>LLM isn't like calculator or microwave oven or other technology before. (Like OP's article) But it really is.

I would not buy a calculator that hallucinated wrong answers part of the time. Or a microwave oven that told you it grilled the chicken but it didn't and you have to die from Salmonella poisoning.

Microwave oven does quite unexpected things when you cook a shelled egg or a dish on metal plate.

We teach our kids about microwave oven safety for this reason.

On the contrary, those things are quite predictable. Once you know those issues exist, you can reliably avoid them. But with LLMs you can't reliably avoid hallucinations. The unreliability is baked into the very nature of the tool.

Except that we know that it does that when you put those things in, so they aren't "quite unexpected".

The microwave analogy is good. I still use it, even though it often makes half my food scalding hot while the other half remains fridge cold.

You should set the microwave to much lower power and let it heat for much longer, so that the heat gets to transfer evenly across the mass of the food. It even says so in the instruction manual. If you blast with full power, leave the food for at least 2 minutes after it's heated for the heat to balance out across the food (again, it's in the manual).

or turn the food over, or move it to a different position inside the microwave -- the way microwave works is that it heats up the food unevenly (there's a wave involved).

Yes, my point was that microwaves are advertised as a 'throw your lunch in and get it warm in 1-2 minutes' appliance, but kinda like an LLM, they require some manual effort to do it well (or decently, depending on your standards).

Like:

1- Put it on the edge of the plate, not in the middle

2- Check every X seconds and give it a stir

3- Don't put metal in

4- Don't put sealed things in

5- Adjust time for wetness

6- Probably don't put in dry things? (I believe you needed water for a microwave to really work? Not sure, haven't tried heating a cup of flour or making a caramel in the microwave)

7- Consider that some things heat weirdly, for example bread heats stupid quick and then turns into stone equally as quick once you take it out.

...

I don’t really think repositioning it has a direct effect. An indirect effect of moving it around is that you turn the microwave off for around 30 seconds or more in order to do it. The reason some parts increase in heat faster is that they have higher concentrations of water; allowing the water to stop boiling and all of the heat to spread through is the magic.

(I’ve heard the fans that you hear are there to reflect the micro waves and make them bounce all over the place but I don’t know if that’s true. Regardless, most models have a spinning plate which will constantly reposition the food as it cooks.)

The fan you hear is to keep the microwave generator cool. It's outside the part of the microwave where the microwaves go.

Older microwaves had a fan-like metal stirrer inside the cooking box, that would continuously re-randomize where the waves went. This has been out of fashion for several decades.

> The reason some parts increase in heat faster is that they have higher concentrations of water;

Composition is part of it, but it isn’t the whole story. A microwave oven is a resonant cavity. There are standing electromagnetic waves in there, in several different modes. They have peaks and nulls. That’s why many microwaves have a rotating plate. It physically moves the food relative to the standing waves.

Microwave's can't do an oven's job. They heat the center first and spread out.

If you want a compromose, invest in an air fryer. It has the opposite problem, so cook 80% in an air fryer and let the microwave finish the center.

My grandma did not have a microwave oven because she didn't see the point of it.

I'm in my 40s and don't have a microwave oven because I don't see the point of it... when I lived in a rented apartment, I got gifted one because how could I not have one? I tried it for a few days and just didn't find it useful. When I bought my own apartment and renovated the kitchen, I didn't bother to install one.

The use is heating up single portions of leftovers.

Which can be done in an induction cooker almost as fast, with the result tasting better, and without the need of a specific appliance that takes up considerable space.

I guess, if you have one of those. Vastly more expensive and more involved to install, especially when renting. I’ve never used one because I’ve never been at a place with one.

When I rented I had a standard ceramic hob and still didn't see the point... sure, you gain some time, but it's maybe 5 minutes of unattended time where you can often be doing something else, vs. much worse taste. But I understand that with slow cookers it can make sense for other people. With induction I think it's outright pointless.

As an anecdote, in my country there is a very popular brand of supermarket pizzas, Casa Tarradellas. I never buy them but a friend of mine used to eat them really frequently. So once he shows up at my house with one, and I say OK, I'm going to heat it. I serve it, he tries a bite and is totally blown away. He says "What did you do? I've been eating these pizzas for years and they never taste like this, this is amazing, the best Casa Tarradellas pizza I've ever had".

The answer was that he used the microwave and I had heated it in the regular oven...

> vs. much worse taste

I have never had that issue when heating stuff up. Your pizza example is not reheating (and generally you never want to reheat anything that’s supposed to be crispy in the microwave; though not on the stove top either).

Reheat pizza on a stovetop covered on low heat. Better than the first time it was cooked. Yw

I prefer convection ovens for that.

Ordinary ovens also do that alright. Takes 20-30 minutes instead of 2-3, but that just trains your delayed reward system a little. Also, don't use a plastic container.

They do a lot more things though, which microwaves don't. Pizza, for example, has to be cooked properly, not with a microwave. If I can only have one, I'll take the mini conventional oven.

The best tasting (and also quickest) corn on the cob is done in microwave. Cook the entire unpeeled ear for 5 minutes on high, cut the butt end about 1 inch in and pull out corn out of the husk. Butter, salt, enjoy!

Maybe the real question isn’t whether the microwave is useful, but whether she wanted what it offered. That seems to apply to a lot of tech debates today too.

I don’t own a microwave because I don’t mind the trade offs of other tools that do the same job. But I don’t go around telling people who find microwaves useful that they are bringing about the end of cooking and should feel bad because of it.

My microwave regularly doesn’t cool things as the instructions describe. I’ve learned to pay attention.

You would if you were able to do basic mental maths and you learned to engage and run basic sanity checks. That's still much faster than grabbing the slide rule. (And it's not like people are infallible)

Obviously if one product hallucinated and one doesn't it's a no brainer (cough Intel FPUs). But in a world where the only calculators were available hallucinated at the 0.5% level you'd probably have one in your pocket still.

And obviously if the calculator hallucinated at the 90% of the time for a task which could otherwise be automated you'd just use that approach.

