I can actually understand this view even if I don't agree with it in the same way.
I tried to use ChatGPT to edit and modify real photos I took, and it can do a good job changing the image in a photo realistic way, but at the same time, the images lack the "entropy" and "real lifeness" of the real photographs. The AI sort of flattens the images so that they look kind of cheap. It's almost imperceptible but it's there.
I also have seen some product sites like walmart use AI images for products, and whenever I see such an image my brain kind of rejects it and doesn't want to look at it. Not sure what that's about.
All of that being said, AI has created things on my behalf that I find valuable. Whether it's code or images or text. So it's not all bad, but it's just a very strange place where I'm not sure how I feel about it.
That is a specific implementation of image models, not true for all image models. For example Civitai has a lot of realistic models that look like people took them, at least on first glance, as I'm sure with enough pixel peeping you can find discrepancies, point is the "flatness" look is with that specific ChatGPT model.
Magical editing of pictures is so wild to me. Most photos people take have a longterm have an audience of basically 1. That's why there's jokes about how awful it is when a coworker corners you to show you their vacation photos, the vast majority of photos taken by the average person are only ever going to be viewed again by the person taking it (and maybe their immediate family).
Memory is already this squishy thing and then when you go back to reminisce about {meaningful event} and go pull up your edited photos, what are you even looking at? Google used to play these ads constantly of editing stuff out, changing how the sky looks, etc.
It's present day you effectively gaslighting future you. What's the point of memorializing something and then immediately destroying the truth of what happened with a bunch of edits.
Maybe that's the goal. That picture you took last week with a Wendy's on the backdrop - was it a Wendy's or a McD's? Let me check. Oh, it was actually a Subway. By the way, did you know Subway has two new exciting foot-long offers?
Reality doesn't matter. If it gets in the way of money and or ads, we can just change it!
To me AI is a really strange technology. When it works it works very well, but at the same time it can't be trusted because of hallucinations. I still get hallucinations just as I did 2 years ago. Nothing has changed. Some part of me feels like it should be shut down for that alone so that it doesn't spread misinformation all over the place.
I also think most of what AI generates is slop and nowhere near the quality of a human creation. Maybe that will change, maybe not. In the end I'm not sure how I feel about it. I don't use it that often, maybe a few times a week.
I don't use much AI, but we have an AI agent that reviews all of our PRs at work.
It's pretty good, I actually like it because it's very thorough and catches real things.
On a recent PR though it very confidently pointed out an "error" and suggested a "fix." Now I authored this code by hand and the "error" was it going "this one doesn't look like all the other ones" and I'm a relatively consistent person so it's not the kind of mistake I would make, which means I probably put thought in and the difference was intentional.
I looked at it's suggestion carefully and my original code was correct, the "fix" would have broken the logic. Not a huge deal all things said.
But I'm looking back at it's original report, it's comprehensive, confident, and ends with "Reply 'fix this for me' and I will fix it" and it made me think about more junior engineers.
I double checked it because I had written the code by hand, I understood the context, I also have enough experience to know that if I wrote this one function differently there was probably a good reason. But if I were earlier in my career, with less experience, would I have just clicked the easy button?
Probably. Especially if everyday I'm clicking the easy button.
Highway engineers used to think it was a good idea to make highways as straight as possible, people going in a straight line is easiest right? They realized that if you didn't put some curves in the road that people would just disengage and a perfect straight "easy" highway was much more dangerous than one with curves. I feel like AI is an "easy" highway
That is indeed the problem. And when you have to meticulously check everything that the LLM does (because you can't know where the hallucinations will be), it completely destroys any productivity benefits you would gain from having it write the code in the first place. Thus you wind up going no faster (if not slower) than you did in the first place. The only way to go super fast (the way some people claim they are) is to discard quality.
As has been pointed out over and over: the time consuming part of programming was never typing code into the computer, it was understanding the problem and the logic behind the code. Using an LLM only addresses the fast and easy part of programming, not the hard parts.
It is called 'jagged intelligence'. A lot progress was made in the last 2 years. Most notably reasoning models, tools use, harness progress. It takes time to build the skill to make those models useful, but they do provide a lot of value.
