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this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2024
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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Did someone not know this like, pretty much from day one?
Not the idiot executives that blew all their budget on AI and made up for it with mass layoffs - the people interested in it. Was that not clear that there was no “reasoning” going on?
Well, two responses I have seen to the claim that LLMs are not reasoning are:
So I think this research is useful as a response to these, although I think "fuck off, promptfondler" is pretty good too.
“Language is a virus from outer space”
I thought it came from Babylonian writing that recoded the brains and planted the languages.
there’s a lot of people (especially here, but not only here) who have had the insight to see this being the case, but there’s also been a lot of boosters and promptfondlers (ie. people with a vested interest) putting out claims that their precious word vomit machines are actually thinking
so while this may confirm a known doubt, rigorous scientific testing (and disproving) of the claims is nonetheless a good thing
No they do not im afraid, hell I didnt even know that even ELIZA caused people to think it could reason (and this worried the creator) until a few years ago.
A lot of people still don't, from what I can gather from some of the comments on "AI" topics. Especially the ones that skew the other way with its "AI" hysteria is often an invite from people who know fuck all about how the tech works. "Nudifier" or otherwise generative images or explicit chats with bots that portray real or underage people being the most common topics that attract emotionally loaded but highly uninformed demands and outrage. Frankly, the whole "AI" topic in the media is so massively overblown on both fronts, but I guess it is good for traffic and nuance is dead anyway.
Indeed, although every one of us who have seen a tech hype train once or twice expected nothing less.
PDAs? Quantum computing. Touch screens. Siri. Cortana. Micropayments. Apps. Synergy of desktop and mobile.
From the outset this went from “hey that’s kind of neat” to quite possibly toppling some giants of tech in a flash. Now all we have to do is wait for the boards to give huge payouts to the pinheads that drove this shitwagon in here and we can get back to doing cool things without some imaginary fantasy stapled on to it at the explicit instruction of marketing and channel sales.
Xml also used to be a tech hype for a bit.
And i still remember how media outlets hyped up second life, forgot about it and a few months later discovered it again and more hype started. It was fun.
and then spent the entire Metaverse hype pretending Second Life didn't exist
Lot easier to do hype when you pretend the previous iterations didn't exist. (and still do, and actually have more content).
./^ L E G S ^\.
Oh man, XML is such a funny hype. What if we took S-expressions and made them less human readable, harder to parse programmatically and with multiple ways to do the same thing! Do I encode something an an element with the key as a tag and the value as the content, or do I make it an attribute of a tag? Just look at the schema, which is yet more XML! Include this magic URL at the top of your document. Want to query something from the document? Here you go! No, that's not a base64-encoded private key nor a transcript of someone's editing session in vim, that's an XPath.
JSON has its issues but at least it's only the worst of some worlds. Want to make JSON unparsable anyway, for a laugh? Try YAML, the serialization format recommended by four out of five Nordic countries!
lol
fucking
this take is so dangerously real I’m pretty sure uttering it at work will earn you a PIP and a fistfight in the parking lot with the lead data architect
you know, normal startup shit
yeah there are so many fucking crazy footguns in yaml
another I quite like:
this reminds me of some of the more cursed things I know from that hype era
(see this for some others)
it’s fucking delicious how thick the buzzwords are for an incredibly simple device:
similarly in that age: CORBA
and now of course instead of people handcrafting xml documents by string-cating angle brackets and tags together in bad php files, we have people manually dash-cating yaml together in bad jinja and go template files! progress!
WP:LOL. WP:LMAO even
Yes! Exactly. Good example.
Wha... What?
I'm trying to imagine a news anchor hyping about XM-fucking-L and I'm drawing a complete blank, is this a zen riddle
It didn't jump out of tech media containment, so it wasn't a mainstream hype thing, more a techworker hype thing. It was the data serialization standard which would save the web! Second life otoh, did massively jump containment.
I’ve always seen XML as much more of a tech executive thing — here’s the language that’ll run your entire business but is also incredibly easy to create proprietary semantics with, ensuring you can’t be ousted without taking the company down with you! it looks like absolute shit and it’s painful to type! buy in now!
I know someone who was hired (around turn of the century) because they knew how to xml with a certain kind of then-important big systems api
the stories I’ve heard from there are hilarious
christ the shit I’ve seen with network vendors…. shibboleth NETCONF/YANG. advance warning; abyss grade 6+
And yet there are some tasks I wish I could do in NETCONF instead of the thing we're actually using, but apparently the documentation for this interface is difficult and expensive for the company to get my hands on, for reasons.
XML works fine for what it is, it's just a bit verbose. Not sure it'd be my first choice for a new thing, but it's not a toxic waste dump if you're allowed to do it properly.
Touch screens?
Yeah a huge thing at one point. Anyone use a laptop with a tochscreen?
The trackpad and trackpoint of my aging linux laptop stop working if the thing gets its lid shut. The touchscreen continues to work just fine, however. It turns out that while two stupid things can’t make a good thing, they can sometimes cancel each other out.
A handy benefit no doubt, but not quite the earth-shaking revolution the touchscreen hype-train promised at the time.
Everyday, big thing in schools.
Of course, of course. At the time though, it was expected that this would change the face of computing - no more keyboards! No more mice! No, this is more like Star Trek where you glance down at some geometric assemblage of colored shapes and tap several in random succession to immediately bring up the data you were looking for.
That, uh, did not happen.
Aren't touch screens literally everywhere? What was the hype?
It's always so baffling to me to learn about those things because I was way too young to actually experience any of the "hype" around most of those technologies. Touch screens are cool and they penetrated society so much there are at my grocery shop, what the fuck were they supposed to do if that's not living up to the hype?
@V0ldek @youngalfred I'd argue that they're put in places they shouldn't be, where tactile feedback is important. Like car interfaces.
To add to the others' comments, they were much less impressive before we had capacitive touch screens. Older resistive screens needed a good deal of mechanical force to register a press (great for longevity!) and required frequent re-calibration. They just weren't very satisfying to use compared to any modern smart phone or tablet.
yeah partly this
and also the other kinds of issues: touchscreens are (even now still) a vastly more complicated engineering item to add than simple toggle switches, and in many places they don't make sense or are a bad solution to pick
but in the hype of then, touchscreens everywhere! turning your lights on? touchscreen. starting your shower water running? touchscreen. opening your window? touchscreen. calling a flight attendant? touchscreen. running your microwave? touchscreen. configuring your fridge temperature? touchscreen.
so, y'know, the usual "this new technology will save us, on everything" bullshit that industries seem so prone to. same reason as why we're seeing so much llm-everywhere bullshit
Isn’t OpenAI saying that o1 has reasoning as a specific selling point?
they do say that, yes. it’s as bullshit as all the other claims they’ve been making
Which is my point, and forgive me, but I believe is the point of the research publication.
They say a lot of stuff.
My best guess is it generates several possible replies and then does some sort of token match to determine which one may potentially be the most accurate. Not sure if I'd call that "reasoning" but I guess it could potentially improve results in some cases. With OpenAI not being so open it is hard to tell though. They've been overpromising a lot already so it may as well be just complete bullshit.
Yes.
But the lies around them are so excessive that it's a lot easier for executives of a publicly traded company to make reasonable decisions if they have concrete support for it.