I've seen my accountant's fingers flawlessly fly using a calculator to track expenses down to the penny. Few people have those mental skills even in the days before calculators - either mechanical or digital.

Slide rule are good for only a couple of digits of precision. That's why shopkeepers used abacuses not slide rules.

I have a hard time understanding your hypothetical. What does it mean to hallucinate at the 0.5% level? That repeating the same question has a 0.5% chance of giving the wrong answer but otherwise it's precise? In that case you can repeat the calculation a few times to get high certainty. Or that even if you repeat the same calculation 100 times and choose the most frequent response then there's still a 0.5% chance of it being the wrong one?

Or that values can be consistently off by within 0.5% (like you might get from linear interpolation)? In that case you are a bit better than a slide rule for estimating, but not accurate enough for accounting purposes, to name one.

Does this hypothetical calculator handle just plus, minus, multiply, and divide? Or everything that a TI 84 can handle? Or everything that WolframAlpha can handle?

If you had a slide rule and knew how to use it, when would you pay $40/month for that calculator service?

Slide rules were used in astronomy, engineering, and aviation. You could get them more accurate than 2 decimal places.

"A couple" does not always mean two.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/couple - "(informal) a small number"

FWIW, "Maximum accuracy for standard linear slide rules is about three decimal significant digits" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slide_rule

While yes, "Astronomical work also required precise computations, and, in 19th-century Germany, a steel slide rule about two meters long was used at one observatory. It had a microscope attached, giving it accuracy to six decimal places" (same Wikipedia page), remember that this thread is about calculating devices one might carry in one's pocket, have on one's self, or otherwise be able to "grab".

(There's a scene in a pre-WWII SF story where the astrogators on a large interstellar FTL spacecraft use a multi-meter long slide rule with a microscope to read the vernier scale. I can't remember the story.)

My experience is that I can easily get two digits, but while I'm close to the full three digits, I rarely achieve it, so I wouldn't say you get three decimal digits from a slide rule of the sort I thought was relevant.

I'm a novice at slide rules, so to double-check I consulted archive.org and found "The slide rule: a practical manual" at https://archive.org/details/sliderulepractic00pickrich/page/...

> With the ordinary slide rule, the accuracy obtainable will largely depend upon the precision of the scale spacings, the length of the rule, the speed of working, and the aptitude of the operator. With the lower scales it is generally assumed that the readings are accurate to within 0.5 per cent. ; but with a smooth-working slide the practised user can work to within 0.25 per cent

That's between 2 and 3 digits. You wouldn't do your bookkeeping with it.

"a couple" always means two. "A few" always means three. That wiki is wrong.

If someone says, there were a couple [of] people there, I would not expect there to have been two, specifically.

Feel free to check some print dictionaries.

New Merriam-Webster dictionary, 1989, def. 4 "an indefinite small number" - https://archive.org/details/newmerriamwebste00spri/page/180/...

Pocket Oxford English dictionary, 2005, def. 3 "(informal) an indefinite small number" - https://archive.org/details/pocketoxfordengl0000unse_p5e4/pa...

The Random House college dictionary, 1975, def. 6, "a couple of, (Informal) a small number of, a few"

> Slide rule are good for only a couple of digits of precision. That's why shopkeepers used abacuses not slide rules.

Shopkeepers did integer math, not decimal. They had no need for a slide rule, an abacus is faster at integer math, a slide rule is used for dealing with real numbers.

Yes ... Isn't that my point? I meant it as an example of how neither "basic mental maths and ... sanity checks" nor is a calculator with a 0.5% error rate are appropriate.

I mean that it's not a difference of accuracy, it's a difference of domain. A calculator & a slide rule have the same domain, an abacus and Mayan Quipu have the same domain. The calculator & abacus are faster than the slide rule & Quipu. Similarly a typewriter has the same accuracy as handwriting a document (worse if a pencil is used since typewriter's can't easily correct mistakes), but typing took over book writing because it was faster, not because it was more accurate.

I lead with the example of my accountant using a calculator to show it has a different domain than a slide rule, or simple mental techniques.

Do you use a GPS? That sometimes gets the route wrong, but overall gets you to where you want to go in less traffic than if you didn't use it? And occasionally really delights you with new routes?

(thanks Rory Sutherland for this analogy)

Rarely. I feel lost when I use GPS to get places.

Alec Watson of Technology Connections points out that GPS routing defaults to minimizing time, even when that may not the most logical way to get somewhere.

His commentary, which starts at https://youtu.be/QEJpZjg8GuA?t=1804 , is an example of his larger argument about the complacency of letting automation do things for you.

His example is a Google Maps routing which saves one minute by going a long way to use a fast expressway (plus $1 toll), rather than more direct but slower state routes and surface streets. It optimizes one variable - time - of the many variables which might be important to you - wear&tear, toll costs, and the delight of knowing more about what's going on in the neighborhood.

His makes the point that he is not calling for a return to paper maps, but rather to reject automation complacency, which I'll interpret as letting the GPS figure everything out for you.

We've all heard stories of people depending on their GPS too much then ending up stuck on a forest road, or in a lake, or other place which requires rescue - what's the equivalent failure mode with a calculator?

OK I don't think I'm going to persuade you if you don't use GPS. Buy 95% of the population do.

Pardon? I said I use GPS.

I'm also aware of the failure modes with GPS complacency, including its incomplete knowledge of the variables that I find important.

And that's with something that makes mistakes far less often than LLMs and related technology.

Which is why I don't think that your mention of GPS use is a strong counter-example to bryanrasmussen's comment against using hallucinating devices.

you seemed to have cast off the most important factor in the conversation of "I can check a GPS's work" for some reason.

If you drive into a lake or anything like that it's your own fault not the GPS. It doesn't control the car it just tells you directions. And if you know the area well enough to make judgements like the other things you mentioned, you don't need gps. Gps is specifically for when you don't know where to go.

I use it all the time, pretty much zero issues.

I view this thread as part of bryanrasmussen comment "I would not buy a calculator that hallucinated wrong answers part of the time" with zpeti pointing out that people use a GPS despite how it gets the route sometimes.

