I thought of this recently (anti llm content within)
The reason a lot of companies/people are obsessed with llms and the like, is that it can solve some of their problems (so they think). The thing I noticed, is a LOT of the things they try to force the LLM to fix, could be solved with relatively simple programming.
Things like better searches (seo destroyed this by design, and kagi is about the only usable search engine with easy access), organization (use a database), document management, etc.
People dont fully understand how it all works, so they try to shoehorn the llm to do the work for them (poorly), while learning nothing of value.
LLMs are great. You can tell them a problem with words and they figure out what you mean and solve it. You can not ignore the value of it for normal people.
Some recent examples for me:
I was playing a factory building game and didn’t want to do a spreadsheet by hand for figuring out the optimal amount of which building I have to place to get a wanted output. I told the LLM, copy pasted the wiki for each building. It did some differential equasions and gave me a result and a spreadsheet all in under a minute.
I had to do some math, without knowing the underlying concepts. Describing the situation and problem and giving it all known values was much easier than reading 5 wikipedia articles, figuring out how to break it down, which formulas to use for each step and how to chain them all.
I recently googled for half an hour, crawling through shit articles, reading 50page PDFs, none of which contained the detail I wanted, before giving up asking an AI and clicking on the source it quoted to get my reply. Maybe my search terms sucked, maybe I can’t ask the right question, because I don’t know what I don’t know, but the LLM was able to get it.
Are the problems I described already “solved” more computationally efficiently by other means? Absolutely yes!
Will it be faster and easier for me to throw it at an LLM? Also yes!
Its a good tool in some cases. But I think general lack of understanding of how it works and its shortcomings is going to cause many issues in coming years.
That’s been true ever since the first graduates came out knowing COBOL instead of assembly. Everything keeps getting more bloated and buggy.
I wish I could go back and learn all the old ways, but no one teaches that now. I hate learning things the new way with all the shortcuts and bloat everything has now
There are lots of assembly programming YouTubers. My way of scratching that itch is Arduino / ESP32. The tool chain is all C code but it’s so stripped down there’s not even an OS. It’s just your code on the hardware.
I do love the little arduinos and pis, but I can’t think of any application I’d need one for.
Also is just kind of a bummer since ai can do all the coding, there’s not much purpose in me learning it all from scratch. Back in the day, you HAD to learn that way, and I much prefer that. Everything is much too easy now and I think humanity is going to see the result of that in 15 years with the up and coming generation.
I do love the little arduinos and pis, but I can’t think of any application I’d need one for.
Also is just kind of a bummer since ai can do all the coding, there’s not much purpose in me learning it all from scratch. Back in the day, you HAD to learn that way, and I much prefer that. Everything is much too easy now and I think humanity is going to see the result of that in 15 years with the up and coming generation.