Ah yeah jagged intelligence is the perfect phrase for it. I do also get some value from them, both in coding and in images. I find it the least usable for information primarily because of the hallucination problem. I still do use it for that purpose but it's kind of annoying when it writes something that's wrong, and I find it out from a Google search later.
You are cooking them wrong. You absolutely must ask the model to do grounding work — search online, search in your files, cross-check with different agents. They are universal reasoning engines, not a fact recalling tool.
Check my 'deep research' skill, you will get the idea
I also have the same feeling about media since around 2015. The prime example being Alien: Earth, which people will argue has immeasurable depth and nuance while when I watched it I just facepalmed a lot. Although it did get better in later episodes.
I feel like no media today has really topped the stuff of the 90s and 00s. Star Trek Voyager season 5 still stands tall above the rest for me. The movie September 5 came close as it had interesting bits.
But besides that, there is a generational thing going on. I felt when I grew up online in the 90s and 00s that people who were older than me were smarter than my generation. My generation watched movies and played games while gen x and baby boomers did hardcore assembly programming and whatever.
And then the same thing happened with millenials and gen z. Gen z is just different from millenials which again are different from baby boomers. Each generation progressively gets less technical it seems like. There are always outliers in every generation of course but I think the trajectory is somewhat clear.
I also think this applies to movies and tv shows. Gen z just thinks differently and doesn't have the same ideas. I don't think a gen z'er could create Voyager season 5, and maybe not even a millenial could. There is so much information and knowledge and perception in the context a generation is born into and grows up in and a lot of that context and information is lost with the next generation.
I want to point out that one of those writers also wrote For All Mankind. Maybe Gen-X never expected to be culturally relevant, so our critical thinking actually got put to good use.
I think you hit on a key note about learning when they're wrong, and I think that's one of the biggest issues with social media and modern debate - namely that being wrong in public is incredibly painful and can often destroy a reputation. But then people realized there are groups who agree with them even when they're wrong, so the most important thing is to cater to them and never agree that you're wrong in public, and some percentage of people will go along with your argument.
I think never believing fully in your own ideas and always being able to admit you're wrong and always questioning is almost a super power that I wish we valued more.
Reading this comment and other similar comments there's definitely a difference between people.
Personally I agree and resonate a lot with the blog post, and I've always found designs of my programs to come sort of naturally. Usually the hard problems are the technical problems and then the design is figured out based on what's needed to control the program. I never had to think that hard about design.
Aptitude testing centers like Johnson O'Connor have tests for that. There are (relatively) huge differences between different people's thinking and problem solving styles. For some, creating an efficient process feels natural, while others need stability and redundancy. Programmers are by and large the latter.
But is the diversity really that staggering?
I mean most animals including possibly dinosaurs that have ever existed share a lot of internal organs, in the same place. They have eyes, brain (with a lot of the same brain areas, even birds have something like a prefrontal cortex but it's called something different).
They all have legs, torso, head.
I would say there is a lot more commonality than difference. The differences come from slight variations on a basic template that works, and then the body looks different and so on.
I'm not sure how to think about the diversity that evolution creates and how diverse it actually is. I would say there are _a lot_ of repeating patterns all across history, with variations on those repeating patterns always changing.
You're choice of samples is rather skewed towards ones sharing a relatively recent common ancestor. Octopus and Sea Squirts are also animals, and they don't have legs or torsos or, in the later case, heads or eyes. Octopus brains are also rather different from those of vertebrates, and they have 8 mini-brains for more distributed/localized control of each major limb.
That said, I agree with you that there is a lot of commonality in life. Even in the case of Octopus we share a lot of DNA. I just mostly think that is due to common ancestor and common environmental pressures, not to some fundamental limit in the breadth of evolutionary potential itself. Its probably worthwhile to wonder at how that actually works though. Maybe evolutionary potential could be improved.
You hate on Louis Vuitton but have you ever tried one? Have you looked at all the designs they have? I think LV is better than Hermes bags with that horrendous closure they have on the Birkin and other bags. LV has cool colorful designs also in their ready to wear. You might object to the branding but the bags work very well and are designed well in terms of how easy it is to get stuff in and out and if you don't throw it around the canvas can last a long time. Hermes might have nice Pogo leather and so on but that doesn't mean that closure is worth the hassle IMO.