I don't know how to respond to your comment in that context.

Do you double-check your calculator all the time, to ensure it's not giving you the wrong answer?

As to Alec Watson's commentary about GPS, how do you know the area well enough to make judgements if you always follow the GPS routing which avoids the neighborhood?

I don't generally keep the entire thread in mind when reading and responding to comments.

If I spend a lot of time in an area I learn it and don't need gps to navigate it, however I might use gps just to find specific addresses as I don't usually memorize every street name. I also usually find that Google maps chooses perfectly sensible routes anyway, I don't see much point in trying to second guess it. Oh maybe I can save a minute or two or save a few kilometers by avoiding a highway, honestly who cares? I certainly don't. It will usually offer multiple route alternatives anyway, your ideal route or something close to it is probably among them.

I don't, I use static maps and aerial photos, and sometimes satellite photos. I also don't have a microwave oven, in part because they are highly unreliable depending on where certain molecules ended up in the bucket in the freezer and so on.

However, I do have a pressure cooker and a rice cooker that gets a lot of use. They're extremely reliable and don't use much electricity and I can schedule what they do, which is bulk cooking without me having to care about it while it happens.

The success rate and failure mode matters. Gps/maps you can look at before driving and confirm it's not completely insane quite easily, and if it takes a suboptimal route you still get to your destination.

If an LLM hallucinates and you don't know better, it can be bad. Hopefully people are double checking things that really matter, but some things are a little harder to fact check.

Wait, do people generally use GPS routes to go places? I find GPS to be great to locate myself when I can't figure it out from landmarks, but I very rarely use it to select a route – I can just look at the map in the same app and figure out a route on my own.

I used GPS routing today to cycle to from a station to a place I never been to before. Used it before for driving on highways in a weird place. Its very helfull when you dont know the area very well

I can't remember a whole route just from looking at the map once. Also maps generally don't show whether streets are one way and things like that.

I just type the address into Google maps, or place a pin manually, then hit the start button. It'll tell me every step of the way. Keep right at the fork. In a hundred meters, turn left. Turn left. Take the second exit in the roundabout. Your destination is a hundred meters ahead on the right.

It's great and it works almost flawlessly. Even better if you have a passenger able to keep an eye on it for those times when it isn't flawless.

> Also maps generally don't show whether streets are one way and things like that.

Citation needed.

It's a mix. If I don't know the area well (like if I'm going downtown), the GPS is a big boon.

If I do know the area, I can simply find the area and then drive straight there. There's still value in my mind of being aware of your environment.

If the GPS routinely hallucinated the existence of places to go, not just occasionally erroneous or out-of-date data, but literally putting streets where they never existed or taking me to the nearest branch of a bank when that never existed, it would be unreliable enough that I would probably only trust maps made the old fashioned way.

Just an odd aside that occurred to me: Would you buy a calculator that hallucinates wrong answers part of the time, but gets enough correct answers and "partial credit" to earn you a certificate for being competent in math?

Yes, people would buy it and work around the wrong answers, if getting a non-hallucinating calculator was off the table.

The people who care about certificates, but not quality, are usually pretty bad in their jobs anyway. Nobody cared what certificates I have or not, and I know several people who had to lie about their certificates - that they don’t have some when in reality they have - to get their current jobs. For example, they signal to me that you like to waste your time for performative acts, instead of doing your job. Also, it’s usually pretty bad to work for bosses who substantially value these.

So should AI also indicate this to me? That the job will suck, and there would be bad coworkers around me in the job?

I would buy a calculator that could help me break down the problem and show my work though, that's the hardest part. I can always double check the numbers, and I would get partial credit for a miscalculation with the right process, but if I can't figure out how to represent the problem mathematically, I'm cooked.

Even if it is wrong half the time, and even when it gives you the right answer the work it shows isn't correct?

> Tech never ever prevents people who really want to hone their skills from doing so

Even though that is a generalization that you cannot prove, you implicitly admit that it will prevent everybody else from gettings any skills. Which is quite a bad outcome.

> powerlifting is a thing

Those people have a different motivation: looks, competition, prestige, power. That doesn't motivate people to learn to draw.

Your easy dismissal is undoubtedly shared by many, but it is hubris.

>People will write lengthy and convoluted explanation on why LLM isn't like calculator or microwave oven or other technology before. (Like OP's article) But it really is.

You generally don't need a lengthy explanation because it's common sense. When someone doesn't get it then people have to go into lengthy convoluted explanations because they are trying to elucidate common sense to someone who doesn't get it.

I mean how else do I elucidate it?

LLMs are different from any revolutionary technology that came before it. The first thing is we don't understand it. It's a black box. We understand the learning algorithm that trains the weights, but we don't understand conceptually how an LLM works. They are black boxes and we have limited control over them.

You are talking to a thing that understands what you say to it, yet we don't understand this how this thing works. Nobody in the history of science has created anything similar. And yet we get geniuses like you who can use a simple analogy to reduce the creation of an LLM to something like the invention of a car and think there's utterly no difference.

There is a sort of inflection point here. It hasn't happened yet but a possible future is becoming more tangible. A future where technology surpasses humanity in intelligence. You are talking to something that is talking back and could surpass us.

I know the abundance of AI slop has made everyone numb to the events that happened in the past couple of years. But we need to look past that. Something major has happened, something different then the achievements and milestones humanity has surpassed before.

I think you should put the pipe down.

> You generally don't need a lengthy explanation because it's common sense. When someone doesn't get it then people have to go into lengthy convoluted explanations because they are trying to elucidate common sense to someone who doesn't get it.

Maybe you're new here friend...

> The first thing is we don't understand it.

Perhaps you do not understand it, but many software engineers do understand.

Of the human brain we can still say that we don't understand it.

>Perhaps you do not understand it, but many software engineers do understand.

No, they do not. LLMs are by nature a black box problem solving system. This is not true about all the other machines we have, which may be difficult to understand for specific or even most humans, but allow specialists to understand WHY something is happening. This question is unanswerable for an LLM, no matter how good you are at Python or the math behind neural networks.

