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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   32584 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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I dunno AI still seems incapable of doing very basic things I ask it to. We don’t even have self driving cars yet! This seems like something that’s always “just a few years away” as a trick to get investors excited

Surveys of actual companies show that basically no one is using AI at companies at all. Users here like to argue this point but many of you are programmers - the exact demographic to be able to use and exploit these LLMs.

Driving cars is among the later capabilities you'd expect to fall, if you switch off human conceit and take the far view. You're asking to beat billions of years of evolution in a data-poor domain (navigating the real world) rather than some thousands (written) or at most hundreds of thousands (spoken) in a well-databased one (words and symbolic reasoning).

Uh, what do you mean we don't have self-driving cars? I took two driverless Waymo rides last week, navigating the nasty, twisting streets of SF. It drove just fine. Maybe you could argue it's not cost-effective yet, or that there are still regulatory hurdles, but I think what you meant is that the tech doesn't work. And that's clearly false.

Also, I'm a programmer and productively using ChatGPT at work, so I'd say the score so far is Magusoflight 0, my lying eyes 2.

you totally misunderstood my comment.

Sarcasm that contains no marker of intent or actual humor is failed sarcasm.

If you intended sarcasm, then this is an excellent example of Poe's law. There are people here who would unironically say the same thing, and have.

I wasn’t being sarcastic. It’s strange, I guess this part was confusing to you?

Users here like to argue this point but many of you are programmers - the exact demographic to be able to use and exploit these LLMs.

The implication I’ll unpack for you - if you’re a programmer you live a bubble. Coding seems extremely important and useful - and since one of the few things LLM can do well is coding, this makes it seem very productive and useful! Hence programmers are very biased on this topic. You don’t really see how unpragmatic LLMs are for any other occupation

I'm a doctor. I think LLMs are very "pragmatic" or at least immensely useful for my profession. They could do much more if regulatory systems allowed them to.

Are there any models that you would consider generally good? I have a Claude-based personal assistant that I'm working on but medical queries don't work out well. The positivity bias is too strong - it tends to agree and amplify, which isn't good in medical care!

I've come around to using Gemini 2.5 Pro for almost everything, Grok 3 being a close contender. As a cheapskate who does his best to avoid paying, Claude is borderline unusable for me, and it's not like paying users get generous usage limits. There's GPT-4o, which I use far less often since the first 2 came out.

IMO, all models are perfectly acceptable for medical purposes. Gemini 2.5 is the best on benchmarks, and I think I can tell the difference that makes. Its personality is not as congenial as Claude or GPT-4o (and I'm a little fond of Grok, even if it tries too hard).

Regarding sycophancy, I have noted a strong tendency for 2.5 Pro to pushback on claims it disagrees with, and it asks for clarification in a manner that's entirely appropriate while also being happy to operate off what it thinks the user intends.

I can't overstate this. I find myself convincing it quite often. It's raised concerns that would have been very valid had it not been for information it didn't have access to. An example is when it threw up clear alarm at a sudden (positive) discrepancy in my net pay off uploaded bank statements, urging me to contact payroll to make sure that my taxes were in order. It didn't know that I'd received backpay, and was relieved to hear it.

TLDR: Anything works fine. Gemini 2.5 Pro works best. And it's free.

Im speaking in generalities

I work in the health system and we STILL rely on a paper healthcare chart.

In 2025

Holy shit. In the U.S? I know of a few but very very few at this point.

Even the VA figured this shit out.

Nah I live in the cold land of “free” healthcare

My man, I was using paper charts in the NHS till about a month ago. Thankfully they fixed the wifi, and we're living in the scifi future of 1999 now.

That is not a significant barrier. Get someone to transcribe them, they've probably got better handwriting than a doctor.

I’m trying to tell you that the adoption of new tech is so glacial that it won’t matter. You’ll be dead before AI gets used productively in medicine

We don’t even have self driving cars yet!

We absolutely, 100% have self driving cars that are accessible to consumers.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Go6Syv8xNMA?si=esnCdfNdiVCH1OCv

https://youtube.com/watch?v=92aBMTpeQB8?si=sj4QHy8uDLDLLitW

Just not everywhere just yet. Maybe you can even say the technology isn't "mature," but it is absolutely here.

The Waymo in California thing is such a small experiment and the upside of fudging with it is so high that if it turned out in 5 years that actually it was mostly indians in a warehouse doing the driving I wouldn't even be surprised

We don't see any waymos driving on the sidewalk to dodge traffic jams, so we can disprove the Artificial Indian hypothesis.

I can’t buy one. Waymo operates it select zones of select municipalities. It’s not accessible.

I presume you can't buy a Bugatti either. It's still an option that real living people can get for cash.

There's nothing standing in the way of Waymo rolling out an ever wider net. SF just happens to be an excellent place to start.

There's nothing standing in the way of Waymo rolling out an ever wider net

There’s quite a bit, it’s regulation, weather, geography, traffic levels, driver behaviour, crime.

I apologize for the hyperbole, and those are mostly valid considerations. I don't think traffic, driver behavior and crime matters, if they can work in SF at a profit. The other three are solvable or quasi-solved, regulation definitely is.

Isn’t SF one of the most tech-friendly cities in the nation? That’s where all the HQs are right?

Certainly. That is one of the drivers behind Waymo opening shop there. But even non rabid technophiles use their services, a car that drives itself and well is a service that almost anyone will pay for at a given price.

The demand is there, yes

Yeah, it’s just that liability tolerance for SDCs is very low. That’s why Waymo cars drive extremely conservatively and they’ve been careful about expanding into routes where more aggressive driving is necessary, like airport pickup (although it’s coming). But it’s all going to happen pretty soon.

I recently saw a travelogue video by Noel Phillips in which he was picked up by a Waymo at PHX.

Yeah, we have them here in Phoenix, and as a native resident of Phoenix, I can say that we have some truly questionable human drivers on the road as it is.

Self driving = ability to do 100% of what a competent human driver can do in any location, without geofencing.

By that standard, a good fraction of cars on the road don't qualify as human-driven.

(My idea for self-driving car laws: It has to pass a standard driver's license exam, and has to carry insurance. Anything past that is consumer protection instead of a valid safety concern.)

That would be a terrible law. Human driver's exams are made to filter out bad human drivers. The kinds of mistakes humans make are not the same as those made by AI. By virtue or being human, you can assume with high confidence that the examinee will not make whole classes of fatal errors, while you can not yet assume that of AI drivers.

They may be good enough now, it's just that the standard you propose is not a good filter.

By that standard, a good fraction of cars on the road don't qualify as human-driven.

How about "has to perform no worse than the worst human with a valid driver's license (without geofencing, etc. etc.), and has to perform in a manner that would not result in the driver's license being taken away from the human"? That's a pretty charitable standard, I'd say, and we should probably aim for average, rather than worst).

My idea for self-driving car laws: It has to pass a standard driver's license exam

The problem with that is that it's fairly easy to train an AI to pass an exam without it implying it can perform in general conditions. I think we already have LLM's that can pass a bar exam, for example.

The geofencing is something I have some ambiguity on. Is it primarily legal/regulatory, or is it because Waymo requires extensive pre-data to function? I.e. if you dropped a Waymo on a Montana back road, would it be able to drive and navigate as well as a human driver in the same situation?

It seems like a bit of an unfair standard to hold it against Waymo capabilities if the issue is primarily legal/regulatory.

Sure, if they already have that capability and it’s only regulations holding them up then it is real self driving.

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