I think we should see a chart as % of “fabricated” references from past 20 years. We should see a huge increase after 2020-2021. Anyone has this chart data?
Ok and buys the laptop with malware? How the customs knows that high value target will buy that specific laptop they swapped the ssd? And what they do exactly? Put malware to steal his data?
I think there is a correlation between when you can you expect from something when I know their internals vs someone that doesn’t know but is not like who knows internals is much much better.
Example: many people created websites without a clue of how they really work. And got millions of people on it. Or had crazy ideas to do things with them.
At the same time there are devs that know how internals work but can’t get 1 user.
pc manufacturers never were able to even imagine what random people were able to do with their pc.
This to say that even if you know internals you can claim you know better, but doesn’t mean it’s absolute.
Sometimes knowing the fundamentals it’s a limitation. Will limit your imagination.
I'm a big fan of the concept of 初心 (Japanese: Shoshin aka "beginners mind" [0] ) and largely agree with Sazuki's famous quote:
> “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few”
Experts do tend to be limited in what they see as possible. But I don't think that allows carte blanche belief that a fancy Markov Chain will let you transcend humanity. I would argue one of the key concepts of "beginners mind" is not radical assurance in what's possible but unbounded curiosity and willingness to explore with an open mind. Right now we see this in the Stable Diffusion community: there are tons of people who also don't understand matrix multiplication that are doing incredible work through pure experimentation. There's a huge gap between "I wonder what will happen if I just mix these models together" and "we're just a few years from surrendering our will to AI". None of the people I'm concerned about have what I would consider an "open mind" about the topic of AI. They are sure of what they know and to disagree is to invite complete rejection. Hardly a principle of beginners mind.
Additionally:
> pc manufacturers never were able to even imagine what random people were able to do with their pc.
Belies a deep ignorance of the history of personal computing. Honestly, I don't think modern computing has still ever returned to the ambition of what was being dreampt up, by experts, at Xerox PARC. The demos on the Xerox Alto in the early 1970s are still ambitious in some senses. And, as much as I'm not a huge fan, Gates and Jobs absolutely had grand visions for what the PC would be.
I think this is what is blunted by mass education and most textbooks. We need to discover it again if we want to enjoy our profession with all the signals flowing from social media about all the great things other people are achieving. Staying stupid and hungry really helps.
I think this is more about mechanistic understanding vs fundamental insight kind of situation. The linear algebra picture is currently very mechanistic since it only tells us what the computations are. There are research groups trying to go beyond that but the insight from these efforts are currently very limited.
However, the probabilistic view is very much clearer. You can have many explorable insights, both potentially true and false, by jıst understanding the loss functions, what the model is sampling from, what is the marginal or conditional distributions are and so on. Generative AI models are beautiful at that level. It is truly mind blowing that in 2025, we are able to sample from the megapixel image distributions conditioned on the NLP text prompts.
If you dig ml/vision papers from old, you will see that formulation-wise they actually did, but they lacked the data, compute, and the mechanistic machinery provided by the transformer architecture. The wheels of progress are slow and requires many rotations to finally reach somewhere.
Personally I hate this “in the middle” as it’s so relative you can shape to fit your narrative.
For example: what’s in the middle for programming?
For me 0 is writing 0 and 1. For others 0 is making the nand ports.
And 100 is ai llm vibe.
So 50/middle would be what exactly? It all depends.
Same for anything really. Some people I know keep saying not 8 not 80 to mean the middle.
Like what’s in the middle for amount of coding per day? 12 h? 8h? 2h?
What’s middle for making money? 50k, 500k, 500m?
What’s the middle for taking cyanide ? 1g? 1kg?
What about water? What about food? What about anything?
As you can see, it’s all relative and whomever says it, is trying to push his narrative as “middle” aka correct, while who does more or less is “wrong”.
I think both me, and person before me, were commenting more about the fact that taking reserved approach is just healthier and prevents "shitstorms" in discussions that are non existent in current internet landscape. Without offending you, but creating a straw man scenario about how much cyanide one can take and getting angry at it is exactly what I had in mind; I just code, I want to code, sometimes use llm or stack overflow or ask another person for advice about code. The approach in the middle is not taking to the extremes, and making use of any available tools to do our work/hobby and just live life and not be a target of hate (I received hateful messages and even one death threat over a comment where I said that I asked Claude to explain some concept in Zig). I could go and say that "in the middle" is more of a metaphor to just being reserved about stuff but I would be probably called out for "moving goal posts" and "backtracking on own comment". Sorry if something is written weirdly, English is not my first language, I'm open to talk more tho.
Maybe your “sometimes” is too much for me or others. How can you ensure it’s in the “middle”? Maybe I consider extreme. Maybe others consider not enough. Like driving every day: is it extreme driving, or moderate?
You see how makes no sense this in the “middle” concept?
Then how should I call my approach? I definitely wouldn't portray myself as either pro or anti-llm: moderate? Moderate in the colloquial speech would also be not much more than trying to stay in the as you pointed out "relative" point of view. Unless you want to say that everyone is a bit of an extremist.
Sounds good, but I'm scared that for some other people it's not an improvement since there will always be someone saying that X amount is too much or not enough.
But yeah, I could say that 1/4 or 1/5 of coding (or rather, googling of stuff I simply don't know) I do is now delegated to an llm, question is if another person would look at this statement and say something along the lines of "cool, I use it more/less but I'm happy that it helped you/I'm sad that it caused you trouble", I slowly think that we might be discussing kind off the wrong thing. But yeah, numerical/fact based approach doesn't sound half bad even though I have some feeling at the back of my head that it can also be kind off self fulfilling but nonetheless it helps in conveying the message better than what I used before (the I use it a lot/not much/I try to stay in the middle).
You can hate it all you want but the world ain't black or white but a scale of greys. You're over focusing on which exact shade of grey one's talking, but it's indeed relative.
> So 50/middle would be what exactly? It all depends.
Using LLMs to explore code bases, doing deep research, asking it to do code reviews or find bugs, but not pushing code that LLMs have authored might be one example in the middle.
Cyanide has an LD50 (50% chance of death) in the 1-2 mg/kg range when taken orally. So middle for taking cyanide is probably 1.5mg/kg. 90mg for someone 60kg.
Sadly the middle ground in other topics is less easy to define!
> You don’t need every job to choose you. You just need the one that’s the right fit.
You mean, the first one to say yes. Tbh seems more like first to say yes, not first to be fit and say yes.
> You don’t need every house to accept your offer. You just need the one that feels like home.
Same here. Is easy to find one to say yes. Hard to be “feels like home” && say yes.
> You don’t need every person to want to build a life with you. You just need the one.
“The one” is hard.
>You don’t need ten universities to say yes. You just need the one that opens the right door.
Same. What even means “the right door”? How can you even know before you got in?
I think it’s a bad analogy. At least frame it a more realistic: your only need one job to say yes. Might not be the right job but it’s a job. Same for all other.
> It's so common that the only logical explanation is that it is encouraged. It appears to be the norm and the non-slurper is the exception. I'm glad that your parents taught you to not slurp. You are an exceptional individual.
Anyway I’ve asked enough Chinese people about it to get the same answer. Not all do it, but some do it for these reasons.
They are saying it is normal to slurp noodles, which is what I said in my first reply to you. They did not say that they make 'loud mouth noises' as a sign of respect.
Ask this specific question: "Do you make loud mouth noises while you eat as a sign of respect, or is it just normal to slurp noodles?" and see what answer you get.
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