Learning is not about what you put in, it is about what you can take out. It is also not zero-sum, but rather exists on a wide spectrum for any given knowledge domain. A good idea could be to prompt the LLMs to keep quizzing you on what you have read and test on both recall and understanding.
Also learning is not just about truth, it is about curiosity as well. The pop-sci metaphors could actually good for satisfying the curiosity of let's say a 10-year old. What to learn and how to learn is ultimately at the judgement of the learner. The better the judgement, the more the learner can stay closer to the exact scientific details.
On a side note, since the author has included a detailed explanation that the text is not AI generated and this is her default writing style, I just find it very difficult to read this style of extra punchy writing. I don't know if it is just me or anyone else as well.
I assume it's common and understandable to dislike LLM generated content and therefore anything that resembles it regardless of origin. For those who happen to write in a similar way it's a pity.
I've noticed some people on the internet dismiss content just by its length too now. I assume this is because they're not used to the idea of a human producing long form content (as opposed to the short form rewarded by popular feeds). I wrote a post (other forum, other handle) where I included some markdown tables and detailed explanations in an attempt to be thorough and help others answer my question and got accused of having LLM generated it despite writing it myself. Maybe the usage of markdown tables or the length of the post was the issue. Anyway, it's not nice being dismissed as AI slop when no AI was involved. I also don't see how there could ever be a reliable way of identifying origin of digital content such as text on a forum.
> I also don't see how there could ever be a reliable way of identifying origin of digital content such as text on a forum.
Perfectly reliable, no.
But:
1. these models aren't even trying to hide their nature, if anything the opposite
2. a great many users of those models are (lazy or time constrained, doesn't matter which) or lacking in style of their own, and in each of these cases the result is they don't prompt the models to hide their default style; worse, the outputs keeps getting RLHF-ed so despite how much of an "ugh" factor it has to the reader, most people making these things, to the extent that they do review the content at all rather than blindly uploading, actually like the style
3. Models don't share state between users. This means the model won't act "bored" from having already written the same thing before, so when 5000 people all prompt for "blog post about X", then it will create 5000 blog posts with almost identical in writing style. In turn, this means that the style of the most-used model (I assume for English-language blog posts this is still ChatGPT) has become cliché faster and harder than almost anything else.
Taste seems something that should be more related to a craft but when doing engineering we don't talk about taste, we talk about theory, systems, practices, skill, intuition, experimentation, teaching and learning. So the debate on whether taste matters or not might come down to whether creating software can be called craft or engineering. In my opinion, maybe programming was more of a craft before LLMs but it looks like it is being squished between the engineering aspects of producing and maintaining software going ahead.
> Anything that exists in reality and is observable by definition is tightly bound by the laws of physics and chemistry. Software is too.
Agreed. If I have to guess, the relevant fields in physics for software engineering would be quantum mechanics and thermodynamics. Of course, we don't see any direct relation as of now but it feel it should be important to determine the physical basis of software. The basis of software cannot be just math. It has to be physics.
My problem with such articles is that they mix the creation of software with the servicing of the software. It can be pretty complex to serve sophisticated software at scale in a cost-competitive and secure manner and it will remain so. So the engineering will remain important and domain expertise will remain important as well, as it has always been. Different business will rely on different combinations of these to create their own specific moats.
I think the confusion comes from considering Agile as a process instead of a set of values and principles. The Agile Manifesto only talks about values and principles(https://agilemanifesto.org/). Values are not right or wrong, they are just values you agree to or don't.
The problem mostly arises when processes are shoe-horned under the guise of 'Agile' in setups where they might not be the best fit by so-called process experts under pressure from management which does not know any better. The authors of Agile Manifesto have frequently said the concept of Agile has been badly twisted.
I think it’s long past the time where we can pretend that The Agile Manifesto is representative of what the word “Agile” means in tech companies.
The manifesto is a minimal set of principles but every real world Agile shop I’ve interacted with has subscribed to a set of processes that everyone in tech would recognize as “Agile”.
The manifesto has become a safe retreat that agile fans bring out whenever someone has criticisms about real-world agile; Whenever someone has a complaint about Agile as implemented in the real world, someone will show up and try to defend it by pointing out that The Agile Manifesto doesn’t contain the specific thing they dislike.
The Agile industry moved beyond The Agile Manifesto almost as soon as it was popularized. We can’t keep returning to it as some safe home base that shields Agile from any criticism.
"Industrial" cannot rely on any one individual. You have to be able to scale your process (or whatever), duplicate your process, have your process survive multiple people leaving, and so on.
Which means that any true agile cannot be industrial. And therefore any industrial agile cannot be true to the principles of the Agile Manifesto.
At this point I equate the Agile Manifesto to the Communist Manifesto. Sounds nice when you read it; in practice it is an absurd endless source of suffering.
>The Agile industry moved beyond The Agile Manifesto almost as soon as it was popularized.
Yeah, spending the amount of words in this thread trying to diagnose or complain about this simple problem in abstract strokes seems silly and frankly confounds me when considering the amount of time people wish to waste discussing the problem.
As with political parties, bad gentrification in cities, and all the rest, once money and consultants turn things into an industry you're pretty much fucked.
People should just immediately stop taking people with conflicting interests at face value when they talk. Stick to concrete details when you talk about stuff, avoid industry terms, don't let them turn things into abstract and general discussions. It only feeds the trolls (consultants) when you even complain generally about it.
Fight it with your day-to-day actions, not so much with your words. And then let it die in silence, it will die faster (I'm referring to any tech topic captured by consultants and monied interests).
The actual post and this comment shows how early we are when simple and obvious ideas look novel when first conceptualizing them. Nothing against these ideas though, they are indeed good.
