Yet another Hacker News

33 points evakhoury 3 days ago 18 comments

ChrisMarshallNY 2 hours ago | parent

I've been increasingly letting the LLM take the wheel, in my coding. It's working out very, very well.

I undersign everything under my imprimatur; LLM, contract programmer, intern, whatever. If it has my chop; it has my support and accountability.

The "A" word (Accountability) has been getting deprecated far longer than LLMs have been around. It seems that no one wants to stand behind their work, anymore; regardless of how that work was done.

I had the advantage of spending almost 27 years, at a company that really made sure that I was Accountable. I ran a team, but it was my butt on the line.

dominotw 1 hour ago | parent

dont understand what point you are trying to make

darthoctopus 52 minutes ago | parent

"it's ok when _I_ use LLMs"

edit: you're making literally the same argument that Provost Santiago Schnell is quoted as making in the article, and the entire article is dedicated to dismantling it. Please have a read.

ChrisMarshallNY 40 minutes ago | parent

Nope. Try again.

ChrisMarshallNY 40 minutes ago | parent

That's the problem.

People no longer understand Accountability.

If I sign off on something; no matter how it was made, it's my ass on the line. If I trust a shyster, and sign off on junk, then I walk the plank, not the shyster.

Legal people have known this for hundreds of years, but tech people seem to have forgotten it.

TL;DR: the process matters less than the result (although good results come from good processes). If someone is known for reliably producing good results, then their personal brand becomes a valuable currency. Classic stuff.

The tech industry has become so tied up with producing junk, that it has atrophied its sense of integrity.

pixl97 33 minutes ago | parent

>People no longer understand Accountability

A fish rots from the head. The increase in recording and reporting has shown us the people at the top are rarely held accountable and make billions doing so. Why follow the rules if it's going to financially harm you. It's every industry.

matt3210 1 hour ago | parent

Tools can’t have credit, only People.

whoamii 1 hour ago | parent

But people are tools, usually

warkdarrior 1 hour ago | parent

> Then we can all asses how useful they really are.

Clearly not written by LLM. (NB: emphasis mine)

1asgtq 1 hour ago | parent

Academics have completely lost it. The number of mathematicians who write with LLMs and are rationalizing their usage is frightening.

And they have the audacity to claim that the public will defund them if they don't use new tech. No, the public will defund you if you continue cheating like a 10 year old and you are evidently superfluous.

Just say no!

idont363 51 minutes ago | parent

“Cheating”? I expect academics to pursue objective excellence in whatever shape or form it comes and not just the artisanal handwritten medieval nonsense shape.

Stop crying and start producing. The time to talk was five years ago. Everyone is way, way too tardy to the party.

It’s the same with developers: oh, but everything will collapse and nothing will work right without us manually signing off on this divinely ordained logic. Well, guess what? Nothing happened and things actually improved. Take a good hard look at software dev over the last ten years and tell me it was fine.

I am not at all convinced the current gen professionals are getting us to where we need to go.

rubikscube09 28 minutes ago | parent

PhD student in math here. Doing LLM math is soulless and takes most of the fun out of solving difficult problems (for the most part - my opinion only, I'm happy to talk to mathematicians who like this kind of work). But ultimately the public funds us to produce and understand as many mathematical results as possible for downstream use (if you ask OpenAI/Anthropic, to cure cancer). In that case it doesn't matter who figures a result whether it be a human, LLM, or dog.

So what are we to do? Follow our duty to the community and the public, which is to produce as many results as possible? Or to follow our duty to ourselves and enjoy and understand what we are doing? To someone like me those things seem to be incorrigably opposed to each other now. At this pint the only option is to quit and find a new domain where human input in problem solving is still necessary.

mistrial9 20 minutes ago | parent

please do not quit

12989575 18 minutes ago | parent

I would suggest that hardly anyone in the public is asking you to increase efficiency. That is the argument you read on pro-AI VC forums and Reddit.

In other words, it is a made-up argument. I think some mathematicians are either addicted (Feynman disease) or hope to make a breakthrough and somehow get credit. So they use "the public" to justify their habit.

The real public that is not on these forums wants academic freedom and independence from corporations. Both will suffer if you are entering soulless production pipelines.

hatthew 56 minutes ago | parent

This article is chock full of interesting links. The link about Kenyan English/LLMs [0] describes something that feels like it should have been obvious to me.

[0]: https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-li...

layer8 4 minutes ago | parent

HN discussion at the time (513 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46273466

bassie123 21 minutes ago | parent

I wonder what it was like when we first got calculators; people saying its cheating at arithmetic. AI is just the next tool humans can apply to problems to solve.

12989575 15 minutes ago | parent

Wow, AI is a tool. I have never heard that one before!

No, I don't think calculators were associated with cheating. More with a skill atrophy.

Stockfish on the other hand is of course associated with cheating because it does all the work, unlike calculators.

pxc 3 minutes ago | parent

[delayed]