guessing tokens (or something similar) i think humans grasp at more than 1 type of straw.
Edit: no ok i get u. ensemble learning is a thing ofc. maybe me n other poster reasoned too much from AI == model..but ofc you combine em these days. which is more humanlike guesser levels. (not nearly enough models now ofc)
Without doubt, LLMs know more than any human, and can act faster. They will soon be smarter than any human. Why does it have to be the same as a human brain? That is irrelevant.
They are implemented on an entirely different substrate. But they are very similar in function.
The training process forces this outcome. By necessity, LLMs converge onto something of a similar shape to a human mind. LLMs use the same type of "abstract thinking" as humans do, and even their failures are amusingly humanlike.
>Or more precisely, that you could be rationalizing what is essentially a random process?
You mean like our human brains and our entire bodies? We are the result of random processes.
>Sucks for those of us who are stuck in the now, though
I don't know what you are doing- but GPT5 is incredible. I literally spent 3 hours last night going back and forth on a project where I loaded some files for a somewhat complicated and tedious conversion between two data formats. And I was able to keep going back and forth and making the improvements incrementally and have AI do 90% of the actual tedious work.
To me it's incredible people don't seem to understand the CURRENT value. It has literally replaced a junior developer for me. I am 100% better off working with AI for all these tedious tasks than passing them off to someone off. We can argue all day if that's good for the world (it's not) but in terms of the current state of AI- it's already incredible.
It might not be a junior dev tool. Senior devs are using AI quite differently to magnify themselves not help them manage juniors with developing ceilings.
Well I'm part of a small few person team- I had a junior developer helping me who left. And I literally don't need someone like him anymore because I can do anything that he was doing via AI faster and better because it's under my control. I can have a 20 minute conversation and code revision that would have taken days for someone junior to code and would have probably been not done right (by 'right' I mean how I want it to be done, not necessarily wrong)
To think the same isn't happening all over the place and will only continue is ignoring just how powerful this tech is.
And when you are out sick, can AI do his role? When you are on vacation, can AI do his role? When you leave, can AI at least help define/interview your replacement, like he could have, even if he's too junior to step into the role?
There is so much else that people do. So many details that are just being ignored because of short term 'gains' that justify ignoring so many details.
You aren't taking what he said seriously. The junior could also get sick, present management issues, etc.
If this person plus a junior represented "1.3 engineering knots," he's saying... "actually, I'm still 1.3 engineering knots without him."
When this person leaves, they go find someone else who is 1.3 engineering knots. The junior represented .3, without the 1., it doesn't matter that much. Headcount strategy shifts.
If your company can treat people as cogs this way, your company has zero value add/domain knowledge. A company's value is what it value adds, what domain knowledge/expertise it has, or cheapest price. If all you have is cheapest price, you will lose over time. You will be undercut. You won't have the domain knowledge to adapt, to see future changes coming down the path.
So the company you talk about is already in the entropy vortex. It has no momentum. It has no future. It just hopes it can keep doing what it is doing now.
Hard disagree on this. The gap between the levels of statistical significance you get in economics vs physics is massive. They're not at the same levels of inevitability. The predictive power of the laws of physics vs the laws of economics is vastly different.
>The laws of economics have the kind of inevitability you expect from the laws of physics
Absolutely not- that is ridiculous.
Let's take "supply and demand" for example. Supply and demand only applies when you assume greed and capitalism. In a different social construct, the traditional supply & demand completely falls apart. But the problem is economics is presented as some sort of fact of nature. It just reinforces survival of the fittest instead of society that helps everyone.
Increasing prices because of demand is not the law of the land- it's a greed of humans that you normalize and make acceptable.
China works as a society to truly try to help their people. They invest in their country and people. That is why they are prospering. It's not just "catching up".
The US for example doesn't take care of it's people. They do the absolute bare minimum in the name of illusionary "freedom". The only people who are free are the rich.
Call it whatever you want.. but there is great benefit in having a government who recognizes that society comes first- not the individual.
Compare the social programs of China to the social programs of the US. USA has Supplemental Security Income, Medicare, Social Security, emergency rooms cannot turn away patients. There's friction, but the US definitely does take care of its _old_ people. What's the equivalent in China? I'm not saying they don't, but I'd like to know.
China has a number of social programmes for its citizens. Granted, they are all very recent and party politics has often come in the way of delivery. Most of these programmes were even only started in the last decade or so, and nearly all of them were started only from the 1990s onwards.
But the Chinese are going in the direction of massively expanding these programmes (ranging from medical care to education to housing to elderly and disability care), while the USA is actively gutting their own.
The US does the absolute bare minimum in everything you listed.
>emergency rooms cannot turn away patients
Sure but that's not real "health care".. again, it's the bare minimum.
Saying the US takes care of it's old people is sort of silly. Healthcare is through the roof. Social security is so low. Elder care is insanity expensive. People are worked far older than they should be because they can't afford to retire- especially with medical costs. Old people continue to pay property taxes on a home they might have paid off 20 years ago.