Why do we keep getting people who say we understand LLMs.

Let me put it plainly. If we understood LLMs we would understand why hallucinations happen and we would subsequently be able to control and stop hallucinations from happening. But we can’t. We can’t control the LLM because of lack of understanding.

All the code is available on a computer for us to modify every single parameter. We have full access and we can’t control the LLM because we don’t understand or KNOW what to do. This is despite the fact that we have absolute control over the value of every single atomic unit of an LLM

I mean, I thought "we" did understand why they happen. It's a design decision to always provide an answer because an LLM never wants to say "I do not know". It might sometimes say "I cannot answer that" for compliance reasons, but never "I don't know".

This design decision is inherent to American culture and waht they consider as a "trustworthy person". Always having an answer is better than admitting a lack of knowledge.

I don't know the technical details behind incomplete information, but I feel I know the meta reasoning behind it.

> The first thing is we don't understand it. It's a black box. We understand the learning algorithm that trains the weights, but we don't understand conceptually how an LLM works

Wrong.

> You are talking to a thing that understands what you say to it

Wrong.

Prove your statements. Otherwise it's equivalent to AI slop. You're written response is no different and no better, therefore what's the point of you even responding? I'd prefer an AI bot to write a retort because it'd be more intelligent then just "wrong".

Not trying to be insulting here. But genuinely if you think humanity is better then AI, why is your response to me objectively WORSE then AI slop?? Prove your own statements by being better yourself, otherwise your own statement is in itself proof against your point.

My guy its not only about the art its about killing passion and the lifeline of people. Your take is incredibly ignorant to people who value human created work. These things will kill industries. What jobs should people work in, who got their income cut by LLMs? Force them into blue collar work?

But isn't that the same as saying: what about all the horse carrier drivers who lost their jobs due to cars? What about all the bank tellers we lost after inventing the automated teller machine?

Not exactly. It depends on how many professions get extinct at the same time. If you have ever lived in a place that is in an economic decline because professions have moved abroad and the new professions replacing the old ones just don't provide the scale or only benefit a few in society, you know where things might be headed.

What do you think happened in the rise of industrial agriculture?

We're talking about places that even after decades haven't recovered. What do you think is happening there right now?

There's a common fallacy that tries to argue that it'll be alright over time, no matter what happens. Given enough time, you can also say that about atomic wars. But that won't help the generations that are affected.

If you live in a dead town with no opportunities then you either make your own opportunities or you move to a place with opportunities.

If you just sit on your hands complaining about the lack of opportunities then you won't get any sympathy from me. People aren't entitled to live wherever they want, humanity's entire thing is adaptability. So adapt. Life is what you make it.

When I say 'place' that includes entire countries. Adapting then depends on the kindness of strangers towards foreign refugees.

I wouldn't be surprised if at some point in the near future something like "Adapt. Life is what you make it" could be read in big bold letters above the entrance of a place like Alligator Alcatraz.

I think it's pretty clear that I'm not referring to Palestinians, Ukrainians or Syrians etc here. I support refugee programs but I also acknowledge that we have limited resources. We can't help everyone. We can't just open the borders and let everyone in.

I hadn't heard about alligator Alcatraz until now, I'm not American so I don't keep up with all of Trump's shenanigans. I feel compelled to make it clear that I in no way support Trump. The fact that the US has elected that clown not once but twice is frankly embarrassing.

Humans are entitled to live wherever they want. Capitalists destroying rural regions with false promises (prosperous jobs) is a thing since the industrialization. Should all people move to overrun big cities? Small once established markets are getting destroyed by big discounters or stuff like Amazon. Also adapting is and never was a thing for most people. I dont know where you got that from but this isn't the wild west anymore. People are trying to set up a life for themselves without moving every 2 years. Entitled city person viewpoint.

There's plenty of rural areas with plenty of opportunities. Cities are not the only option. If I lived in a dead mining town I'd move elsewhere. You can blame corporations or whatever you want, doesn't matter whose fault it is. Complaining and blaming doesn't solve anything. Finding solutions does. Stop complaining, start finding solutions. I grew up in a beautiful rural place. I'd like to live there, but what I like even more is not having to drive for over an hour to work every day. So I moved. I also went to university in my late 20s and some of my peers were in their 40s and 50s.

People adapt to all kinds of stuff all the time. Saying adapting isn't a thing for most people is ridiculous. Of course it's a thing. It's what you do when your current situation isn't working. You adapt.

And that is extremely difficult at a large scale. Especially when you reduce safety nets and heighten the consequences of failure. A lack of healthcare, poor rural hospitals, extortionate tuition at colleges, high housing costs; these all make it extremely difficult to adapt.

Sure, you can smugly say that the hard-working will survive. But i don't want to imagine what the USA will be like millions of unemployed and under-provisioned Americans. Poverty and the process of falling off the socio economic ladder is ugly for everyone, unless you're wealthy enough to afford to insulate yourself from the consequences.

The fact that this nuance appears to be lost on you makes me suspicious of your motives for posting your opinion.

I'm not talking about large scale. I'm also not talking about politics, which I assume is what you're implying re my motives. I don't have any motives, I'm not even American. I don't really care about all the crazy stuff happening over there. They got what they voted for, meanwhile the world is wondering how they elected that clown not once but twice.

The ironic thing in all this is that these rural people you're talking about are probably the exact people responsible for electing him. Evokes images of leopards eating faces and such.

There is a difference in killing off passion work and mundane work. We are also killing off empathy while we are at it.

I don't think there's a real difference. Thinking a job is "mundane" IMO is mostly a case of not working that job. Many "mundane" jobs have depth and rewards, even if not in every instance.

I've heard people express that they liked working in retail. By extension somebody must have enjoyed being a bank teller. After all, why not? You get to talk to a lot of people, and every time you solve some problem or answer a question and get thanked for it you get a little rush of endorphins.

Many jobs that suck only suck due to external factors like having a terrible boss or terrible customers, or having to enforce some terrible policy.

