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God. Thank you. All these LLM conversations are making me hate this website so much, because apparently at some point actual scientific enquiry took a back seat, and turning one’s nose up at anything in a blatant attempt to seem smart has taken charge. If all the people whinging on here took some of that time and actually ‘formally’ experimented with LLMs, measuring their reliability / correctness against a human in some task in their domain, they may be surprised by the results. And no, “I tried Copilot for an afternoon and hated it” doesn’t suffice. At work, recently, I happened across an opportunity to do just this. There was a task that I thought that it was quite possible for an LLM to be good at. The task was such that we could run a bit of a ‘study’ to see how the LLM fared against a real-world meat-bag person. A skilled person at that. The person we would’ve had do the job in the first place. The LLM and the human agreed the vast majority of the time (>99.9%), and the LLM with its infinite ‘attention’ (heh) was on more than one occasion correct in cases where the human wasn’t, because it was a repetitive task that’d put someone to sleep. It was a task that involved parsing language, but I’m sure one that the geniuses on HN would say requires “understanding semantics”, “intelligence” or whatever armchair philosophy nonsense they whip out in lieu of intelligent conversation. It wasn’t sentiment analysis, categorisation, or anything of that nature. Maybe it’s something I could’ve tackled without an LLM, with traditional ‘deep learning’, or whatever. I really don’t know. I couldn’t think of a way off the top of my head. It was beyond ‘throw linear regression at it’ anyway. Software engineering isn’t engineering, but evidently computer science is increasingly not a science. This industry deserves all of the belittling pejoratives people throw at it. There’s a disappointingly large contingent of utterly unengaged, incurious, drones that let their entire professional skill set be guided by whatever some other incurious drone says on a social network. |
Makes me wonder why that person wouldn't just write code to automate it instead of manually making the changes.
I have several dozen custom code generators in some of my projects, where I just have a spec file written in a DSL.