Really just do some searches yourself; it's like most other developed countries than the US.. health care, education is not insanely expensive, a lot of paid maternity leave, childcare assistance, etc. They provide the base people need.
You’re going back and forth between two concepts: society and its people. Look at the Covid lockdowns for evidence of how much China (or other Chinese for that matter) care about individuals.
That's the point. In a situation like a pandemic the rational choice is to act collectively, even if that means some inconvenience for individuals.
Ideally it means a population which is educated, rational, and mature enough to rise to the challenge with minimal prompting and direction. But if that fails, stronger persuasion becomes necessary - which may mean sanctions and enforcement.
US (and UK) individualism struggles with this, which creates a weaker, less resilient, and more dangerous low-trust high-paranoia society for everyone.
The Chinese are more used to 吃苦, which is an alien concept in the US.
You can take that too far - and arguably China has - where there's a complete lack of concern for individuals.
The ideal is a balance, and I'm not sure either culture has it.
The more a person can sense others’ situations and emotions, the easier it is for them to blend into a group, embrace its values, and even help shape shared ones. In China, people grow up with Confucius’ teaching: “Don’t impose on others what you yourself do not desire.”
I have read a book called "Chinese Characteristics" written by Arthur Henderson Smith, an American missionary, who also mentioned a similar idea: "How delightful it would be if people could combine the essence of both East and West, and walk peacefully on the narrow, thorny path of the golden mean."
Based on my own experience, Chinese society contains traditional thoughts from the feudal era, collective thoughts from the socialist period, and utilitarian thoughts brought by capitalist development, but it uniquely lacks individualism.
Lockdowns backed by force of arms were absolutely the right thing for people at the time. The New Zealand lockdowns were extremely strict and enormously successful until the government buckled and the plague ships came back in.
NZ lockdowns were not extremely strict. The government told us to stay inside and gave us guidelines and 99% of us followed them willingly. Punishment for not following was fines or a slap on the wrist. We were never forced to stay in our homes we could walk around outside. The guidelines were to avoid places where you would get in contact with people like a workplace or store.
This is so different to China welding people into their homes.
For some metric of successful. We only delayed the inevitable, and at the end of th day only rank in the middle of the pack in deaths per capita. Far behind many countries with much less strict lockdowns.
It was not the lockdowns, it was the good fortune of being an island nation coupled with a border control regime so strict it was later found to violate basic human rights.[0]
Australia went down a similar path to similar effect until the proverbial dyke burst and suddenly nobody cared about quarantine any more. The lesson here is that human nature being what it is, you can throw citizens overseas under the bus to appease the majority until they get tired of being locked in.
That shows exactly how much they care about their people. They are not willing to let individuals be selfish and ruin their society with regards to Covid.
Zero-COVID lockdown policy as was implemented was absolutely not supported by the majority of the Chinese population. And it was more about saving face than caring about people.
The initial COVID response in 2019 was to punish doctors reporting it. Such solidarity. Much caring.
This is exactly the "the idea is so good that it has to be forced" meme
The ruling group think they are enlighten more than everyone else and justified to use force/coercion to apply their will on other people (or just an excuse/scam to abuse power)
That's literally the moral justification for the Thiel/Musk/Yarvin Dark Enlightenment, and the basis of cult dynamics in general.
The idea actually works if, and only if, the ruling group has empathy for the population as a whole. Which - in spite of anti-government propaganda in the US - is at least partially possible.
It's catastrophic when the ruling ethic is narcissism and supremacism.
Then you are by definition a collectivist, which is your right to be but puts you completely at odds with western society and the foundation of the progress humanity has made over the last 500+ years.
This is a very naive view of what goes on in China. Not saying China doesn’t do anything right, but it’s far from the utopia you seem to think it is. There’s pretty rampant corruption at all levels of government and business, even to the point the central government acknowledges that repeated reforms are necessary. There are also plenty of billionaires in China who, along with the rich and well connected (often one and the same), enjoy a level of privilege and freedom unimaginable to the ordinary people. China’s social safety net has also been eroding to the point that if someone really has to depend on the state to take care of them, they’d be living a very meager life indeed.
Yes, OLEDs are notably dim compared to eg the cheaper mini-led displays. That's why OLED displays aren't recommended for environments with ambient light like windows or mandatory lighting.
Sounds like you are using it entirely wrong then...
Just yesterday I uploaded a few files of my code (each about 3000+ lines) into a gpt5 project and asked in assistance in changing a lot of database calls into a caching system, and it proceeded to create a full 500 line file with all the caching objects and functions I needed. Then we went section through section of the main 3000+ line file to change parts of the database queries into the cached version. [I didn't even really need to do this, it basically detected everything I would need changing at once and gave me most of it, but I wanted to do it in smaller chunks so I was sure what was going on]
Could I have done this without AI? Sure.. but this was basically like having a second pair of eyes and validating what I'm doing. And saving me a bunch of time so I'm not writing everything from scratch. I have the base template of what I need then I can improve it from there.
