> A very good example of the first category is image (and video) generation. Drawing/rendering a realistic looking image is a crazily hard task. Have you tried to make a slide look nicer? It will take me literally hours to center the text boxes to make it look “good”. However, you really just need to take a look at the output of Nano Banana and you can tell if it’s a good render or a bad one based on how you feel.
The writer could be very accomplished when it comes to developing - I don’t know - but they clearly don’t understand a single thing about visual arts or culture. I probably could center those text boxes after fiddling with them maybe ten seconds - I have studied art since I was a kid. My bf could do it instantly without thinking a second, he is a graphic designer. You might think that you are able to see what « looks good » since, hey you have eyes, but no you can’t. There’s million details you will miss, or maybe feel something is off, but cannot quite say why. This is why you have graphic designers, who are trained to do that to do it. They can also use generative tools to make something genuinely stunning, unlike most of us. Why? Skills.
This is the same difference why the guy in the story who can’t code can’t code even with LLM, whereas the guy who cans is able to code even faster with these new tools. If use LLM’s for basically auto-completion (what transformer models really are for) you can work with familiar codebase very quickly I’m sure. I’ve used it to gen SQL call statements, which I can’t be bothered to type myself and it was perfect. If I try to generate something I don’t really understand or know how to do, I’m lost staring at sole horrible gobbledygoo that is never going to work. Why? Skills.
There is no verification engineering. There is just people who know how to do things, who have studied their whole life to get those skills. And no, you will not replace a real hardcore professional with an LLM. LLM’s are just tools, nothing else. A tractor replaced a horse in turning the field, bit you still need a farmer to drive it.
> A tractor replaced a horse in turning the field, bit you still need a farmer to drive it.
Before mechanisation, like 50x more people worked in the agricultural sector, compared to today. So tractors certainly left without work a huge number of people. Our society adapted to this change and sucked these people into industrial sector.
If LLM would work like a tractor, it would force 49 out of 50 programmers (or, more generically, blue-collar workers) to left their industry. Is there a place for them to work instead? I don't know.
> You might think that you are able to see what « looks good » since, hey you have eyes, but no you can’t.
I'm sure lots of people will reply to you stating the opposite, but for what it's worth, I agree. I am not a visual artist... well, not any more, I was really into it as a kid and had it beaten out of me by terrible art teachers, but I digress... I am creative (music), and have a semblance of understanding of the creative process.
I ran a SaaS company for 20 years and would be constantly amazed at how bad the choices of software engineers would be when it came to visual design. I could never quite understand whether they just didn't care or just couldn't see. I always believed (hoped) it was the latter. Even when I explained basic concepts like consistent borders, grid systems, consistent fonts and font-sizing, less visual clutter, etc. they would still make the same mistakes over and over.
To the trained eye they immediately see it and see what's right and what's wrong. And that's why we still need experts. It doesn't matter what is being generated, if you don't have expertise to know whether it's good or not, the chances are glaring errors will be missed (in code and in visual design)
Though it's notable that sometimes this will produce "wrong" results because it centers on the geometric middle point of the box, while the correct thing is often more like bringing the center of gravity into the middle
I'm more of a fan of aligning to an edge anyways. But some designers love to get really deep into these kinds of things, often in ways they can't really articulate
I meant just by eye, mate. But it is pretty bad example anyway, obvs it is something that any program can do better than us. Better would be layout or maybe typography. Even professionals mess it up all the time.
Point is, even basic visual design is far from intuitive.
I don’t want to put anybody down, but I don’t get this. What does this do that sai Apple’s Notes doesn’t? Or million other applications? And why on Earth is this hosted on web, this is something you clearly do not want to leave you device?
Also, I use pen and a notebook. It is better than anything electronic, since we are monkeys and using our eye-hand coordination has proven effects on concentration and learning.
I think my about page [0] might do a decent job providing more context and trying to answer that question.
I guess in the end it's my take on a system that I want to use for regular meeting notes with others and that I've never been able to find in any other tool, so I built it.
