I hate when people say ‘LLMs have legitimate uses but…’. NO! THEY DONT! Its entirely a platform for building scams! It should be burnt to the ground entirely
But then how will people write 20 cover letters a day to keep up with the increasing rate of instant rejections?
Saw a really depressing ad at work the other day where Google was advertising their thing and it was some person asking their LLM to write a letter for their daughter to this athlete bragging about how she’ll break her record one day. They couch it in “here’s a draft” but it’s just so bleak. The idea that a child so excited about doing a sport and dreaming of going to the Olympics and getting a world record can’t just write a bit of a clumsy letter expressing themselves to their hero is just beyond depressing. Writing swill for automated systems that are going to reject you anyway is one thing, but the idea that they think that this is a legitimate use of these models just highlights how obnoxiously out of touch they are.
How do we learn and grow as people and find our own writing voices if we don’t write some of the most cringe shit imaginable when we’re young. I wrote a weird letter to Emma Watson in middle school, nobody ever read it, but it was a learning experience and made me actually have to think about my own feelings. These techbros have to have been grown in vats.
I’ve hesitated to ever write anything about it thinking it’d come across as too or Luddite, but this comment kind of inspired me to flesh out something that’s been simmering in the back of my head ever since LLMs became latest fad after the NFT boom.
One of the most unnerving things to me about “AI” in the common understanding is that its entire hype cycle and main use cases are all tacit admissions that all of the professional and academic uses of it are proof that their pre-“AI” standards were perfunctory hoop jumping bullshit to join the professional managerial class, and their “artistic” uses are almost entirely utilized by people with zero artistic sensibilities or weirdo porno sickos. All of it belies a deep cynicism about the status quo where what could have been heartfelt but clumsy writing by young students or the athlete in your example are being unknowingly robbed of their agency and the humanizing future of looking back on clunky immature writing as a personal marker of growth. They’re just hoops to jump through to get whatever degree or accolade you’re seeking, with whatever personal growth that those achievements originally meant stripped of anything other than “achieving them is good because it advances your career and earning potential.” Techbros’ most fawning and optimistic pitches of “AI” and “The Singularity” instead read to me as the grimmest and most alienating version of neoliberal “end of history” horseshit where even art and language themselves are reduced to SEO marketized min/maxxed rat races.
I hope this doesn’t sound too but I had to get that rant out
I’m barely better than when it comes to tech literacy, what’s the best platform for stuff like that? Is Medium bad? I’ve installed a Linux distro before but basically just want to rant and take pictures of my cats
Medium is also “bad” but it does put your posts out into an algorithm. Kiiiind of. Everyone ends up deleting them. I just use long Mastodon/forks posts (I make a lot of accounts on every activitypub server tbqh just for gimmicks and things) but 5,000 is not a lot of characters so I also link to Firefish Pages. Easy to make server with 50,000 for personal use at least which is a bit better for longform.
I think the best option on ActivityPub is https://writefreely.org/ you can also generally find a way to seamlessly retweet things like Lemmy linkposts or Writefreely blogs on Mastodon/Firefish whatever fork
Not very technically savvy at all over here it’s just pretty online
I really like Firefish Pages because they have sexy embeds for Mastodon and its forks’ posts and Writefreely as well haha, because it is a Mastodon fork. So I can spam a bunch of tweets over a months and then cite them all in a Page.
They’re all going to make you repost them somewhere else anyways. Once you break into AcitivityPub posting it’s very good, just pretty hard to dodge the whole Ukraine net, so it’s not bad itself. But that’s not even what I’m saying, you can always post from Writefreely or Lemmy back to Reddit or Twitter or whatever and it ensures your real post won’t be deleted. You keep control of part of your data on something self hosted or friend hosted on a cloud service.
I found Substack’s editor impossible to paste into BTW and had other technical issues. But Medium and Substack do kiiind of offer some social media opportunities themselves. But they mostly promote dumb crap and Taibbi respectively
I don’t think it’s purpose and mechanisms being non-artistic is incompatible with people finding meaning in it. We find meaning in random stuff all the time, it’s kind of just our thing
I mean this is exactly part of the reason they’re going bankrupt which is good so you should keep doing it. Companies have been using other forms of AI with some success whereas LLM just regurgitates too much random fake information for anyone serious to use professionally.
If it goes under, use open source LLMs which have been steadily improving and almost surpassing proprietary ones.
I promise this isn’t true. AI is absolutely a scam in the sense that it’s overhype as fuck, but LLMs are frequently of practical use to me when doing basically anything technical. It has helped me solve real-life problems that actually materially helps others.
