I thought of this recently (anti llm content within)
The reason a lot of companies/people are obsessed with llms and the like, is that it can solve some of their problems (so they think). The thing I noticed, is a LOT of the things they try to force the LLM to fix, could be solved with relatively simple programming.
Things like better searches (seo destroyed this by design, and kagi is about the only usable search engine with easy access), organization (use a database), document management, etc.
People dont fully understand how it all works, so they try to shoehorn the llm to do the work for them (poorly), while learning nothing of value.
LLMs are great. You can tell them a problem with words and they figure out what you mean and solve it.
For example, I was playing a factory building game and didn’t want to do a spreadsheet for figuring out the optimal amount of which building I have to place to get a wanted result. I told the LLM, copy pasted the wiki for each building. It did some differential equasions and gave me a result and a spreadsheet.
Same with math, describing the situation and problemis much easier than thinking about which formulas to use and how to chain them.
Same for researching info online. Recently I googled for half an hour, crawling through shit articles, reading 50page PDFs, none of which contained the detail I wanted, before giving up asking an AI and clicking on the source it quoted to get my reply. Maybe my search terms sucked, maybe I can’t ask the right question, because I don’t know what I don’t know, but the LLM was able to get it.
Are the problems I described already “solved” more efficiently by other means? Absolutely yes!
Will it be faster and easier for me to throw it at an LLM? Also yes!
Its a good tool in some cases. But I think general lack of understanding of how it works and its shortcomings is going to cause many issues in coming years.
That’s been true ever since the first graduates came out knowing COBOL instead of assembly. Everything keeps getting more bloated and buggy.
I wish I could go back and learn all the old ways, but no one teaches that now. I hate learning things the new way with all the shortcuts and bloat everything has now
There are lots of assembly programming YouTubers. My way of scratching that itch is Arduino / ESP32. The tool chain is all C code but it’s so stripped down there’s not even an OS. It’s just your code on the hardware.
And how do you know that the LLM was accurate and gave you the correct information, instead of just making up something entirely novel and telling you what you wanted to hear? Maybe the detail you were searching for could not be found, because it did not actually exist.
He said he clicked the source it quoted.
Maybe if Google hasn’t been enshittifying search for 10 years, AI search wouldn’t be useful. But I’ve seen the same thing. The forced Gemini summary at the top of Google often has source links that aren’t anywhere on the first page of Google itself.
And how do you know the source is accurate? Having a source doesn’t automatically make it accurate. Bullshit can also have sources.
First, read my text fully before replying.
But additionally I have a brain and can use it to double check:
In example 1. I just build it blindly because it’s a game and it doesn’t matter if it’s wrong. But it ended up being correct.
In 2. the math result was not far off from my guesstimate and I can confirm later, it was correct.
In 3. it gave me a source and I read the source. Google did not lead me to that source.
When I let LLM write code, I read the code, then I test the code.
It’s weird how there is such a knee jerk hate for a turbo charged word predictor. You’d think there would have been similar mouth frothing at on screen keyboards predicting words.
I see it as a tool that helps sometimes. It’s like an electric drill and craftsmen are screaming, “BUT YOU COULD DRILL OFF CENTER!!!”
The commenter more or less admitted that they have no way of knowing that the algorithm is actually correct.
In your first analogy it would be like if text predictors pulled words from a thesaurus instead of a list of common words.