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by atomic128 628 days ago
This sentiment, I observe it everywhere. My coworkers and the people I interact with in engineering communities. A process of hollowing out and loss of motivation, a loss of meaning and purpose, as people delegate more and more of their thinking to the LLM.

Some may ruminate and pontificate and lament the loss of engineering dignity, maybe even the loss of human dignity.

But some will realize this is an inevitable result of human nature. They accept that the minds of their fellow men will atrophy through disuse, that people will rapidly become dependent and cognitively impaired. A fruitful stance is to make an effort to profit from this downfall, instead of complaining impotently. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41733311

There's also an aspect of tragic comedy. You can tell that people are dazzled by the output of the LLM, accepting its correctness because it talks so smart. They have lost the ability to evaluate its correctness, or will never develop said ability.

Here is an example from yesterday. This is totally nonsensical and incorrect yet the commenter pasted it into the thread to demonstrate the LLM's understanding: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41747089

Grab your popcorn and enjoy the show. "Nothing stops this train."

3 comments

The wrong July 16th answer is hilarious! Half of the examples that are posted here as proof of the brilliance of LLMs are trivially wrong.
No, they posted it to the thread to illustrate that the problem was in the training set. Which it obviously was.

I don't know where your interpretation came from. Perhaps you're an LLM and you hallucinated it? :)

It's called getting older. You guys are so dramatic about the llm stuff lol
So dramatic... There are so many people who are so psyched on what LLMs have allowed them to achieve, and so many beginners that can't believe they've suddenly got an app, and so many veterans who feel disenchanted, and so on and so forth. I'm quite tired of everyone generalizing LLM reactions based on their own experience!
No, it is called having one's open source output stolen by billionaires who then pay enough apologists, directly or indirectly, to justify the heist.
No one stole anything from you. Other than maybe your self esteem.
Large language models are used to aggregate and interpolate intellectual property.

This is performed with no acknowledgement of authorship or lineage, with no attribution or citation.

In effect, the intellectual property used to train such models becomes anonymous common property.

The social rewards (e.g., credit, respect) that often motivate open source work are undermined.

Anyone who contradicts a (probably paid) apologist must be either old or lacking in self esteem. Well done, your masters will be happy.
lol you think I'm paid to argue with VC bros on Hackernews?

"Anyone who contradicts my opinion is paid off"

I do it for the love of the game.

Self esteem? I mean plagiarism is a compliment. It's also a licence violation and a shame rich capitalists do it to screw everyone else as usual.
How are rich people screwing you with AI? Which people?
Please don't pretend like you didn't understand. It's not useful.