As a software developer with close to 30 years of experience, I find it continually astonishing when people say LLMs are useful to them for technical stuff. I already spend too much of my life debugging code I didn’t write. I don’t need to automatically churn out more technical debt to be responsible for!
I don’t work in actual software development, though I do a little of it amongst other work.
When I need to slop out a one-time snippet or short script to do something, which I have to do like 10 times a day, it takes me like 3-20 minutes. ChatGPT 4 does it near-perfectly, takes one minute, and usually teaches me something on the way.
Plus when I need to work out how the fuck GDB works to debug shit, it’s an absolute lifesaver. The manual is very long and remembering all the memory examination commands is hard.
If you’re ever working on code over ~100 lines a long, then I basically agree as it takes massive debugging and is poorly factored to the point of being worthless. But for arcane, well-documented commands (ie obscure programming languages and linux tools), and short blasts of code, it’s genuinely incredibly useful on a daily basis.
the only software developer thing chatgpt does well exceptionally well is 101 level answers to general questions/requests and read to me paraphrased stackoverflow results with nearly google levels of reliability.
Where chatgpt really 100x’s a person’s output is when you’re trying to generate shitloads of spam text, such as automated posting of unique comments that use the post/thread/blog/videos’s context and existing comments as context to appear relevant while still pushing a narrative or shilling a product, or building a proxy such that every page someone visits on your website, you automatically reword (plagiarize) another specific website’s article then add your ads.
Idk you probably sound like people did when search engines first started getting popular. If you can’t learn how to get good output from an LLM you might get left behind. I never use LLMs for large chunks of code just snippets and it’s great for that. It’s just like StackOverflow. Don’t blindly copy shit without understanding what’s actually going on. You have fun writing boilerplate code I’m never going back to hand writing that shit.
It’s good for occasional questions to avoid IRC assholes. It’s also interesting technology and isn’t super helpful now but it would be interesting to see future developments.
I hate when people say ‘LLMs have legitimate uses but…’. NO! THEY DONT! Its entirely a platform for building scams! It should be burnt to the ground entirely
But then how will people write 20 cover letters a day to keep up with the increasing rate of instant rejections?
Saw a really depressing ad at work the other day where Google was advertising their thing and it was some person asking their LLM to write a letter for their daughter to this athlete bragging about how she’ll break her record one day. They couch it in “here’s a draft” but it’s just so bleak. The idea that a child so excited about doing a sport and dreaming of going to the Olympics and getting a world record can’t just write a bit of a clumsy letter expressing themselves to their hero is just beyond depressing. Writing swill for automated systems that are going to reject you anyway is one thing, but the idea that they think that this is a legitimate use of these models just highlights how obnoxiously out of touch they are.
How do we learn and grow as people and find our own writing voices if we don’t write some of the most cringe shit imaginable when we’re young. I wrote a weird letter to Emma Watson in middle school, nobody ever read it, but it was a learning experience and made me actually have to think about my own feelings. These techbros have to have been grown in vats.
I’ve hesitated to ever write anything about it thinking it’d come across as too
or Luddite, but this comment kind of inspired me to flesh out something that’s been simmering in the back of my head ever since LLMs became 
latest fad after the NFT boom.
One of the most unnerving things to me about “AI” in the common understanding is that its entire hype cycle and main use cases are all tacit admissions that all of the professional and academic uses of it are proof that their pre-“AI” standards were perfunctory hoop jumping bullshit to join the professional managerial class, and their “artistic” uses are almost entirely utilized by people with zero artistic sensibilities or weirdo porno sickos. All of it belies a deep cynicism about the status quo where what could have been heartfelt but clumsy writing by young students or the athlete in your example are being unknowingly robbed of their agency and the humanizing future of looking back on clunky immature writing as a personal marker of growth. They’re just hoops to jump through to get whatever degree or accolade you’re seeking, with whatever personal growth that those achievements originally meant stripped of anything other than “achieving them is good because it advances your career and earning potential.” Techbros’ most fawning and optimistic pitches of “AI” and “The Singularity” instead read to me as the grimmest and most alienating version of neoliberal “end of history” horseshit where even art and language themselves are reduced to SEO marketized min/maxxed rat races.
I hope this doesn’t sound too
but I had to get that rant out
Maybe I’ll expand that into something
no I thought it was on point, just don’t use substack or wordpress if you start blogging we have better options now
I’m barely better than
when it comes to tech literacy, what’s the best platform for stuff like that? Is Medium bad? I’ve installed a Linux distro before but basically just want to rant and take pictures of my cats 
Medium is also “bad” but it does put your posts out into an algorithm. Kiiiind of. Everyone ends up deleting them. I just use long Mastodon/forks posts (I make a lot of accounts on every activitypub server tbqh just for gimmicks and things) but 5,000 is not a lot of characters so I also link to Firefish Pages. Easy to make server with 50,000 for personal use at least which is a bit better for longform.
