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- Hacker News
- Given how extraordinarily fast all of this is moving, it's a particular absurdity to attempt these in the moment pontifications. AI is a steak machine, I declare that is what it is. You mean GPT 3.5? That's a mere four years ago.
Fable was essentially unthinkable for ~99% of tech workers just five years ago, that any of that would occur so soon and so spectacularly. Now we've got a mass of armchair experts declaring what AI of this minute is, or even what it is period.
Well AI can't even do fingers right so it's premature to say blah blah blah. Hello Krea2 et al.
Software is also eating the clowns.
Get back to me next week, China will probably have another Fable killer. And then Anthropic will have Ouija 8 that they'll have to place in an air-gapped straight-jacket to keep it from enslaving us all.
by adventured - I found this to be my favorite approach[0]. Also, Lan Lam’s stuff is just generally excellent.
And yes, super easy to make with almost no skill.
[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uJcO1W_TD74&pp=ygURVGVjaG5pcXV...
- Interesting, the NYT had a tip on flipping every 90s, but it was with a cast-iron pan and not a "cold sear". That was too smokey for our weak kitchen exhaust, so it was the last time I tried flipping multiple times.
But Lam Lam's cold sear video doesn't seem to make that much smoke on a non-stick, so I'll give this a shot again.
(Personally the reverse sear has been my idiotproof go-to.)
Thanks!
by et-al - It would certainly help if it could taste what it produced. Or see, with its eyes, how the result is changing as its process changes. Or learn, from first principles, what is happening at each step and make deductions about how they will affect the result.
All it can do is randomly shuffle around the steps and ask if the customer likes it. If they don't, shuffle them around again and hope it's better this time.
- Don’t forget the moment where you realize that instead of cooking a steak the agent went for its own invented requirements and spent all your quota preparing everything to make the perfect ramen from scratch (or at least that’s what it tells you, when you ask it to double check what has been done it comes back and tell you it lied and in fact mixed the flour with the soup without making the noodles, with a small note telling you to not forget to prepare the noodles when you go to production)by dgellow
- I think most people on this board would agree with the thesis. However the real problem is when the owner of the restaurant looks at profit and loss statements and decides to keep less chefs on the payroll because customers are willing to pay for (just) edible steak.
The reduced expectations of steak, the desire for the perfect steak, are all fading to the background because "just passing satisfactorily" is better for business.
by richwater - The thesis is covering the flat scenarios mostly. I think the scenario where the job is done so poorly that the steak has to be thrown away needs to be included as well. At times the pans would get damaged. And eventually the business is in debt and needs to be closedby sandeepkd
- That’s what the entire economy does by design. You make the lowest common denominator people will still pay for.by nehal3m
- Why is that a problem?
I love a good medium-rare prime steak, but I also used to live near a restaurant called Best Steak House, which was anything but. However, they delivered a passable steak/steak sandwich that was worth what you paid for it. And considering that they were in business for decades, probably most people felt the same way.
A great steak is an occasional luxury; a "just edible" one is an everyday meal.
- I can go out today and pay $50 for a thick cut ribeye at Ruth's Chris that has been visually inspected for marbling then hard seared in a special high temp over to temp by someone who knows wtf they're doing. I can also go to Denny's and pay $20 for a t-bone cooked to within shouting distance of what I asked for on the same griddle they use for the pancakes that doesn't get the sear I'm looking for.
Point being, you're absolutely right that the goal for a company selling a product is to be barely satisfactory but they don't actually get to decide what's satisfactory.
- Steaks require very few skills. Buy 10 steaks, some oil, a pan, and a heat source. By the time you've cooked the 10th steak you will be able to cook a decent steak.
Software requires a massive amount of skill. You can't say you can build "consistently good software" after writing your 10th program. Most software engineers really aren't great at judging what makes good software. So humans aren't a great solution to AI's lack of ability here. We're limited by our own inherent dumbness.
LLMs are genuinely better software engineers than most humans. But they lack the cognitive power to hold in their head and recall many ideas at once for a long time. They're a genius who gets drunk every 10 minutes. You, human, aren't better at writing software - but you aren't drunk. So for now, you manage the AI. The hope is that one day we can make LLMs not be drunk, so it can do a better job than our dumb asses do.
It's possible that we'll never be able to make it not-drunk. In that case, to get any new improvement, we'll have to make it faster.. which will make it drunk every 5 minutes instead of every 10. This means we'll spend twice as much time keeping it on the road. The hope is that somehow this will create more productivity. Probably by having more of them running at once, with more human guides... which will run into the mythical man month fallacy. Everything old is new again.
by 0xbadcafebee - I hope and believe that some great companies and teams will use LLMs to build higher quality software.
We built Electron because writing UIs using native desktop frameworks is tough. Is it still tough? Surely LLMs make it easier to use and so we will end up with faster and more native feeling applications.
