[cactusplant7374]

> But I am struggling to put into words how alarming I find the comments on threads like this — all sorts of good-natured anecdotes about how XYZ works for them that are more like the suggestions in pet care or cookery threads on Facebook.

It will always be this way going forward. Everyone thinks differently about problems. In the past we had experts and only they could do the work at a high level. But now we have many people that are cranking out expert level solutions without much knowledge. Worrying about the minutia is a dying trend.

Edit: I see I touched a nerve. But that is how it is now. You can't fight reality.

[foobarchu]

> You can't fight reality.

Defeatism doesn't do anything positive for the world. You're trying to convince the people pushing for a marginally better world that they should give up because it'll never happen. That is not a useful contribution.

[vitally3643]

Your argument is that superstition is the way of the future and technical rigor no longer applies.

Because that's what OP is talking about. Superstition presented as factual advice instead of the technically rigorous and scientific fact that already exists.

You're being downvoted because you don't understand this fact, or indeed understand what you're saying at all.

I'll spell it out for you: technically and scientifically rigorous facts do actually exist, even in regards to LLMs. We can, in fact, obtain scientific and objective facts about how LLMs perform. It can be rigorously proven that certain context habits affect certain tasks positively or negatively. Your argument is that none of this matters more than superstition. And you're surprised that arguing to a room full of engineers and scientists that science is dead and superstition is the one true way forward gives you negative response.

[cactusplant7374]

There aren't any good facts that exist regarding LLMs. It's a black box. Also, do not presume to know what I understand or don't understand from one comment.

> I'll spell it out for you

You are a rude and crude individual. I am not interested in discussing anything further with you.

[Revisional_Sin]

It's a black box, but you can run tests to quantify the behaviour and establish, for example, that a certain model is X% more likely to give a certain behaviour.

[dofm]

At some level, we've always delegated worrying about the minutiae to someone who builds the tool that is one or two levels below.

I usually don't have to worry about compiler optimisations because compiler experts do that; sometimes they appear in a thread about code and say "compiler guy here — if you write your code like this the compiler can optimise it".

And that person will be provably right (or wrong), in that context. And it'll be the same each time you run the test!

I just… ehh. You make a good point and I worry you are not wrong. It's all so different.

I like my 3D printing analogy much more than I wish I did.