I’m sorry, but this is stupid, you understand that you have several logical errors in your post? I was sure Clinton is going to win 2016. Does that mean that when I say 800 is bigger than 8 is not to be trusted?
Do people actually think that running a business is some magical realism where you can manifest yourself to become a billionaire if you just believe hard enough?
I been a part of endless meeting with ”lively discussion” with the whole team. Results are always slim to none. Instead if you allocate 15 minutes for a topic and there is no conclusion, stop the discussion and say that it must continue on another allocated time. This way people come better prepared with an actual agenda to get things done.
It requires as much thinking as it did for me to copy-paste code I did not understand from Stackoverflow to make a program 15 years ago. The program worked, just about. Similarly you can generate endless love sonnets with just blindly putting words into a form.
For some reason we naturally anthropomorphise machines without thinking it for a second. But your toaster is still not in love with you.
I think she says exactly that MeToo, while important in revealing how institutionalised sexual violence against women is in our society, created also this weird neo-puritanism:
> The organized goals of the #MeToo movement are missing from the new puritanism. I think that the prudish revulsion I’ve seen online and in my own life has as much to do with surveillance as with sex.
To me she very clearly engages with the very fact.
I have ADHD and I bet your tribe would like to have a guy who snaps to attention from every little noise watching over while you eat or sleep. I also prob have ‘tism, I suck at typical modern social settings, but get along well in martial arts or other activities, where you are doing something physical and concrete together with people, without endlessly yapping about each other’s boring life. Today when I’m older people often elect me as some sort of leader in these settings, prob because I learn fast and it comes pretty naturally to me. I think I would be pretty successful in pre-civilisation society. I’m also great with animals, I kinda naturally know how to touch and groom them. Looking at apes, this is far more important in creating social connections rather than lying about your professional achievements on Linkedin.
I’ve seen people who are “good with people” just make friendships in less than a minute pouring their whole life to another person like they had known for years. If you can do that you have a great career in sales, marketing or politics in front of you. To me it seems completely insane behaviour, like I was watching completely different species.
Perhaps we all come with adhd and autism as a default, and some people get modernity updated into their system while in the womb?
I never really liked fb or any other big application that much, so kicking them after 2016 was not that bad, but I used to be heavy user or forums and kicking some of them felt pretty similar to kicking tobacco back in the day.
We are super social insane monkey creatures that get high on social interaction, which in many ways is a good thing, but can turn into toxic relationships towards family members or even towards a social media application. It is not very dissimilar how coin slot machines or casinos lure you into addiction. They use exactly the same means, therefore they should be regulated like gambling.
The writer could be very accomplished when it comes to developing - I don’t know - but they clearly don’t understand a single thing about visual arts or culture. I probably could center those text boxes after fiddling with them maybe ten seconds - I have studied art since I was a kid. My bf could do it instantly without thinking a second, he is a graphic designer. You might think that you are able to see what « looks good » since, hey you have eyes, but no you can’t. There’s million details you will miss, or maybe feel something is off, but cannot quite say why. This is why you have graphic designers, who are trained to do that to do it. They can also use generative tools to make something genuinely stunning, unlike most of us. Why? Skills.
This is the same difference why the guy in the story who can’t code can’t code even with LLM, whereas the guy who cans is able to code even faster with these new tools. If use LLM’s for basically auto-completion (what transformer models really are for) you can work with familiar codebase very quickly I’m sure. I’ve used it to gen SQL call statements, which I can’t be bothered to type myself and it was perfect. If I try to generate something I don’t really understand or know how to do, I’m lost staring at sole horrible gobbledygoo that is never going to work. Why? Skills.
There is no verification engineering. There is just people who know how to do things, who have studied their whole life to get those skills. And no, you will not replace a real hardcore professional with an LLM. LLM’s are just tools, nothing else. A tractor replaced a horse in turning the field, bit you still need a farmer to drive it.
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