This is the kind of thing that's so impressive that if you're not an (experienced) SWE you think "man LLMs are the future, and I am making some major decisions based on this". But you look at the code, and it's essentially gluing three.js and some DB stuff together. There's no lobby, no real interaction logic, no physics apart from what you get from three.js, chatting, commands, map editing, game modes.
In other words, this is slop. We know these new models can generate slop images, text, videos, and code. Sometimes slop can be useful; maybe you can shape it into something useful, maybe you can slop a slopper. But we're learning it's not economical--this is some of the costliest slop we've ever made.
This is the job a junior developer may deliver in their first weeks at a new job, so this is the way it should be treated as: good intentions, not really good quality.
AI coding needs someone behind to steer it to do better, and in some cases, it does. But still hasn't left the junior phase, and while that doesn't happen, there's still the need for a good developer to deliver good results.
There's no serious company who would do anything equivalent to "hey Jr Dev make me a Counterstrike", so examples like these do way more harm than good, because they give the impression of superpowers but this is really just the best they can do.
They're not thinking or reasoning or understanding. It's just amazing autocomplete. Humans not being able to keep themselves from extrapolating or gold rushing doesn't change that.
They are. I know a lot of people don't want to admit this, but they are. They're getting better with each release.
> But we're learning it's not economical--this is some of the costliest slop we've ever made.
Huh? How on earth would you know whether my usage of LLM's has been worth it or not?
> Sometimes slop can be useful; maybe you can shape it into something useful
Man, I just spent the last 2 weeks with a CEO who got a Bolt.new subscription to be able to generate some high-level mocks ups for me to utilize that just saved us months of back and forth.
You know what's the best part? Those same mockups can be used to gather user feedback with a functioning UI without me having to spend weeks building it and it ending up wrong anyway.
Sometimes it irks me, but now I've sorta come to embrace devs like you. You're guaranteeing I have a job because you refuse to acknowledge the very obvious thing that's happening.
We're not disagreeing. Your best example is throwaway mocks: temporary slop, which these models are good at, but all the costs and externalities are hidden from you. They're not actually economical to use (even if you don't consider training etc as part of the cost, which is ridiculous as they're some of the costliest things humans have ever done).
Yes, if you look at a photo of the X220 lid, what looks like a cosmetic accent across the lid near screen-top is actually a seam, between the nice alloy traditional lid, and some plastic that's barely held on, painted to look the same. Even minor impact can break the little plastic screw hole tabs that hold the screen-top edge of the lid. Absolutely not what you want from a ThinkPad, which has a legacy of being durable.
A disappointing thing about this is that someone changed the design, to this, to be more fragile and non-ThinkPad. In this way, it's similar to the series of regression changes to the keyboard, and now the TrackPoint.
Dunno if you listen to Ezra Klein but he had an anthropologist on once who described this tribe of humans who when someone came back having bagged big game, they had to run a gauntlet of everyone else downplaying their accomplishment like "that's not that big, your father caught bigger", and "maybe one day you'll bring down an adult deer" etc. The whole idea was like, egomaniacs are pretty bad, and they had a cultural defense against it.
I often think a weakness of liberal, western society is the insistence on rationality, that like the hunter in question could just easily put their abilities and accomplishments alongside those of others and get a pretty accurate picture. This is super untrue; we need systems to guard against our frailties, but we can't admit we have them, so we keep falling into the same ditches.
> Dunno if you listen to Ezra Klein but he had an anthropologist on once […]
Klein wrote a book a few years ago on the topic of polarization, human's inclination towards clan/tribal thinking, and how it manifests itself in (US) politics:
Maybe this is a stupid question, but is there any downside to harvesting heat from the planet? Would we slow convections by cooling it and then cause some weird ass problem?
There's a cat in our neighborhood that shits on our back porches multiple times a day (I have no idea how this is possible, maybe it means the cat will die soon!), and I finally got a huge industrial fan and hooked it up to a motion sensor. Mischief managed.
Then the only thing I have to ask you is: what do you think this means in terms of how we treat LLMs? If they think, that is, they have cognition (which of course means they're self aware and sentient, how can you think and refer to yourself and not be these things), that puts them in a very exclusive club. What rights do you think we should be affording LLMs?
I super agree. Life today is unrecognizable from life just like, 80 years ago. I'm not advocating for like, taking the warning labels off the bottles and letting the problem solve itself or whatever, but I do think there's something insidiously infantilizing about modern society.
I read AOtD and I had a different takeaway: TV is great entertainment (watch all the trash you want!) but it's terrible for news and learning about the world. I found it pretty convincing--it's so clear to me that our societal discourse divebombed when TV news became dominant.
Listen, guys, I'm so much more productive now. I've founded 10 companies and Claude's building the products for all of them. It's gonna be huge. Unrelated: can you front my rent for the next few months?
Man what bullshit. Here's the owner (and 4th author of the paper) [0] of the consultancy that authored the paper [1] they reference. She (almost certainly) has Meta stock!
In other words, this is slop. We know these new models can generate slop images, text, videos, and code. Sometimes slop can be useful; maybe you can shape it into something useful, maybe you can slop a slopper. But we're learning it's not economical--this is some of the costliest slop we've ever made.
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