Yeah, and everybody is saying block communities/users whatever. But there’s barely any engagement outside of those that you want to block! So yeah, what’s the point of being here then.

Are you sure? I didn’t notice that.

Fuck me if it’s true though, I abandoned reddit because of the bots.

It’s not being shit at searching. I find that google has become almost unusable for me. It’s been on a steady decline for years now, but in recent months I pretty much can’t use it if I want to find anything remotely specific. And god forbid that I need to find something that uses similar terms to a more common search querry, then I can forget it. I basically can’t use it for coding or literature research anymore and I am forced to use AI.

Which performs ever so slightly better, but is still shit.

Why would you restrict who’s allowed to read the publications based on the “credibility” of the reader?

That’s not the problem, the problem is that the journals legally restrict you from making your publication openly accessible.

I honestly feel like I’m going crazy. Everybody is constantly telling me that LLMs are so good and capable, and a lot of people even consider them superior and talk about that like it’s a known fact. But I just don’t see it.

I tried to use them lot of times, but the results were simply not good and I always end up just wasting my time. And everybody is always like “well you have to write the right prompts, they have to be like this and this” or “well it might be that you’re not using the right model, try this and this model” or whatever.

One guy even suggested that I might not be advanced enough to recognize it as good code, because again, LLMs are just so good and that’s a fact. Which, to be fair, I fully admit to not being advanced or very experienced, especially in C++ which I am currently using and trying to learn. So I’m not rejecting this notion outright, it might actually be true. Although, I am experienced and I’d even say advanced in Python, and there I can say for sure that the code written by LLMs is just bad, convoluted, and unmaintainable.

A lot of times that I talk to people about this and explain my experience, and manage to convince them that I tried different prompts, models and everything, they always land on the same conclusion - that the code doesn’t actually have to be readable and maintainable. LLMs are a new interface for coding, thus the code only has to be good enough for the LLM to be able to work with it.

And I honestly can’t even say that this is such a ridiculous idea. That may very well be the path we’re headed towards. And if that is the case, then my insisting on not using LLMs just puts me at a disadvantage since I’m much less productive (assuming that people who use LLMs are actually more productive - which I haven’t seen conclusive studies about). I’ve read a little about this topic on reddit and stuff, and a lot of people really do agree with this - if you don’t use LLMs, you’re just too slow and it will only get worse. And this is coming from people who are (claiming to be) experienced software devs.

My situation is a little bit different though - I’m writing research code and I definitely DO have to be able to read and debug the code. If I don’t, my results might be completely false and come from bugs or wrong functionalities. So I strongly reject using LLMs in my code, at least in the 95% of the code that actually implements my methodology.

But even still, I haven’t had success with getting good code out of LLMs for the 5% that doesn’t deal with the research, so what the hell is going on? I seriously feel like I’m going crazy since it seems to me like I’m the only one who isn’t satisfied with the “capabilities” of LLMs. I can admit that my prompting needs work and that I don’t exactly put much effort into it, but at some point, where do you draw the line? How many paragraphs do I have to write to ensure that the LLM does exactly what I want, before it becomes more work than actually doing it myself? I swear, some of the tips I get from people on prompting are crazy - writing .md files with instructions, writing out every single detail, explaining exactly how to do it and on and on and on. Its honestly easier and quicker just doing it myself.

And another thing - when did it happen that people stopped being embarrassed about heavily using LLMs to code?? Like this just flipped at some point and now people proudly talk about not having written a single line of code in a project (and I mean this literally, I’ve had multiple people tell me this). I cringe so hard every time in these conversations.

So I really have no idea what to think anymore. In any case, I won’t be using LLMs in my research because the main goal is for me to actually learn something, as well as to produce reliable code and results. I’m still early in my research, so there’s no problem with me doing that right now. But there will probably come a time where I will have learned enough about the topic to allow for “blackbox” code because I will be able to verify the functionalities and results, and I certainly expect higher pressure to use LLMs then. I have no idea what I’ll do then.

What would that solve?

I get what you mean, and I would agree with you but the last month kind of disillusioned me.
The fact that they managed to spin things like the presidents right hand guy giving the nazi salute on his inauguration day, or Trump blatantly supporting a dictator of the historically biggest US adversary, or him alienating and threatening to attack or annex US allies, or the countless other actions, is just defeating. I mean where the hell is the red line? What would it take for them to say “yes, Trump made a mistake.”? They pushed the narrative so far out that they’re okay with him aligning with Putin over the EU. I mean he literally said that Putin has gone through a lot with him and praised him while trying to extort Zelensky and screaming at him with the whole world watching. Where does it end?

It’s just extremely defeating.

I wouldn’t hold out hope that any of them would change their mind to be honest. Those people would never vote differently, they’ll just vote in the next MAGA idiot.

I’ve been lurking r/conservative a bit since the election, and every time Trump, Musk or their cronies do something bad, it’s either not posted (though maybe it’s being removed), or if it’s outrageous enough, it’s always the same story:
At first they’re like “I don’t know about this one guys…”, but they’re quick to correct course with “I know this looks bad, but Trump knows what he’s doing and we don’t have enough information to judge yet”.
And then after a day or so, when the marching orders come from Fox and the like, it’s “This is a genius 4D chess move, anybody who doesn’t see it is a low IQ libtard”.

Then there’s inevitably infighting - anybody who isn’t following the new narrative is a leftist who’s infiltrated the sub, old comments which were sceptical at first get deleted and new posts on the same topic get posted where all the comments are praising Trump. They cry about brigading, mods purge the users and post stickies on how they’re planning to handle it in the future (and beg for donations).

Then the next thing happens - wash and repeat.

A lot of comments start with users trying to convince others that they are a true conservative, afraid to say anything slightly critical of Trump or Musk. The purism is in full swing. They really can’t accept that anything Trump or his admin does, no matter how outrageous, could be bad.
It’s like the whole sub is going through cognitive dissonance.

It would be really interesting if it weren’t so sad.

How did you do that?