[exo-pla-net]

This is a tech site, where >50% of us are programmers who have achieved greater productivity thanks to LLM advances.

And yet we're filled to the gills with Luddite sentiments and AI content fearmongering.

Imagine the hysteria and the skull-vibrating noise of the non-HN rabble when they come to understand where all of this is going. They're going to do their darndest to stop us from achieving post-economy.

[devjab]

I think programmers are in the perfect profession to call LLMs out for just how bad they are. They are fancy auto-complete and I love them in my daily usage, but a big part of that is because I can tell when they are ridiculously wrong. Which is so often you really have to question how useful they would be for anything where they aren’t just fancy auto-complete.

Which isn’t AIs fault. I’m sure they can be great in cancer detection, unless they replace what we’re already doing because they are cheaper than doctors. In combination with an expert AI is great, but that’s not what’s happening is it?

[antirez]

I fail to see the difference. Actually, programming was one of the first field where LLMs shown proficiency. The helper nature of LLMs is true in all the fields so far, in the future this may change. I believe that for instance in the case or journalism the issue was already there: three euros per post written without clue by humans.

Anyway in the long run AI will kill tons of jobs. Regardless of blog posts like that. The true key is governments assistance.

[exo-pla-net]

I don't know what difference you are referring to. I was agreeing with you.

And also agreed: many trumpet the merits of "unassisted" human output. However, they're suffering from ancestor veneration: human writing has always been a vast mine of worthless rock (slop) with a few gems of high-IQ analysis hidden here and there.

For instance, upon the invention of the printing press, it was immediately and predominantly used for promulgating religious tracts.

And even when you got to Newton, who created for us some valuable gems, much of his output was nevertheless deranged and worthless. [1]

It follows that, whether we're a human or an LLM, if we achieve factual grounding and the capacity to reason, we achieve it despite the bulk of the information we ingest. Filtering out sludge is part of the required skillset for intellectual growth, and LLM slop qualitatively changes nothing.

[1] https://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/texts/diplomatic/THE...