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by mjr00 80 days ago
> assume it is only a matter of time until they will be useful tools in the hands of even the untrained masses.

IMO this vastly overestimates how good the "untrained masses" are at thinking in a logical, mathematical way. Apparently something as basic as Calculus II has a fail rate of ~50% in most universities.
3 comments
chromacity 80 days ago
How does this follow?

There's nothing "basic" about Calculus II. Calculus is uniquely cursed in mathematical education because everything that comes before it is more or less rooted in intuition about the real world, while calculus is built on axioms that are far more abstract and not substantiated well (not until later in your mathematical education). I expect many intelligent, resourceful people to fail it and I think it says more about the abstractions we're teaching than anything else.

But also, prompting LLMs to give good results is nowhere near as complex as calculus.

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xyzelement 80 days ago
Who cares? People know what they want and need and AI is increasingly able to take it from there.
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embedding-shape 80 days ago
> People know what they want and need

If they truly did, there wouldn't be a huge amount of humans whose role is basically "Take what users/executives say they want, and figure out what they REALLY want, then write that down for others".

Maybe I've worked for too many startups, and only consulted for larger companies, but everywhere in businesses I see so many problems that are basically "Others misunderstood what that person meant" and/or "Someone thought they wanted X, they actually wanted Y".

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mjr00 80 days ago
> People know what they want and need

The multi-decade existence of roles like "business analysts" and "product owners" (and sometimes "customer success") is pretty strong evidence that this is not the case.

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PhilipRoman 80 days ago
What they want? Sometimes. What they need? Almost never.
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isueej 80 days ago
That’s why you can’t generalise opinions on here.

Most people on here don’t belong to that group of people. So ofc they can find a way to create value out of a thing that requires some tinkering and playing with.

The question is can the techniques evolve to become technologies to produce stuff with minimal effort - whilst only knowing the bare minimum. I’m not convinced personally - it’s a pipe dream and overlooks the innate skill necessary to produce stuff.

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