This sounds like a strawman tbh, I have worked retail for years and I do not know a single person enjoying retail work. Especially not cashiers. I can understand what you are on about, but do you think this is the majority of people? The issue is being able to support yourself which these mundane jobs hardly are able to. Personally I want these mundane things automated because I don't want to interact with people. I appreciate art though and I want to support human art. I appreciate everything from ancient architecture and stone cutting to renaissance paintings to basement drawings of amateurs. Art used to have character and now its all the same AI slop. Video games will become unplayable for me in the near future. Advertisements will be fully AI slop. Sure there are still artists out there, but they get overshadowed by AI slop.

I mean, retail has many different instances of it. Yes, I can imagine working in a busy supermarket owned by a giant like Walmart would be unpleasant.

But imagine working in a nice cafe in a quiet small town, or a business that's not too frantically paced, like a clothing store. Add some perks like not always doing the same job and a decent boss, and it shouldn't be too bad. Most any job can be drastically improved by decreasing the workload, cutting hours and adding some variety. I don't think being a cashier is inherently miserable. It's just the way we structure things most of the time makes it suck.

Just like you think a human touch makes art special, a human touch can make a mundane job special. A human serving coffee instead of a machine can tell you about what different options are available, recommend things, offer adjustments a machine might not, chat about stuff while it's brewing... You may end up patronizing a particular cafe because you like the person at the counter.

A lot of people who are passionate about creative fields work jobs that are pretty mundane, e.g. painting drab environmental textures every day for the next iteration of Call of Duty, or cutesy barfy crap for the next Candy Crush Saga. The jobs are very rarely alligned with their own taste and interests, plus they're terribly dull because, as a specialist, you're constantly working only one specific kind of assignments.

No, this is far far more wide reaching and it’s intellectually dishonest to pretend otherwise.

It’s why it’s so exciting.

Agreed. However, according to the author LLM's mostly produce crap, and he doesn't seem to be able to imagine (or want?) that to improve (beyond crap/hallucination and become very useful to many).

Tell me how is it going to be useful to the many? Even better marketing emails? More precise targeted advertising? Even more automated job application rejections? Mass firings due to AI replacing most office jobs?

Whats the benefit of LLMs to the many who barely can operate a search machine?

I am sorry but thinking this will benefit the many is delusional. It's main use is making rich people richer by saving expenses on people's wages. Tell me, how are these people going to get a job once their skills are made useless?

I'm not an LLM enthusiast, but I can think of at least one example where these are useful to the many: decent/fast translation from one language to another. It won't be perfect, but it is usually good enough when you are visiting a foreign country for a few weeks and you have no time or interest in learning the language.

Exactly... Why is it that every time a science fiction writer comes up with a new dystopian future to warn humanity about something, there's always a bunch of psychopaths that go "ooh, blueprints for a get-rich-at-the-expense-of-everyone-else scheme!"?

Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale

Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus

(Original source: https://xcancel.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538?... )

I'm just a regular developer - not rich, not running a company. I used to maintain accessibility apps for blind users (QRead for ebooks, various Twitter clients back when their site was barely screen-reader compatible). Had to abandon them when I got a day job - no energy left for wrestling with deprecated APIs and broken CI pipelines.

Now with Claude Code, I've cleaned up years of technical debt, added proper test coverage, got everything building in CI again with automated release-on-tag. (Yes, CC will literally debug your GitHub Actions yaml.) My blind users are getting updates again after years of nothing.

I'm nobody special. By basic statistics, if LLMs are this useful to one random developer, they're probably useful to millions of others maintaining their own small projects.

Yes, job displacement is a real concern. But the idea that LLMs [only] help the wealthy get wealthier? I'm living proof that's not true. I'm using them to resurrect accessibility tools that the market wouldn't support. That's not exactly a venture capital use case.

The number of bank tellers did not drop after ATMs starting in use. https://conversableeconomist.com/2015/03/03/atms-and-a-risin...

That said, yes, what about them? These are people with real skin the the game - people who spent years learning their craft expecting it will be their life-long career.

Do we simply exclaim "sucks to be you!"?

Do we tell out-of-work coal miners to switch to a career in programming with the promise it will be a lucrative career move? And when employment opportunities in software development collapse, then what?

All while we increasingly gate health care on being employed?

Yeah. If society no longer needs your job then you need to find something else to do. Doesn't have to be software, we mine other things than coal. We need builders, plumbers, electricians, lots of possibilities.

Software dev opportunities won't collapse any time soon, any half decent dev who's tried vibe coding will tell you that much. It's a tool developers can use, it's not a replacement.

If society no longer needs my job, society should help.

What's your solution to the miners of West Virginia?

https://www.wvva.com/2025/06/25/coal-miners-face-layoffs-fed...

"As West Virginians face possible cuts to Medicaid and SNAP, they are also being hit hard in the job market."

"“I’m worried for the people that are laid off, and are they going to be able to find another job? You know, are they my age? How are you going to start over? You’ve got to find a job back in what you know, because you can’t start over at my age,” said Ricky Estes, a former Coal Mining Safety Representative, who was laid off. "

"Even before these possible cuts, affordable healthcare can be hard to find currently in the mountain state"

I mention mining -> programming because that was the hyped solution a decade ago, eg, https://www.wtrf.com/community/from-coal-to-coding-new-progr... .

How well did that work out?

I wasn't talking about the recent LLM fad, but rather the decades of mass government funding of STEM[1], and programming training in particular (like Joe Manchin's Mined Minds), with the carrot of a high-paying job at the end, leading to a surplus of coders who, as a result, flood the job market and lower salaries and individual employee power.

[1] STEM government funding doesn't seem to end up in, say, marine biology or sociology or the theory of unbounded operators or other fields of science and math that don't make companies a lot of money.

I'd suggest that Mr. Estes find a different mine to work at if he insists on continuing to work in mining. He could also pivot to other industry, safety is a big deal in most industry. I'm sure they would consider him at many locations for similar positions.

I'm not opposed to having programs to help these people, not at all. I'm from Norway where we have free healthcare, education, social security nets etc. I'm all for that stuff, it benefits all of us.

