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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 16, 2024

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My brother in Christ, the 174th best coder on Earth is literally an LLM.

No, it is ranked as 175th in a specific ranking. That is with access to all analysis, answers of this existing questions. Solving question is distinctively easier if you seen the answer.

Make no mistake, LLM are much better at coding than I would predict 10 years ago. Decade ago I would laugh at anyone predicting such progress, and in fact I mocked any idea of AI generating code that is worth looking at. And trawling internet for such solutions is extremely powerful and useful. And ability to (sometimes) adapt existing code to novel situation still feels like magic.

But it is distinctively worse at handling novel situations and taking any context into account. Much worse than such ranking suggest. Leaving aside all cheating of benchmarks and overfitting and Goodhart's law and all such traps.

If this AI would be really 174th best coder on Earth then they would be already releasing profitable software written by it. Instead, they release PR stuff. I wonder why? Maybe at actual coding it is not so great?