People commenting on hacker news recently are very rude and pessimistic. They would probably cancel Homer because they found similarities between Achilles-Patroclus and Gilgamesh-Enkidu or something.
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. The first volume, Swann's Way, to be exact.
It's not for the faint of heart, it's relatively difficult, but it's very satisfying so far. You know the feeling when it's maybe an autumn evening and some blue light comes throught the window, hits the curtains a certain way and the shadows remind you of something from your childhood that you thought you had forgotten forever? Well, it's like this, on steroids.
Socrates was right in a sense, if you consider how for 2000 years Plato and Aristotle were seen as authorities on all matters, especially by the Church.
They are still considered by many people as the greatest philosophers of all time, especially by those who have never read them.
There is something extra to this. The fact that a lot of people in the AI world suffer from psychosis. They can sincerely believe that they are building God and lie about it's capabilities for their investors at the same time.
I don’t know enough people deep inside the technical roles at the labs to make a judgement. But are you proposing that we should trust randos online when they tell us “exactly what’s going on here” instead of the researchers most knowledgeable on the topic who contributed to building the tools we are talking about?
We should trust NO ONE, unless we understand the "why" behind what they say.
It's like saying "politicians deal with politics all time, why not trust them on politics?", well, because when you search the "whys", you find they have good reason to lie.
I 100% trust more the opinion of a rando online if it's well put rather than any "trust me bro" of the most knowledgeable person of a particular subject, especially if the knowledgeable person has huge investments on the subject...
AI bros have repeatedly cheated, lied, stolen, lobbied and any other word with a negative connotation you can think of, and a pattern emerges out of this.
90% of problems are easy once you know what you actually want well enough for you to be able to ask it from an LLM.
90% of code before LLMs was badly copied from StackOverflow anyway.
That 10% that's remaining, I've see 0, ZERO, nil progress. Windows is still awful. Spotify still doesn't work correctly offline. Youtube search is trash. Jira takes 20 seconds sometimes to load a task. LLMs haven't created a new database or a new game engine or a new renderer or anything like that.
The maths breakthroughs are really more of a testament to the efforts of the last 150 years for maths to be an organised verifiable principle. If LLMs had to practice math they way Euler did, they wouldn't be able to find shit.
(sorry if I sound incoherent, just some thoughts while I'm commuting)
reply