All I'm saying is if new opportunities don't fall into your lap you need to find them yourself.

Since you are from Norway you likely aren't aware that there aren't significant other mining jobs in West Virginia.

Or other jobs in West Virginia, with its long history of coal mining, with profits ending up in the pockets of mine owners, not employees.

Since you think people are only looking for jobs that fall in their lap, I'm certain you have no idea of the issues.

So, now you need find a new job yourself, and it requires a specific training, so you spend your savings on a one year training program, only to find that, once done, the job market has changed and now you also need two years of job experience .. then what?

In the meanwhile, your breathing has gotten more difficult. You think it might be black lung. Your union helped pass the law which helps provide health and financial support to miners who get black lung, and you became a miner expecting this protection, but Trump DOGE'd it so who knows when you'll get your legally required support.

Then move out of West Virginia. Or find something that works in WV. Those are their options.

I also can't say I have much sympathy for people who voted for Trump and then got screwed by Trump. West virginians overwhelmingly voted red. You can't vote against social security nets and then complain that you dont have a social security net.

Pull yourselves up by your bootstraps, red blooded patriots. No one can tread on you.

Bless your heart.

Your point is very valid. It is the luddite argument. And that is valid. But the problem is never the technology itself but, as you point out, the loss of livelihood and meaning and especially the shifts in power from the many to the few.

We need to learn to make technology truly benefit the many. Also in terms of power.

Yes, fully agree. Can't believe we live in a timeline in which big tech companies steal data from the many, use this data to train models, sell this data while also convincing technological illiterate people their propaganda machines (social media) is useful to them... Now they want to buy nuclear power plants too. Im sure nothing will go wrong there.

It's all downstream from the way the economy works, and the economy is (I think) downstream from the tools we use to coordinate effort. If we can evolve the way which we handle resource allocation, trust and effort coordination I emphatically believe there's at least some some hope that we can create an alternative economy. Which it seems that we urgently need as a civilization.

> People will write lengthy and convoluted explanation on why LLM isn't like calculator or microwave oven or other technology before. (Like OP's article) But it really is.

No it's not (like OP's article says). With a calculator you punch in 10 + 9 and get 2 immediately, and this was 50+ years ago. With an LLM you type in "what is 10 + 9" and get three paragraphs of text after a few seconds. (this is false, I just tried it and the response is "10 + 9 = 19" but I'm exaggerating for dramatic effect). With a microwave you yeet in food and press a button and stuff happens the same way, every time.

Sure, if you abstract it to "doing things in an easier and lazier way", LLMs are just the next step, like IDEs with built in error checking and code generation were since 20 years ago. But it's more vague than press button to do a thing.

> No it's not (like OP's article says). With a calculator you punch in 10 + 9 and get 2 immediately, and this was 50+ years ago.

Your calculator is broken.

> With an LLM you type in "what is 10 + 9" and get three paragraphs of text after a few seconds. (this is false, I just tried it and the response is "10 + 9 = 19" but I'm exaggerating for dramatic effect).

So you’re arguing against a strawman?

Up until recently, I could, if I wanted to have a living doing VFX. I could, if I wanted to, craft new worlds, and get paid for it.

In two years, that won't be the case.

Its the same for virtually all other Arts based job. An economy that currently support say 100% of the people now, will at most be able to support 10-30% in a few years time.

> It's ridiculous to think drawing will become a lost art because of LLM/Diffusal

Map reading is pretty much a dead art now (as someone who leads hikes, I've seen it first hand)

Memorising books/oral history is also a long dead art.

Oral story telling is also a dead art, as is folk music, compared to its peak.

Sure _rich_ people will be able to do all the arts they want. Everyone else won't

I agree. I am at mid-career. I know many people who dedicated years of their lives learning a craft and building a dignified, somewhat-creative career. I admire these people greatly. The rewards from putting in this effort have disappeared.

For example, I have no knowledge of film editing or what “works” in a sequence, but if I wanted to I could create something more than passable with AI.

My girlfriend is a ceramist. She makes porcelain pieces (https://malinamore.art/) that are sold for hundreds or even thousands of euros.

Why would someone buy a plate off her, when they could get one from IKEA for 1.50 eur?

Yet ceramics is not a dead art. Beats me?

Correct!

but 200 years ago there were loads of ceramic manufactures, employing hundreds of thousands of skilled potters. even 50 years ago, there were thousands of skilled ceramists in the UK. now its single person artisans, like your very talented other half.

Now, that reduction in work force too 200 years and mirrors the industrial revolution. GenAI is looking like its going to speed run that in ~5-7 years

I should be more clear, there is a difference between dead art (memorizing stories) and non viable career for all but 1% of people compared to now. I'm talking about the latter.

there will always be a market for exceptional artists, but what about the other 80-90% of people that used to be able to make a living and now can't anymore? What are they going to do? And without the possibility of a particular profession leading to gainful employment, very few people will even start it, making the funnel smaller and smaller until even exceptional artists won't be able to emerge at all.

We still have amazing master blacksmiths who've reached the pinnacle of the craft despite no economic demand for their skills, so clearly the lack of a market doesn't deter curious people looking for a hobby.

> doesn't deter curious people looking for a hobby.

curious rich people.

I've met a few master blacksmiths who do fair/con circuits, these are often guys who did stuff in their garage while working a regular job until they were able to build a customer base and online presence.

Is that our inspiration? to lose all social stability traveling on the road, treating their hard worked craft as a circus attraction.

And all as a side gig, too. for a craft their forefathers spent entire careers honing. Is that really how a craftman masters their craft?

>Sure _rich_ people will be able to do all the arts they want. Everyone else won't

I miss when rich people spent their time appealing to other rich people with art instead of screwing over all of society.

Well, they always did the latter. But they had their circuses as well. Now it's just cold, hard corporatism.

Something notable to recognize when comparing LLM's to calculators, is the fact that the skill a calculator is replacing can be learned by any competent adult in about a week. Manual division, addition, even more complicated stuff, it will just take much longer. However, the skills that an LLM is targeting, once atrophied are not replaceable in such short time frames.