I think the best option on ActivityPub is https://writefreely.org/ you can also generally find a way to seamlessly retweet things like Lemmy linkposts or Writefreely blogs on Mastodon/Firefish whatever fork
Not very technically savvy at all over here it’s just pretty online
Thanks, duly noted
Luv 2 scream into the void online
I really like Firefish Pages because they have sexy embeds for Mastodon and its forks’ posts and Writefreely as well haha, because it is a Mastodon fork. So I can spam a bunch of tweets over a months and then cite them all in a Page.
They’re all going to make you repost them somewhere else anyways. Once you break into AcitivityPub posting it’s very good, just pretty hard to dodge the whole Ukraine net, so it’s not bad itself. But that’s not even what I’m saying, you can always post from Writefreely or Lemmy back to Reddit or Twitter or whatever and it ensures your real post won’t be deleted. You keep control of part of your data on something self hosted or friend hosted on a cloud service.
I found Substack’s editor impossible to paste into BTW and had other technical issues. But Medium and Substack do kiiind of offer some social media opportunities themselves. But they mostly promote dumb crap and Taibbi respectively
I like your funny words
Will look into that stuff, thank you
So the emotional resonance I felt when I asked ChatGPT to write me a song about my experiences still loving the parent that abused me was what to you?
Like the results were objectively artless glurge of course but I needed that in that moment.
I don’t think it’s purpose and mechanisms being non-artistic is incompatible with people finding meaning in it. We find meaning in random stuff all the time, it’s kind of just our thing
I mean this is exactly part of the reason they’re going bankrupt which is good so you should keep doing it. Companies have been using other forms of AI with some success whereas LLM just regurgitates too much random fake information for anyone serious to use professionally.
If it goes under, use open source LLMs which have been steadily improving and almost surpassing proprietary ones.
You should recognize that all the artistic, aesthetic, and emotional work being done here was done by you.
I promise this isn’t true. AI is absolutely a scam in the sense that it’s overhype as fuck, but LLMs are frequently of practical use to me when doing basically anything technical. It has helped me solve real-life problems that actually materially helps others.
As a software developer with close to 30 years of experience, I find it continually astonishing when people say LLMs are useful to them for technical stuff. I already spend too much of my life debugging code I didn’t write. I don’t need to automatically churn out more technical debt to be responsible for!
I don’t work in actual software development, though I do a little of it amongst other work.
When I need to slop out a one-time snippet or short script to do something, which I have to do like 10 times a day, it takes me like 3-20 minutes. ChatGPT 4 does it near-perfectly, takes one minute, and usually teaches me something on the way.
Plus when I need to work out how the fuck GDB works to debug shit, it’s an absolute lifesaver. The manual is very long and remembering all the memory examination commands is hard.
If you’re ever working on code over ~100 lines a long, then I basically agree as it takes massive debugging and is poorly factored to the point of being worthless. But for arcane, well-documented commands (ie obscure programming languages and linux tools), and short blasts of code, it’s genuinely incredibly useful on a daily basis.
the only software developer thing chatgpt does well exceptionally well is 101 level answers to general questions/requests and read to me paraphrased stackoverflow results with nearly google levels of reliability.
Where chatgpt really 100x’s a person’s output is when you’re trying to generate shitloads of spam text, such as automated posting of unique comments that use the post/thread/blog/videos’s context and existing comments as context to appear relevant while still pushing a narrative or shilling a product, or building a proxy such that every page someone visits on your website, you automatically reword (plagiarize) another specific website’s article then add your ads.
Idk you probably sound like people did when search engines first started getting popular. If you can’t learn how to get good output from an LLM you might get left behind. I never use LLMs for large chunks of code just snippets and it’s great for that. It’s just like StackOverflow. Don’t blindly copy shit without understanding what’s actually going on. You have fun writing boilerplate code I’m never going back to hand writing that shit.
You sound very insecure, kid.
You sound old. Enjoy 30 more years of writing boilerplate.
Here’s a nickel, kid, buy yourself a language that eliminates boilerplate.
It’s good for occasional questions to avoid IRC assholes. It’s also interesting technology and isn’t super helpful now but it would be interesting to see future developments.
LLMs are useful when you don’t know what terms to put in a search engine
well, we solved that exploit by enshittifying search engines