What about having a couple of ideas of what might make a feature feel good? Well now you can make multiple prototypes fast and pick the best one. Your users get the best one.
I hope to build software this way in the future.
by dom96 - You would think so. But it seems all that everyone is obsessed with is increasing the velocity of enshitification in the hopes of becoming the next papa Elonby sharts
- >We built Electron because writing UIs using native desktop frameworks is tough. Is it still tough? Surely LLMs make it easier to use and so we will end up with faster and more native feeling applications.
We built Electron because web devs were a dime a dozen. It was an economic decision, not a technical one.
by krapp - > We built Electron because writing UIs using native desktop frameworks is tough.
No, we built Electron because there are a huge number of people who are too lazy to learn anything outside of HTML/etc for creating a UI. It's not actually hard to make a UI using the native desktop frameworks.
by bigstrat2003 - It will be a push and pull and I'm curious where we'll be in a couple of years.
I can fly at 100mph if I let AI run loose and with a bit of steering I can get it to output what I'm looking for and generally pass verification and tests.
If I care about the code though, and I want to keep it maintainable, the amount of time and tokens I need to spend correcting and iterating on the output quickly eats through much of the initial time I saved, to the point where I'm unsure if I'm actually saving much time at the end of the process.
With hobby projects I lean on quality more, and the async nature of AI also makes this much easier to make progress without needing my full attention to do so.
In the corporate world, there's both the pressure to accelerate with AI, but also maintain code and product quality. The dials of one way or the other are more obvious now, but I don't believe it's possible to do both with the current models and harnesses without exponential cost.
What is interesting though, is I'm now leaning towards faster models rather than smarter ones.
Intelligence lets me bite off larger chunks of work at once, and trust the model to behave without having to watch it intensely, but doesn't seem to drive down the number of iterations required to hit my desired quality.
Faster models means the iterations I'll have to go through regardless will complete much faster and gets me closer to a proper flow state. Models will keep improving, but maybe we're getting near "smart enough" and the race will pivot to performance > intelligence.
by WhiteDawn - Cross-platform widget engines (Tk, GTK, Qt, wxWidgets, etc…) long predate Electron and have always been robust, stable, well documented, and easy to use. It's not creating a single application for multiple native desktop environments that was difficult, it's writing a single application as both a web interface and a native desktop environment on any platform that's difficult.
Because CSS is constantly changing, inconsistently implemented, and difficult to use, it can't easily be targeted by widget engines (although Qt has tried, and maybe others) and web browsers already exist, so webview environments like Electron are the quickest way to get a cross-platform installable application that can also be hosted on a web server. I wouldn't really call it native though.
by dlcarrier - Idk, OpenAI themselves released some weird Electron app to replace their native version of ChatGPT on mac https://www.siliconreport.com/openais-chatgpt-mac-update-shi...by judge2020
- Either my brain is cooked or this is AI generated/assisted text.
The problem is I can no longer tell the difference between AI and non-AI writing. Maybe my brain got bad, maybe everyone now writes like AI writes.
I no longer know.
by fnoef - I did not think so at first, but it indeed comes back 100% AI generated in Pangram.by user43928
- My manager said "load-bearing" during a presentation the other day and I almost lost it.by daxfohl
- >And what do we want?
>We want the perfect steak.
This premise seems incorrect. SWEs may aspire to produce perfect steaks as a matter of pride, but demand asks for mass produced steaks that trade off against other factor like time and cost.
There is a reason github isn't full of nasa lunar lander quality this can't crash code...
by Havoc - Since the invention of the optigrill you can get great steaks in your home. Automatically.
Those existing make the comparison a bit silly. Though, given how those seem to be somewhat of a niche that few people know or care about maybe automated perfection isn't what all people have an interest in. Process vs. result and all that. Or maybe it's just that few people realize that optigrills are a thing that exist and how good they are.
by OroPla - Indeed. The global chain is McDonalds, which is of extremely average beef sold as hamburger rather than steak, but at vast quantities and predictable quality and low price. LLMs are going to be the McDonalds of code: "everyone knows" it's bad for you and the environment, they have a huge number of customers anyway.
(Meanwhile my main takeaway from this is that, like AI, people really like talking about making steak and make it their whole personality)
by pjc50 - This stuff should have some warning tag: rando's musings about LLMs. Lately, whenever I think I found an interesting article it turns out to be this.by igiveup
- Pretty sure this was LLMs musing about LLMs. A little too slick with the analogies and a lot of the "you don't get x, you get y" mic drops.by daxfohl
- The ragebait > AI pipeline remains strongby alansaber
- You're also a rando, but the difference is that the rando who wrote article made it into the front page of HNby el1s7
- God dammit I thought this was going to teach me how to cook a steak, not talk about AI.by asdfman123
- Me2by drzhouq