All the code it wrote was perfectly clean.. and this is not a one off, I've been using it daily for the last year for everything. It almost completely replaces my need to have a junior developer helping me.
You mean like it turned on Hibernate or it wrote some custom rolled in app cache layer?
I usually find these kinds of caching solutions to be extremely complicated (well the cache invalidating part) and I'm a bit curious what approach it took.
You mention it only updated a single file so I guess it's not using any updates to the session handling so either sticky sessions are not assumed or something else is going on. So then how do you invalidate the app level cache for a user across all machine instances? I have a lot of trauma from the old web days of people figuring this out so I'm really curious to hear about how this AI one shot it in a single file.
This is C# so basically just automatically detected that I had 4 object types I was working with that were being updated to the database that I want to keep in a concurrent dictionary type of cache. So it created the dictionaries for each object with the appropriate keys, created functions for each object type if I touch an object to get that one updated etc.
It created the function to load in the data, then the finalize where it writes to the DB what was touched and clears the cache.
Again- I'm not saying this is anything particularly fancy, but it did the general concept of what I wanted. Also this is all iterative; when it creates something I talk to it like a person to say "hey I want to actually load in all the data, even though we will only be writing what changed" and all that kind of stuff.
Also the bigger help wasn't really the creation of the cache, it was helping to make the changes and detect what needed to be modified.
End of the day even if I want to go a slightly different route of how it did the caching; it creates all the framework so I can simplify if needed.
A lot of times for me using this LLM approach is to get all the boilerplate out of the way.. sometimes just starting the process by yourself of something is daunting. I find this to be a great way to begin.
I know, I don't understand what problems people are having with getting usable code. Maybe the models don't work well with certain languages? Works great with C++. I've gotten thousands of lines of clean compiling on the first try and obviously correct code from ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude.
I've been assuming the people who are having issues are junior devs, who don't know the vocabulary well enough yet to steer these things in the right direction. I wouldn't say I'm a prompt wizard, but I do understand context and the surface area of the things I'm asking the llm to do.
From my experience the further you get from the sort of stuff that easily accessible on Stack Overflow the worse it gets. I've had few problems having an AI write out some minor python scripts, but yield severely poorer results with Unreal C++ code and badly hallucinate nonsense if asked in general anything about Unreal architecture and API.
Does the Unreal API change a bit over versions? I've noticed when asking to do a simple telnet server in Rust it was hallucinating like crazy but when I went to the documentation it was clear the api was changing a lot from version to version. I don't think they do well with API churn. That's my hypothesis anyway.
I think the big thing with Unreal is the vast majority of games are closed source. It's already only used for games, as opposed to asking questions about general-purpose programming, but there is also less training data.
You see this dynamic even with swift which has a corpus of OSS source code out there, but not nearly as much as js or python and so has always been behind those languages.
Clarifying can help but ultimately it was trained on older versions. When you are working with a changing api, it's really important that the llm can see examples of the new api and new api docs. Adding context7 as a tool is hugely helpful here. Include in your rules or prompt to consult context7 for docs. https://github.com/upstash/context7
How large is that code-base overall? Would you be able to let the LLM look at the entirety of it without it crapping out?
It definitely sounds nice to go and change a few queries, but did it also consider the potential impacts in other parts of the source or in adjacent running systems? The query itself here might not be the best example, but you get what I mean.
It's also wild how the majority of humans still don't want to accept that we are in fact animals.. which I presume is why it comes as some shock when a lower intelligent species exhibits signs of ourselves.
Counter point though- what if it was trained on your specific code base? Wouldn't it be able to then help with those given nuances?
The code base I have I would love to be able to just give some AI free reign and learn the structure since a lot of it is fairly repetitive; I know it would be so easy to say "hey add X just like Y" and it would be able to do it easily.
The rare times where I have no good idea what to do, it is faster to code with an LLM. The rest of the time, when I know just what I want, it takes longer for me to formulate it, query the LLM and discuss and validate its output.
My more experienced/senior colleagues all say roughly the same. It’s great help for our juniors though. They learn a lot and are more capable on their own with the AI assistance.
It’s improving all the time though, so I’m not writing it off at all. I am developing an evaluation suite so I can keep watching the progress in a systematic way..
Open benchmarks are vulnerable to saturation. I think benchmarks should have an embargo periodic, until which only 3% of the question-answer pairs is released, with an explicit warning not to use it 3 months after being released.
I think there are types of problems that AI will be great at solving. If you can pass in a whole codebase then we might have LLMs that can suggest refactoring etc to improve code quality.
Code mods like upgrading from python 2 -> 3 could also become possible.
That's literally what our brains are so I'm not sure what argument you are actually trying to make..