Being good at coming up with ideas, at critically reading something, at synthesizing research, at writing and editing, are all things that take years to learn. This is not the same as learning the mechanics that a calculator does for you.

>World record of 100m sprint kept improving even since car was invented.

Obesity rates keep "improving" since the car was invented, up to becoming a major public health crisis and the main amplifier of complications and mortality when the pandemic stroke.

Oh, and the 100m sprint world record has been set for more than a decade and a half now, which means either we reached human optimum, or progress on anti-doping technology has forced a regression on performance.

I think it's interesting that practically every time this point is made (and it is made so very often), the examples that are used to prove the point are objective and easy to measure. A 100m sprint time or a calculation of Pi is not the same as a work of art, because they can be measured objectively while art cannot. There is no equivalent in art-making to running a 100m sprint. The evaluation of a 100m sprint is not subjective, does not require judgement, does not depend on taste, context, history, and all the other many things the reputation and impact of a work of art depends on.

As ever, the standard defence of LLM and all gen AI tech rests on this reduction of complex subjectivity to something close to objectivity: the picture looks like other pictures, therefore it is a good picture. The sentence looks plausibly like other sentences, therefore it is a good sentence. That this argument is so pervasive tells me only that the audience for 'creative work' is already so inundated with depthless trash, that they can no longer tell the difference between painting and powerlifting.

It is not the artists who are primarily at risk here, but the audience for their work. Artists will continue to disappear for the same reason they always have: because their prospective audience does not understand them.

There is at least three major art markets: 1) pretty pictures to fill in a void (empty walls, dress up an article...), 2) prestige purchases for those trying to fill that void in their imposter syndrome, and 3) fellow artists who are really philosophers working beyond language. The whole reason art is evaluated with vague notions like taste, context, history and so on is because the work of artists left their audience's understanding several generations ago, but they still need to make a living, so these proxies are used so the general public does not feel left out. Serious art is leading edge philosophy operating in a medium beyond language, and for what it's worth AI will never be there, just like the majority of people.

There’s an even deeper issue, not just for art, for all things.

The majority of artists, and of all other groups, are in fact mediocre with mediocre virtues, so enough incentives would turn most of them into Whatever shillers like the post describes.

So a non expert cannot easily determine, even if they do stumble upon “Serious art” by happenstance, whether it’s just another empty scheme or indeed someting more serious.

Maybe if they spend several hours puzzling over the artist’s background, incentives, network, claims, past works, etc… they can be 99% sure. But almost nobody likes any particular piece of work that much upon first glance, to put in that much effort.

The opposite. We are all learning to hone our slop detectors now, real art is more valuable and necessary.

This doesn’t seem to address the comment?

Anyone can claim to have “real art”.

Better analogy might be all those gloomy Victorian artists wandering around declaring the death of portraiture after photography really got going.

The example might be bad but the argument still stands. Painting hasn't disappeared when photography was invented. Drummers still drum after the invention of drum machines.

Music is actually a terrific counterexample to your point. It perfectly demonstrates the culturally and artistically destructive power of the steady march of progress in computer technology -- which really has led to fewer drummers.

Far fewer people make their living as musicians than did even thirty years ago. Being a musician is no longer a viable middle-class career. Jaron Lanier, who has written on this, has argued that this is the direct result of the advent of the internet, music piracy, and streaming -- two of which originally were expected or promised to provide more opportunities for artists, not take them away.

So there really are far fewer drummers, and fewer, worse opportunities for those who remain, than there were even within the living memory of even most HN users, not because some specific musical technology advanced but because technological advancement provided an easier, cheaper alternative to human labor.

Sound familiar yet?

> which really has led to fewer drummers.

what's your basis for this claim? please provide some data showing number of drummers over time, or at least musicians, over the last fifty years or so. I tried searching and couldn't find anything but you're so confident, I'm sure you have a source you could link

Sure, here's a blog post that cites BLS statistics showing a 45% decline in the number of working musicians in the US just between 2002 and 2012: https://thetrichordist.com/2013/05/21/45-fewer-professional-...

I’m one of those statistics. But I still play. It’s fun to imagine myself with a full time studio career but instead I’m a database startup founder. (I got into databases by building a web crawler to recommend how musicians could promote themselves on mp3 blogs.)

How many musicians or artists are finding their need to explore similarly met by opportunities that simply didn’t exist in 2002? If art is expression than we should expect the people who might have wielded a brush or guitar to be building software instead.

If this is you, I recommend Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act. It’s as pure an expression of the way I like to work in music, as it is aligned with how I think about code and product design.

>How many musicians or artists are finding their need to explore similarly met by opportunities that simply didn’t exist in 2002?

Given the current job market: very few. They didn't become SWE founders, they were thrown into dead end jobs as a means to survive. At best, maybe they became music teachers to try and keep the spark alive.

The survivor's bias is pretty strong here.

>If art is expression than we should expect the people who might have wielded a brush or guitar to be building software instead.

everyone expresses differently. Too bad that not all expressions lead to a career that sustains oneself. If you really believe AI will take over programmming, what's the next frontier after building software?

Secondly, most software is product, not art. Most people aren't going to feel like they are expressing anything as they pump out CRUD widgets. That's just modern day pencil pushing.

Gotta love being so confrontational about wanting a source and then never responding when provided one.

I know the writings of Jaron on this and I think he is mostly wrong.

What he is comparing was a brief time in history that the music industry was at the absolute peak.

We have just gone back to normal that most people can't make money being a musician just like being an actor is not really a viable middle class career option.

Sure, when I graduated high school you could have just made a living in a local rock band because everyone wanted to be in a band to be the next Guns n Roses.

To me, it is like how even Hitler wanted to be a painter because everyone wanted to be a painter at that time. The way everyone wanted to be a rock star when i was a teenager.

Times change and the collective artistic taste change with them. So many musicians are doing better than ever before because of youtube too.

I play the baroque lute and I can tell you that it is much tougher to get a gig in a bar today than it was in 1650 in France.

