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Thoughts on thinking

(dcurt.is)
648 points bradgessler | 3 comments | 16 May 25 19:09 UTC | HN request time: 0.899s | source
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bsenftner ◴[17 May 25 13:57 UTC] No.44014381[source]▶
I believe the author is awash in a sea they do not understand, and that is the cause of their discomfort. When they describe their ideas being fully realized by LLMs, are they really, or just appearing as such because the words and terms arrive in a similar and expected manner as their prompt?

Performing any type of intellectual philosophic or exploratory work with LLMs is extremely subtle, largely because you nor they know what you are seeking, and the discovery process with LLMs is not writing prompts and varying one's prompts in trial manners to hopefully get "something else, something better" <- that is pure incomprehension of how they work, and how to work with them.

Very few seem to be realizing the mirror aspects embodied within LLMs: they will mirror you back, and if you are unaware of this, you may not be getting the replies you really seek, you're receiving "comfort replies" and replies mirroring your metadata (style, nuance) more than the factual logic of your requests, if any factual requests are made.

There is an entire body of work, multiple careers worth of human effort, to document the new subtle logical keys to working with LLMs. These are new logical constructs that have never existed before, not even fictionally, not realized as they are now, with all the implications and details bare, in our faces, yet completely misunderstood as people attempt old imperative methods that will not work with with this new entity with completely different characteristics than anything reality has any experience.

A major issue with getting developers to effectively use LLMs is the fact that many developers are weak to terrible communicators themselves. LLMs are fantastic communicators, who will mirror their audience in an attempt to be better understood, but when that audience is a weak communicator the entire process disintegrates. That is, what I suspect is happening with the blog post author. An inability to be discriminate in their language to the degree they parcel out the easy immediate sophomore level replies, and then arrive at a context within the LLM's capacity that is the integrity of context they seek, but that requires them to meet that intellectually and linguistically or that LLM context is destroyed. So subtle.

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bartread ◴[17 May 25 14:09 UTC] No.44014454[source]▶
> but when that audience is a weak communicator the entire process disintegrates. That is, what I suspect is happening with the blog post author.

That’s a pretty rude and disrespectful take on this piece, don’t you think?

How can you read a piece that is so well articulated then turn around and, apparently unironically, suggest the author isn’t a good communicator?

How can you invalidate the author’s experience without seeing and knowing more? You have no idea of the nuts and bolts of their LLM interactions whereas, to support the conclusion you’ve arrived at, this is exactly the information you’d need based on what you’ve said.

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1. bsenftner ◴[17 May 25 15:32 UTC] No.44015027[source]▶
If you are worried about being rude when dealing with misunderstandings, you waste a lot of time coddling your audience. The author describes their highly emotional inability to effectively communicate with an LLM, I point out the issue is a lack of communications skill, and you call that as rude? How else to describe this issue? Effective communications and using LLMs is the issue.

The piece is not that well written, it has large amounts of assumptions that need to be clarified if that information were to be used within an LLM prompt. Very few people, developers included, appear to understand the concept of LLM context construction and management. It is barely even a topic. I suspect because the software engineering professional, as a whole, are composed largely of weak communicators, and the zietgiest of understanding how to use LLMs is truly and genuinely not there. To grasp LLM usage, it is very much "literature calculus", a term or concept not out yet at all.

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2. bartread ◴[17 May 25 21:33 UTC] No.44017141[source]▶
A big part of having good communication skills is knowing your audience. HN is a forum for people do discuss stories, not a forum for prompting LLMs. Moreover that discussion is supposed to be civil. You might see that civility as a waste of time but, if you do, you're likely to lose your audience, and that is a failure of communication.

Similarly, the intended audience for the author's post is people, not LLMs. So it doesn't really matter whether an LLM would struggle to properly understand and provide a useful response to it because I, as a human being, did understand the perspective, and found it both interesting and thought provoking.

You don't know anything at all about how the author uses an LLM, and nor do I. So when you draw a direct line between software engineers in general being "weak communicators" and the post author being a weak communicator, specifically with LLMs, you are jumping to a conclusion that is not supported by the evidence we can actually see.

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3. bsenftner ◴[17 May 25 22:55 UTC] No.44017622[source]▶
You seem to be defending the blog author. The author themselves describes their experience as:

But now, when my brain spontaneously forms a tiny sliver of a potentially interesting concept or idea, I can just shove a few sloppy words into a prompt and almost instantly get a fully reasoned, researched, and completed thought.

This is casual, unmeditated use of an LLM and then allowing an emotional reaction to shut down further investigation. Excuse me for describing the author's own experience and related that back with an interpretation you feel is disrespect. I can dress it with less comprehensible words, disguising the perspective, but it is still a mirror reflection of the blog author's own assessments. He describes being overshadowed and intimidated to paralysis. Is that happening across the board? Are people exposed to LLMs developing inferiority complexes and ambition loss? Can this ideas and issues even be discussed if people are afraid of the topics? Discuss my points, do not say my language is illegal to this community, that is a cop out in an forum that is supposed to be exploring ideas.