Our horse riding skills have degraded even more.

Jokes aside, I think this gets at the core of it.

If you really loved horseback riding, or you really loved breeding and training horses, or you were really good at it, I'm sure that cars fucked up your day, and that it sucked to see cars replace horses.

I'm sure there were plenty of people who said that cars were horrible and that we should stick with horses. I'm equally sure there have been C programmers looking derisively at Python programmers, Python programmers looking derisively at Node programmers, etc etc.

But there's a pretty big gap between the feeling of unhappiness that something you liked is no longer as in-demand / profitable / common / whatever, and saying that cars aren't useful and we're all worse off for letting our horse-riding skills degrade.

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vermilingua 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Lots more people die in car crashes than horse accidents. Good analogy!

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akerl_ 2 days ago | parent [-]

Do they? Horses aren't particularly safe, there's just way fewer of them and they don't travel as many miles.

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queenkjuul a day ago | parent [-]

Normal people didn't ride horses everywhere. They weren't used like cars. I'm so sick of this analogy. People walked places. If it was too far to walk you used a horse drawn bus/tram. If you had to much to carry you used a horse drawn truck. Every single person wasn't riding an individual horse ten minutes each way to buy groceries every day like that do now with cars. Cars unquestionably kill drastically more people than horses ever did or even could. Tens of thousands a year in this country alone! The leading cause of death for children and young adults!

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akerl_ a day ago | parent [-]

We're pretty off track given that ya'll are nitpicking the metaphor rather than the actual topic, but claiming that horses were never common doesn't really have any connection to the claim that per-mile-moved / per-human-carried, horses are also dangerous.

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munksbeer 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Never use analogies when arguing online. It only ever results in exactly this, people nitpicking the metaphor. You've essentially given them a way to "be correct", about something irrelevant.

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queenkjuul a day ago | parent | prev [-]

They are nowhere close to cars

	▲	akerl_ a day ago \| parent [-]
		https://www.biamo.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/HorsesOnly-...

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timacles a day ago | parent | prev [-]

This does not get to the core of it, LLMs are not equivalent to cars.

All of your analogies (in other posts) discount that: - LLMs are not deterministic - they do not produce high quality/expert level output. - They are not easy to control consistently.

Once again, and i mean this in the nicest way possible. You do not sound like you understand how things operate at an expert level of engineering. I do not know of any senior engineer who thinks LLMs can consistently produce quality output.

You are way too invested in your argument and refusing to see other perspectives

	▲	akerl_ a day ago \| parent [-]
		It seems really convenient for you to speculate about my level of expertise so that then you can make claims that no senior engineers think something.