The best lutenist though are killing it on youtube with Bach videos.

> What he is comparing was a brief time in history that the music industry was at the absolute peak.

Could you provide data defending this claim? Without it, and even with it, all I see in your comment is that you're begging the question or shrugging your shoulders at the data and saying, "so what," not actually or substantively disagreeing with anything Lanier has said or written.

What caused the decline? You seem very sure you know the answer, and yet your answer basically seems to be to stop asking the question or investigating: "music was at its peak, so obviously it declined." If music was at some absolute peak, why was that? "It was at its peak" isn't an answer. It's a restatement of the question.

And can you show me that there were fewer musicians per capita, making less money in adjusted terms, twenty or thirty years earlier?

And do you have any data showing that more than a tiny, miniscule fraction of musicians are doing "better than ever before" thanks specifically to YouTube? "So many" is slippery and frustratingly difficult to quantify in a manner that lets me evaluate its accuracy.

>We have just gone back to normal that most people can't make money being a musician just like being an actor is not really a viable middle class career option.

And we want to normalize that? We can also go back to the times were 8 YO's worked in teh mines and humans worked 7 days a week for 12+ hours.

>The way everyone wanted to be a rock star when i was a teenager.

Everyone wanted to be an astronaut growing up at one point too. That trend faded... but it turns out astronauts can get a living wage. Or at least, I sure hope so.

To the extent this argument holds, it then fails for something like writing code, as well as any visual art style when works are created on a computer if their original aesthetic derived from the material-world limitations of tools and materials under which it arose: no human skill, no countless hours of labor has gone in to producing digital works in styles or colors where their perceived beauty was rooted to the rarity of seeing, ever in one’s life, something like the shade of blue derived from lapis lazuli. Now? Any child with a screen can produce it.

Totally agree. Calculators didn’t kill math. Cameras didn’t kill painting. Tools change the baseline, but people still push the edges. The ones who love the craft won’t stop just because it got easier for others.

> People will write lengthy and convoluted explanation on why LLM isn't like calculator or microwave oven or other technology before. (Like OP's article) But it really is.

Well you sure showed them.

The TFA makes a very concrete point about how the Whatever machine is categorically different from a calculator or a handsaw. A calculator doesn't sometimes hallucinate a wrong result. A saw doesn't sometimes cut wavy lines instead of straight lines. They are predictable and learnable tools. I don't see anyone addressing this criticism, only straw manning.

> People will write lengthy and convoluted explanation on why LLM isn't like calculator or microwave oven or other technology before. (Like OP's article) But it really is.

There are clear differences. First of a calculator and microwave are quite different, but so is LLM. Both are time savers, in the sense of microwave saves time defrosting and calculator saves time calculating vs human.

They save time to achieve a goal. However calculators come with a penalty, by making multiplication easier they make user worse at it.

LLMs are like calculators but worse. They both are effort savers, and thus come with a huge learning penalty and unprecise enough that you need to learn to know better than them.

> World record of 100m sprint kept improving even since car was invented.

A very good example!

Indeed the world record is achieved by a very limited number of people under stringent conditions.

Meanwhile people by and large† take their cars to go to the bakery which is 10min away by foot, to disastrous effect on their health.

† Comparatively to world record holders.

IMO AI isn't like a calculator, it is like a microwave. Another analogy would be like takeout. The difference is that you don't get to choose the details, and usually get worse quality, but sometimes that's OK.

AI is the equivalent of going from stone abacuses straight to smartphones, skipping all computer and calculator development in between.

We go from a society where only a very few people are literate in math to one where everyone has a literal supercomputer at all times. What do you think that would do for math literacy in a society? Would everyone suddenly went to learn algebra and calculus? Or would the vast majority of people use the easy machine and accept its answers without question or understanding?

But you are not allowed to use either until you can already cook and calculate.

comparing LLMs to microwaves makes me think of the time my grandmother cooked the Thanksgiving turkey in a microwave because it was new and easy and the obvious thing to do!

I guess the analogy isn't that bad! I'd be pretty upset if a professional cook made my steak in a microwave.

The jump from Assembly to Python is an enormous skill difference. But the shift from Python to Python with Copilot? Not as much, and every counter to this sort of comparison that I have heard is strongly in want of a true Scotsman.

It’s time to move on. The history of tech is a steady march of tools that demand less prep, less precision, and less friction from their users.

All this hand-wringing seems to show is that a worforce whose aggregate work ethos usually mocks “get off my lawn” attitudes in others was hiding a significant “but I never thought it would happen to me”, often couched in some variety of “but think of the children”.

Besides, it could be worse: it’s not like when other professions went obsolete practically overnight, like switchboard operators, or cuirassiers.

The point is what value can the common man reasonably provide in the free market to support a family when most of white collar work is also automated?

The industrial revolution automated a lot of blue collars, AI is starting to seriously automate white collars to the point less people are needed.

They are automating the mind, there’s not much else to compete with to provide value. Which color people should pivot to?

>Which color people should pivot to?

At this rate: red.

>But it really is.

it really isn't. Calculators don't steal from acuators. Actuators and calculators grabbed from nature. Microwaves didn't take from the fireplace.

People really want to pretend that LLM's aren't just storing massive amounts of other people's data with reckless abandon and pretend instead that it's like the car to a horse. Cars didn't need literal horsepower.

>It's ridiculous to think drawing will become a lost art because of LLM/Diffusal models when we live in a reality where powerlifting is a thing.

I agree that athletes are the last thing to be replaced by our robot overlords. If there's one cheatcode to the human element, it's charisma. And people bouncing balls real good is a trillion dollar industry that warps out entire civlization, from forming hobbies, to shaping what we find as "attractive".

That's more of a cultural thing than a practicality thing, though. People respect athletes. They do not apparently respect artists nor engineers, let alone blue collar work that turns out to be way more expensive to automate.

Yeah at least at its current stage it still is. but a calculator boosts productivity just like a microwave. A lot of experiments and boilerplate code with low entropy is made a lot easier with LLMs.