Also IDK what to think about the iPhone Pocket. It LOOKS like a hassle to get stuff in and out of it but if they have somehow managed to make it easy, maybe it's well designed. If not then I agree with you the product is probably garbage.
They hate on Louis Vuitton plastic bags, not Louis Vuitton in general, and they are entirely right to do so. It's the same with their perfumes, keychains, wallets and most other small accessories. All products which are far too expensive for what they are but remain reachable by the average person to capitalise on people who want the brand but can't afford the "real" products.
Buying entry level products from luxury brands is hard to justify. At their price point, you can generally get a far better equivalent product from a brand with less appeal. It's especially true with Louis Vuitton where the brand's cachet has been severely diluted by how many people own their bags.
Other random LV fact: Louis Vuitton was a lock maker, and the locks he made were advertised as “unpickable” (more advertising than reality, sadly.) He even had Houdini try to pick one. No, this has nothing to do with TFA, but I like locks.
This is kind of getting into the weeds a little bit but for me and a lot of others luxury items can be fun to own. You can get an affinity for certain designers style, whether it's Gucci, Louis Vuitton or Balenciaga. The items are ridiculously expensive sometimes but it's kind of a tough line to balance because the fact that they cost so much make them more special. So how cheap should they be before they don't feel as special anymore? Is it all a bit irrational? I guess. There isn't a clear definitive defense for luxury items I think other than the feeling they can give. Some people can spend all their income on luxury items rather than other discretionary items because it's the most fun to them.
> There isn't a clear definitive defense for luxury items I think other than the feeling they can give.
Counterpoint: that is exactly what someone who charges $500 for a $5 pair of pants would want you to think. If you boil it down far enough, the principles you are describing are just inequality and luxury marketing.
While that is definitely at play there is a deep rooted instinct in humanity to show status and to have something that is worth a lot. It goes beyond just marketing, which is why it "works" economically. I think the luxury market serves a certain type of mindset that has been there since ancient egypt even. It would be nice to have a society where status didn't pay a role but there hasn't been a social movement that has crystallized what that would look like.
I also think as a sidenote there is a difference between luxury and fashion. Fashion is about creativity and self expression, and for a long time, the luxury market was sort of the defacto place for creeativity rather than the cheaper labels that had more 'standard' clothing, at least where I live. That has changed a bit in the past decade though. I like both fashion and luxury, but I am conflicted about it too. For example in the luxury fashion world there is a thing called 'grails', which are essentially items that are difficult to get but are considered very cool looking in some way and so they become grails. A lot of people like the feeling of chasing and finally acquiring grails, so that's one aspect of it.
I think AI is still in the weird twilight zone that it was when it first came out in that it's great sometimes and also terrible. I still get hallucinations when I check a response I get with ChatGPT on Google.
On the one hand, what it says can't be trusted, on the other, I have debugged code I have written where I was unable to find the bug myself, and ChatGPT found it.
I also think a reason AI's are popular and the companies haven't gone under is that probably hundreds of thousands if not millions of people are getting responses that have hallucinations, but the user doesn't know it. I fell into this trap myself after ChatGPT first came out. I became addicted to asking anything and it seemed like it was right. It wasn't until later I started realizing that it was hallucinating information.
How prevalent this phenomena is is hard to say but I still think it's pernicious.
But as I said before, there are still use cases for AI and that's what makes judging it so difficult.
I tried to use ChatGPT to edit and modify real photos I took, and it can do a good job changing the image in a photo realistic way, but at the same time, the images lack the "entropy" and "real lifeness" of the real photographs. The AI sort of flattens the images so that they look kind of cheap. It's almost imperceptible but it's there.
I also have seen some product sites like walmart use AI images for products, and whenever I see such an image my brain kind of rejects it and doesn't want to look at it. Not sure what that's about.
All of that being said, AI has created things on my behalf that I find valuable. Whether it's code or images or text. So it's not all bad, but it's just a very strange place where I'm not sure how I feel about it.
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