following this advice would have made most of my professional life impossible, what a luxury it would have been to be able to.
Not that luck doesn't have a role, but everybody gets it.
A lot of people get wrapped up in pursuing compensation opportunities or prestige brands as their top priority, only to burn themselves out or wallow in a domain/culture that doesn't suit them, but if you're willing to deprioritize pay or dinner table cred, you often end up with a lot more flexibility on other work factors. And sometimes, flourishing in those better-fit environments pays off bigger in compensation and career growth in the end anyway.
Granted, Fowler was able to do very well on more axes than many of us, but most competent mid- or late- career people have plenty more flexibility on worklife than they admit to themselves.
If your professional life has required you to spend enormous amounts of time working very closely with people you don't like and/or don't trust, then -unless it has made you enough money to retire after a few years' work- please accept my condolences.
Plus, I've been on the receiving end, too. Is this not simply adulthood?
- When we think of AI agents, we shouldn’t anthropomorphize
- ...my visceral dislike of interacting with an LLM that’s not just making a pretense of being human, but also posing as the kind of human I walk away from.
So he's anthropomorphised the LLM as being like a human himself (rather than forcing it to act as a machine via its prompt for example).
Maybe he should have had an AI check his post
*This sadly also describes me as a 31 year old man.
I def want to finetune my llm responses and yes sure Claude has some type of memory but its too early to just bet on one horse and while i use claude at home through claude.ai i also use claude through an api at my company.
It might start feeling better when they solve the issue of forgetting things they already got right before.
It's amazing how effectively tech leaders have indoctrinated people to give up their power and give the tech people free reign. The same thing has happened in the socio-political realm. Assertions of powerlessness are seen as wisdom.
I'm sure I can sort of prompt it to try to give the answer I want but some people talk about "I don't want an LLM with a political perspective, just provide all the perspectives equally and without bias."
And to a certain extent they have to be constrained. Anything more than a 500 word response I'm probably not going to read, particularly if I want to go deeper on something I want to navigate the conversation. But it means that tuning things like sycophancy just create sort of extremely simple mitigations. Even when I say "May" or "slight chance of" I'm often corrected "Be careful to make too blanket of a statement." I wonder if part of this has been the move towards optimizing towards the agent experience.
Likewise a bias towards "Say things equally without bias" is an exceptionally poor way to actually explore the nuances of an idea, with this sort of regression to the mean.
I don't know if they'll be able to solve this problem broadly. I mean, LLMs probably shouldn't be therapists/coaches/philosophical gurus. But I could anticipate a growth in sort of groupthink and regression to the mean in terms of perspectives broadly speaking as a society.
I find them useful. Maybe it's better I find them distasteful to talk to as well.
It's usually the first step I take when writing research. I don't even read the analysis, just go straight for the papers.
They usually provide me with very relevant seminal papers and I can then easily expand from the bibliography in those papers.
It basically solves discoverability, whereas in the past I would spend days and would need to ask colleagues and librarians for help, to achieve what I can get in minutes now.
But again, I value the actual output of the LLMs at bellow zero factually wise because I need to check everything they say if I want to internalize it and use it for any end. Pointing me to sources is the perfect use case. Really, I cannot emphasize enough how little I trust the text LLMs produce, I actively avoid reading it because I really don't want to risk ingesting spurious information that I might later repeat or rely on for any reason.
But they're response is kinda always.
"Python? Have you considered that some people prefer, javascript?"
To your point, I think I'm asking too much, and would have a better time if I adjusted my approach.
For my own sanity ive wrapped my pi setup in some strict bubble wrap and it is basically exclusively an LOC generator. I have no need nor desire to "converse" with the LLM, it is there to do exactly what i need when i need it.
Is he actively coding...anything? Any projects? And engagements? Or is he a coding influencer now, giving hot takes and opinions, and riding on the XP inertia as a relevant authority?
Because if it's the latter, and I strongly suspect it is, his opinions on LLMs and coding are close to worthless. There are loads of "I'm now an influencer" giving these sorts of hot takes now, and they all seem...detached and irrational with the real world.
The internet for all of its activity is becoming harder to index because the classic dumb search engines were turned into personalized semantic people pleasers.
The classic model for knowledge discovery still exists, though. You find a blog you like, and use that as a thread of knowledge. You join a community and talk with someone and share resources together. Join a small group chat and post with those people. Your knowledge sharing comes from people you share interests with.
Go to a library, ask your coworkers. If you put in the ground-work, it's possible to do that. For seeds of knowledge outside of your local network, at this point you have to find the indexers that work for you.
Personally, I am in the process of writing the infrastructure for my own search engine, and maybe I will share the tech broadly one day. For now, I'll keep my inventions to my closer personal circles.
In general, I think people should be able to more easily maintain their own offline indices, and share knowledge graphs peer-to-peer rather than relying on a centralized one, in my opinion. This tech has no monetization opportunity, though, so I'm guessing that's why it's relatively under-developed, but luckily for me I have enough money and now enough time to develop and release it (and similar tools).
That was the case long before LLM's even existed though.
it is a tool after all.
I know we're not supposed to complain about HN "changing", but, shit, it really hurts.
Also, was Henry Ford asking for regulation because his cars may destroy our civilization as we knew it?
Are you implying that Martin Fowler is a highly respected figure or something? He just comes off as a grifter from what I can see.
For most people it's a job, and that's ok.
That's surprising to me. It's been a majority of people I've worked with. I guess perhaps it depends heavily on where you work.
autistic guy that rejects your PRs because you used tabs instead of spaces: pro
This takes about 30 seconds to fix permanently. You can prompt them to use any tone , be as concise or verbose as you like.
> They confidently bullshit me - often giving me useful, helpful answers. But also just making stuff up with the same assurance - and with only a veneer of fake remorse when I call them out on it.
Only people with flimsy epistemological underpinnings feel threatened in this way. Everyone makes mistakes, and gets fooled by AI (as we’ve been fooled by historians and scientists), but to write off AI because you feel it’s constantly misleading you means you lack proper foundations. Most of my fun conversations with AI are bending it back into proper grounded truth.
This doesn't work by, effectively, Anthropic's own admission. CC's concise mode tells Claude to wind its neck in every turn. That is significantly more than changing the prompt.
As an aside:
> they offer leverage in form of agents to put it in Naval Ravikant words
This is a confusing use of attribution. It's sort of like saying, "as Naval Ravikant famously said, AI can be very useful."
i would expect that when you cite someone by name, the sentence being cited should at least be significant and meaningful to the slightest degree
> I don’t like them. They talk to me in this grating LLM-voice, an uncanny valley of talking to a real human. They confidently bullshit me - often giving me useful, helpful answers. But also just making stuff up with the same assurance - and with only a veneer of fake remorse when I call them out on it.
I think what he needs is a personal fine-tune, something I suspect will become more prominent when we start getting multi-tenant LoRA and can use fine-tunes on a per-token cost basis.
A co-worker commented that he thought the models performed worse after being "embarrassed," suspect it is an artifact of how some conversations progress in the training data.
edit: Not exactly as I remembered, but it's a PG tweet: Prediction: In the AI age, taste will become even more important. When anyone can make anything, the big differentiator is what you choose to make.