> You need to realise that if you use them, you’re both financially and socially supporting dodgy companies doing dodgy things. They will use your support to push their agenda. If these tools are working for you, we’re genuinely pleased. But please also stop using them.
> Your adoption helps promote the companies making these tools. People see you using it and force it onto others at the studio, or at other workplaces entirely. From what we’ve seen, this is followed by people getting fired and overworked. If it isn’t happening to you and your colleagues, great. But you’re still helping it happen elsewhere. And as we said, even if you fixed the labour concerns tomorrow, there are still many other issues. There’s more than just being fired to worry about.
> Click to zoom, open in a new tab for interactivity
I admit I did not expect "Open Image in New Tab" to do what it said on the tin. I guess I was aware that it was possible with SVG but I don't think I've ever seen it done and was really not expecting it.
Normally, I use the generator included in async-profiler. It produces interactive HTML. But for this post, I used Brendan’s tool specifically to have a single, interactive SVG.
Post is clearly very heavily glued together/formatted and more by an LLM, but it's sort of fascinating how bits and spurts of the author's lowercase style made it through unscathed.
It never was "just predicting the next word", in that that was always a reductive argument about artifacts that are plainly more than what the phrase implies.
And also, they are still "just predicting the next word", literally in terms of how they function and are trained. And there are still cases where it's useful to remember this.
I'm thinking specifically of chat psychosis, where people go down a rabbit hole with these things, thinking they're gaining deep insights because they don't understand the nature of the thing they're interacting with.
They're interacting with something that does really good - but fallible - autocomplete based on 3 major inputs.
1) They are predicting the next word based on the pre-training data, internet data, which makes them fairly useful on general knowledge.
2) They are predicting the next word based on RL training data, which causes them to be able to perform conversational responses rather than autocomplete style responses, because they are autocompleting conversational data. This also causes them to be extremely obsequious and agreeable, to try to go along with what you give them and to try to mimic it.
3) They are autocompleting the conversation based on your own inputs and the entire history of the conversation. This, combined with 2), means you are, to a large extent, talking yourself, or rather something that is very adept at mimicing and going along with your inputs.
Who, or what, are you talking to when you interact with these? Something that predicts the next word, with varying accuracy, based on a corpus of general knowledge plus a corpus of agreeable question/answer format plus yourself. The general knowledge is great as long as it's fairly accurate, the sycophantic mirror of yourself sucks.
I think you should try harder to find their limits. Be as picky as you want, but don't just take over after it gave you something you didn't like. Try again with a prompt that talks about the parts you think were bad the first time. I don't mean iterate with it, I mean start over with a brand new prompt. Try to figure out if there is a prompt that would have given you the result you wanted from the start.
It won't be worth it the first few times you try this, and you may not get it to where you want it. I think you might be pickier than others and you might be giving it harder problems, but I also bet you could get better results out of the box after you do this with a few problems.
A title per paragraph (slight exaggeration), half of the form The X, The Y, The Z. Every section ends with "it's not x; it's y" contrast framing.
But really the only issue is it's monotone linkedin still insight fluff and you can't tell where the prompt ends and the LLM crap begins. I expect something interesting was put into the LLM, but the LLM has destroyed the author's ability to communicate it with me effectively. Everything is overinflated to the same level of importance and I can't tell what the author actually cared about expressing.
I think I'm also very good at getting great results out of coding agents and LLMs, and I disagree pretty heavily with you.
It is just way easier for someone to get up to speed today than it was a year ago. Partly because capabilities have gotten better and much of what was learned 6+ months ago no longer needs to be learned. But also partly because there is just much more information out there about how to get good results, you might have coworkers or friends you can talk to who have gotten good results, you can read comments on HN or blog posts from people who have gotten good results, etc.
I mean, ok, I don't think someone can fully catch up in a few weeks. I'll grant that for sure. But I think they can get up to speed much faster than they could have a year ago.
Of course, they will have to put in the effort at that time. And people who have been putting it off may be less likely to ever do that. So I think people will get left behind. But I think the alarm to raise is more, "hey, it's a deep topic and you're going to have to put in the effort" rather than "you better start now or else it's gonna be too late".
Hold'em is offered in casinos routinely, I'm not sure where else one even goes to play it aside from private games, but it is not against the casino. It's against other players, and the casino takes a percentage of the pot.
Others may differ and I am biased because 99% of my play has been online, but I'd say it's almost entirely playing the odds. Or at least, the popular romantic conception of looking for tells or whatever, is, I would expect, a really minimal edge compared to simply playing better.
You do learn the other players' tendencies and adapt accordingly, and table selection is very important, so in that sense it is very much about reading players.
A large part of my play was heads up where it's very much about understanding the other player's play as deeply as possible, and so if I wanted to be technically accurate about reading players vs playing the odds, I'd say both are very important. But if I'm answering someone who has the popular conception of what those phrases mean, I think saying "it's about playing the odds" would give them the more accurate picture.
You really want to be good at playing the odds, and you don't want to stray too far from fundamentally good play. If someone is learning how to play and I'm advising them, I'm teaching them all about playing the odds, and trying to get them to read players less. Only once they have a solid fundamental understanding of the odds would I teach them how to adjust.
Around here (Melbourne) the other place is in pubs - there are organised poker tournaments. They can't legally charge you an entry fee, but they can give you a lot of extra chips if you buy a meal at the pub. Some modest prizes if you win.
They're kind of a ridiculous format - you typically start with about 20 BB but the blinds go up pretty quickly so you don't see a lot of post-flop play.
If you tautologically define "best" as "that which wins", sure.
There's many ways for something to be better than another thing, though, and a lot of stuff is winning because it's best at "engagement" even if it's really bad in many other ways.
> You need to realise that if you use them, you’re both financially and socially supporting dodgy companies doing dodgy things. They will use your support to push their agenda. If these tools are working for you, we’re genuinely pleased. But please also stop using them.
> Your adoption helps promote the companies making these tools. People see you using it and force it onto others at the studio, or at other workplaces entirely. From what we’ve seen, this is followed by people getting fired and overworked. If it isn’t happening to you and your colleagues, great. But you’re still helping it happen elsewhere. And as we said, even if you fixed the labour concerns tomorrow, there are still many other issues. There’s more than just being fired to worry about.
reply