>> I saw a post yesterday showing Brave browser's new tab using 70mb of RAM in the background. I'm very sure there's code there that can be optimized, but who gives a shit.

I do. This sort of attitude is how we have machines more powerful than ever yet everything still seems to run like shit.

> It's still early stages, that is why.

Were we advised to check compiler output every single time "in the early days"?

No, that's not the difference.

A compiler from whatever high/low level language is expected to translate a formal specification of an algorithm faithfully. If it fails to do so, the compiler is buggy, period.

A LLM is expected to understand fuzzy language and spit out something that makes sense.

It's a fundamentally different task, and I trust a human more with this. Certainly, humans are judged by their capability to do this, apply common sense, ask for necessary clarification, also question what they're being asked to do.

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills or misunderstanding you. Shouldn't it matter that they are using 70mb of RAM more or less totally wastefully? Maybe not a deal breaker for Brave, sure, but waste is waste.

I understand the world is about compromises, but all the gains of essentially every computer program ever could be summed up by accumulation of small optimizations. Likewise, the accumulation of small wastes kills legacy projects more than anything else.

> It's still early stages, that is why.

I have been hearing (reading?) this for a solid two years now, and LLMs were not invented two years ago: they are ostensibly the same tech as they were back in 2017, with larger training pools and some optimizations along the way. How many more hundreds of billions of dollars is reasonable to throw at a technology that has never once exceeded the lofty heights of "fine"?

At this point this genuinely feels like silicon valley's fever dream. Just lighting dumptrucks full of money on fire in the hope that it does something better than it did the previous like 7 or 8 times you did it.

And normally I wouldn't give a shit, money is made up and even then it ain't MY money, burn it on whatever you want. But we're also offsetting any gains towards green energy standing up these stupid datacenters everywhere to power this shit, not to mention the water requirements.

I hate this "early stages" argument. It either works, or it doesn't. If it works sometimes that's called "alpha software" and should not be released and hyped as a finished product. The early stages of the GUI paradigm at release started with a fully working GUI. Windows didn't sometimes refuse to open. The OS didn't sometimes open the wrong program. The system didn't sometimes hallucinate a 2nd cursor. The system worked and then it was shipped.

The "early stages" argument means "not fit for production purposes" in any other case. It should also mean the same here. It's early stages because the product isn't finished (and can't be, at least with current knowledge)

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I can fart in the general direction of the code and that's a kind of abstraction too. It distills my intent down to a simple raspberry noise which could then be interpreted by sufficiently intelligent software.

> Just because you end up looking at what the prompt looks like “under the hood” in whichever language it produced the output, doesn’t mean every user does.

> Similar as with assembly, you might have not taken a look at it, but there are people that do and could argue the same thing as you.

... No. The assembler is deterministic. Barring bugs, you can basically trust that it does exactly what it was told to. You absolutely cannot say the same of our beloved robot overlords.

Only if you can write specs precisely enough. For those of us who remember the way software used to be built, we learned that this is basically impossible and that English is a terrible language to even attempt it in.

If you do make your specs precise enough, such that 2 different dev shops will produce functionally equivalent software, your specs are equivalent to code.

>“please ship a new product to meet customer X’s need”

The customer would just ask the AI directly to meet their needs. They wouldn’t purchase the product from you.