I’ll have to take your word for it! “figuring out” sounds like a higher-order process than a large language model is capable of to me, but if what they do is as good, then great.

I think I’m just skeptical because of how horrendously bad LLM output is in my field of expertise (despite looking fine to a lay person), so I immediately analogize that to other areas. The output of law and coding are both really about language, and the process of creating that output on the part of a lawyer or coder are really about language, so I can see how one might think LLMs would be able to recreate what lawyers and coders do. But boy it doesn’t strike me as remotely plausible that LLMs will ever get there, at least for law. I have no doubt some yet-unimagined technology could get us there, but “next word prediction” just isn’t gonna be it.

Maybe I’m a fool, but I’m a lawyer and I feel very safe. Everything I’ve seen so far is very bad, and in ways that don’t make me think it can get better. “next word prediction” is just not the right avenue to do legal analysis haha. It can do a fair approximation sometimes, but I think that’s honestly more dangerous because I’ve seen LLMs say things that look plausible but definitely don’t work. When I’ve seen it, I’ve been able to jump in and stop catastrophic mistakes…but how many people are just going for it without talking to a lawyer? Gonna make a lot of work for lawyers to fix all that lol.

I’m not a coder, so I can’t speak to the quality of code generated by these models. I am a lawyer, and every time I see stuff that lay people think is impressive in my field, I can’t help but guffaw and think “none of this is going to function, and no one will know for years. We’re so fucked…and then one day we’ll have to clean all this up and it’s gonna be so much work.” I kind of assume it’ll be similar for code? Like…it’ll obviously be somewhat better because there is a lot of testing you can actually do, whereas in law “testing” takes many years…and by the time you find out something doesn’t work, the burden of having done it wrong all this time, thinking it was right is catastrophic (which is why lawyers are so conservative about language that they “know works.”

I can see how little features can get added and these tools can deliver on those projects fast…but like…can they do bigger things with consistency? Can they like…set things up well? I’m not saying it’s impossible, but…I guess i’m thinking about Go. It took a long time for neural networks to get to be good at 19 x 19. They got good at 9 x 9 pretty fast. But as the game gets more complicated, it’s way WAY harder to do good long-term strategy. And the machines got there, no doubt. But the entire universe of Go is a 19x19 grid, on which the spaces are black or white or empty. How much more complicated is a language? Even a programming language? infinitely more complex, of course!

So I worry that we’re going to have individual features that work well, but systems that cannot function…looking like the uhhh…weasley house in Harry Potter…but without the magic to hold it up lol.

the announcement that Allbirds was transitioning from shoes, a product category it has a decade of experience in, to AI compute, a product category it has no experience in, shot the stock up by over 400 percent.

This is preying on boomers being really goddamn dumb. It’s basically elder abuse!

Joke went way over my head; thanks for the context!

This but unironically? lol the US is bad. do china next!

But I think most MLs would assume everyone already knows this and would instead want to argue about whether the bad things china does are actually “imperialist,” technically.

IDK maybe this is an accurate depiction of some kind of rabid sinophile…I haven’t had the joy of meeting any.

America bad.

Zapatistas always rejected the anarchist label to my knowledge. Extremely cool and good, and I am glad anarchists take so much inspiration from it…but that movement doesn’t/didn’t spring from the European political theory of anarchism the way that the anarchist elements of the Paris commune or Spanish civil war did!

It’s definitely a counter example to a claim I don’t think that guy was making (he didn’t say “the only anticapitalist projects with longevity are Marxist Leninist ones” ).

making a lotta MONEY! probably.