has responded - gets shoved into that window when you interact with it. (Or depending on the chatbot harness, saved in "memory" files that it can retrieve when the context contents indicate that would be useful.)

That's why the bots seem so weirdly forgetful one moment and like they've got photographic memories the next. Stuff that is in the context window and has its "attention" will influence the tokens it produces, but whether or not the right things are in the context window and it's including them in the token prediction is a crapshoot.

4w ago

Why Normal People Aren’t Using AI Agents

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kescusay @lemmy.world 4w ago

No, I've decided not to use a tool that isn't fit for purpose. Studies have consistently shown that people think they're much more productive on LLMs than they actually are, and the side effects of cognitive debt and skill loss aren't worth the often imaginary productivity gains.

Combine that with the awful financials of OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, and Google's Gemini, and you've got the makings of a really nasty situation.

Say I come to depend on Claude Code for all my coding, and build an entire workflow around it. I get used to spending thousands of dollars a month for access, and tell myself it's worth it for the imaginary productivity gains (although what's actually happening is that I'm just producing a shit-ton of garbage code no one has any hope of understanding).

Then Anthropic reaches the point where they run out of investor money to spend, and fold because even charging developers like me thousands of dollars doesn't even begin to cover their costs, and I'm one of their rare customers who are loyal, versus the bulk of developers who use up their free allotments of tokens and then model-hop.