Zach GageJun 21, 2023

please someone disrupt the email space with an app that uses a LLM to give me options like:

“block every email that looks like an ad person reaching out to me”

“suggest the solution i am typing out now every time you see a support email that asks this question”

“automatically unsubscribe from everything that is a newsletter"

“block every pr request i get”

"rewrite every angry email i receive into a neutral tone”

Show threadzaratustraJun 21, 2023
@helvetica every generation reinvents the bash script
Show threadjakJun 21, 2023
@zaratustra @helvetica talking about reinventing bash, I read this Verge article a few months ago that began by explaining how computers used to have hard to use text-based command line interfaces, and now we have amazing advances like chatGPT. then they started talking about how to coax the right answers out of chatGPT by understanding how it works, and the notion of “prompt engineering”. it seemed the author did not catch on to the fact that ChatGPT is just a really opaque/imprecise text CLI
Show threadZach GageJun 21, 2023

@jakintosh @zaratustra lol. to be fair, i think it's maybe more nuanced than just being opaque/imprecise.

im also not entirely convinced that the raw cli style interface we have for this stuff right now is going to be the end-all interface for most of it

Show threadjakJun 21, 2023
@helvetica @zaratustra I just can’t help but be 100% critical of a technology whose primary feature is “it’s a black box!”. modern post-industrial societies have used their infinite cheap energy to develop unsustainable amounts of technological abstractions that nobody understands, and LLMs/NNs/etc are the ultimate “lean in” to a *shrug idk whatever* approach to engineering. the more knowledge we offload to the black box, the more knowledge we stop reproducing and carrying forward as a society
Show threadZach GageJun 21, 2023

@jakintosh @zaratustra i dont think that’s it's primary feature. the primary feature of transform models is that they can identify patterns that we cannot. they're like an electron microscope for patterns.

it also happens that we cannot look through this particular electron microscope

Show threadjakJun 21, 2023
@helvetica @zaratustra I was having a conversation last week where people were excited to use it to write their boilerplate code, or translate crochet patterns from Russian, but they were not thinking about how that friction is what pushes humans towards creative new solutions, and the *process* of working through problems like that is where we learn and synthesize ideas across disciplines. in many cases this is where culture itself comes from and we’re ready to sacrifice that for “productivity”
Show threadjakJun 21, 2023
@helvetica this is to say that we *can* look through the microscope of identifying patterns, and we *do*, it’s just in a distributed manner through cultural evolution of knowledge and process, and not at the individual level. we risk losing the “process” of everything in favor of the “result”
Show threadZach GageJun 21, 2023

@jakintosh it’s been pretty amazing to knock together prototypes with i will admit

no i think we don’t look through it in the specific way that transform models too.

for example Google has a way to identify diabetes through a photo of someone’s eye. That is not something we could previously do.

Show threadZach GageJun 21, 2023

@jakintosh you’re talking about an abstract process by which people learn that you’re nervous we will stop doing. I'm talking about a literal actual process that exposes things that we previously did not have access to.

I think I am not so worried that people will stop doing the process. You’re worried about losing it just because we have this new tool.

Show threadZach GageJun 21, 2023
@jakintosh those kinds of fears feel to me a little bit like the people who are worried that we're gonna stop understanding how to program because we no longer program in assembly or C++ and we're gonna stop learning how to use computers because we no longer have to build our own computers.
Show threadZach GageJun 21, 2023

@jakintosh But what has instead happened is people are learning and writing of variety of wild and interesting programming languages, and they're building and working with microcontrollers on a scale way beyond anything anyone was doing along time ago because we have raspberry pis and FPGAs etc.

Tools that make the stuff more accessible may mean a smaller percentage of users in a given field are working with raw technology, but they almost always mean more overall are still doing the hard work

Show threadjakJun 21, 2023
@helvetica I guess my criticism comes from a place where, in reality, the worries of "we'll forget how to program" have actually come true, and that our technology is more resource intensive, opaque, and brittle than it used to be, and that have not yet fully "paid for" that cost or learned our lesson since it takes a long time for the system to break down. I also think there is a fine line between increasing accessibility and handing out dangerous tools with the sharp edges sanded off
Show threadZach GageJun 21, 2023
@jakintosh when you say "we’ll forget how to program" has come true, what are you referring to?
Show threadjakJun 21, 2023
@helvetica in this case the "consequences". I agree that strictly numbers-wise there are a lot more people in the world who engage with technology at a low level than say 40 years ago, but proportionally it's much, much smaller. the tech industry is filled with people who don't really understand what they are doing, and our tech systems as a whole are worse-off because of it. they're not resilient, secure, efficient, or performant, and the main tool for improvement is "more abstraction".
Show threadZach GageJun 21, 2023

@jakintosh i think we may disagree fundamentally on the causes and requirements here.

so much of our world is tech based we have a requirement of so many tech workers, this leads to abstractions required so we can allow for lower-skill labor, there just isn't enough high skill labor out there to support the system.

also, afaik most security and efficiency problems dont come from bad software construction, but collisions between environments and workflows

Show threadZach Gage

@jakintosh for example, one company subsumes another company, or even one workgroup merges with another. different procedures, structures, software, need to get glued together. everyone can't just pause the business and rebuild and learn a new system from scratch

(this is from my security worker friend, we were just talking about this last week)

Jun 21, 2023 at 3:35pmWeb