Mniot

joined 3 months ago
[–] Mniot@programming.dev 8 points 3 weeks ago (6 children)

I think the academic advice about Wikipedia was sadly mistaken. It's true that Wikipedia contains errors, but so do other sources. The problem was that it was a new thing and the idea that someone could vandalize a page startled people. It turns out, though, that Wikipedia has pretty good controls for this over a reasonable time-window. And there's a history of edits. And most pages are accurate and free from vandalism.

Just as you should not uncritically read any of your other sources, you shouldn't uncritically read Wikipedia as a source. But if you are going to uncritically read, Wikipedia's far from the worst thing to blindly trust.

[–] Mniot@programming.dev 42 points 3 weeks ago

I don't think the article summarizes the research paper well. The researchers gave the AI models simple-but-large (which they confusingly called "complex") puzzles. Like Towers of Hanoi but with 25 discs.

The solution to these puzzles is nothing but patterns. You can write code that will solve the Tower puzzle for any size n and the whole program is less than a screen.

The problem the researchers see is that on these long, pattern-based solutions, the models follow a bad path and then just give up long before they hit their limit on tokens. The researchers don't have an answer for why this is, but they suspect that the reasoning doesn't scale.

[–] Mniot@programming.dev 1 points 1 month ago

Can't even ignore the pain of getting a post deleted...

[–] Mniot@programming.dev 3 points 1 month ago

But delete-instead-of-downvote is how you drive out the trolls. If you give shitty people a platform labeled "I think this person is wrong" then you've still given them a platform.

[–] Mniot@programming.dev 7 points 1 month ago

They said "please stop donating". Returning funds or organizing what to do with them is a bunch of work. If they're shutting down because running the instance is too much work and they feel hassled then I wouldn't begrudge them just keeping the few thousand left over.

[–] Mniot@programming.dev 31 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The title of this post is disappointing. The given answer is sound and it seems safe to assume it was arrived at by thinking mathematically.

[–] Mniot@programming.dev 3 points 1 month ago

Just saw: they're changing it back because you don't appreciate it enough :(

[–] Mniot@programming.dev 3 points 1 month ago

Thanks for linking that. Reading the paper, it looks like the majority of the "self-host" population they're capturing is people who have a WordPress site. By my reading, the wording of the paper would disqualify a wordpress.com-hosted site as "self-hosted". But I'd be very suspicious of their methodology and would expect that quite a few people who use WP-hosted reported as self-hosted because the language is pretty confusing.

[–] Mniot@programming.dev 17 points 1 month ago

Some people think, "oh this witch leaving a note means she's really powerless and I can keep taking the rhubarb." It's not going to be so awesome when she forecloses on his first-born.

[–] Mniot@programming.dev 9 points 1 month ago (3 children)

I don't understand how you think this works.

If I say, "now we have robots that can build a car from scratch!" the automakers will be salivating. But if my robot actually cannot build a car, then I don't think it's going to cause mass layoffs.

Many of the big software companies are doing mass layoffs. It's not because AI has taken over the jobs. They always hired extra people as a form of anti-competitiveness. Now they're doing layoffs to drive salaries down. That sucks and tech workers would be smart to unionize (we won't). But I don't see any radical shift in the industry.

[–] Mniot@programming.dev 16 points 1 month ago (8 children)

To be honest, you sound like you're only just starting to learn to code.

Will coding forever belong to humans? No. Is the current generative-AI technology going to replace coders? Also no.

The reaction you see is frustration because it's obvious to anyone with decent skill that AI isn't up to the challenge, but it's not obvious to people who don't have that skill and so we now spend a lot of time telling bosses "no, that's not actually correct".

Someone else referenced Microsoft's public work with Copilot. Here's Copilot making 13 PRs over 5 days and only 4 ever get merged you might think "30% success is pretty good!" But compare that with human-generated PRs and you can see that 30% fucking sucks. And that's not even looking inside the PR where the bot wastes everyone's time making tons of mistakes. It's just a terrible coworker and instead of getting fired they're getting an award for top performer.

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