You are asking the wrong question. It's not about if you can do X which can be faked especially if you are given practically infinite tries and all failures are hidden.

The people who want to believe they actually reason just ignore all obvious evidence of contrary and cherry pick the times reasoning was faked well enough.

The people who don't want to believe will just take a second to understand how they work and then come up with ways to reveal they were faking all along. Like asking how many letters there are in a word lol.

It's only the people who don't want to believe that count because reality is what happens despite of what you believe.

You seem to believe that something is only "reasoning" if it works in a particular way. That it's not enough for it to observationally display reasoning skills; it has to be using a particular method to do that so it's not "faking" it. Is that correct?

It will be interesting to see the excuses people come up with when LLMs innevitably start solving millenium prize problems.

Ironically it is any maxxing, including improbabilitymaxxing, that actually makes you a predictable and controllable machine. Such a sad waste of what could be a free will.

That's better than 99.99999% humans. Where do I put my credit card details?

I agree it's rare, but I think there are more than 830 humans on the planet which can do this.

Not really.

For example preliterate people have absolutely insane memory. In comparison my memory sucks. Having to use notes, look things up etc sucks. Literacy is a tradeoff but at least it can be argued to be worth it.

Then there is smartphones. This is not the same. The tradeoffs compared to pre smartphones cannot be argued to be worth it imo and I was 20 years old when they were introduced. They make society and lives worse. It's not just about not being able to use PC but your attention and social skills sucking.

Then there is AI which is even worse than smartphones. The tradeoffs are so unthinkably bad I can't really even describe it.

This is a curious choice of fields for you, if the last technology you think was a net positive was literacy!

Well, it was. But we still have to pay the bills.

It actually makes sense. For any task it is completely trivial for anyone to become better than >80% humans and still easy to be better than >95%. The only problem is motivation not intelligence.

Not being able to call a function inside if block or a loop is not just javascript.

> When it comes to deciding where to place which code, I found a particular mantra very helpful: minimize code and maximize use cases. The idea is to have as many reusable software components as possible and to minimize the overall code within an organization.

You'll want to do exactly the opposite. This just leads to maximizing dependencies and grinding everything to halt as everything you could fix in 2 mins will take 6 months of waiting instead. Also literally anything can be "reused" with enough configuration and parameters, with them becoming the source of complexity and programming itself and at the end of the day it was a huge waste to effectively create a new programming language.

I actually lean towards copy and pasting the same code into many files just so that they are self-contained and have no dependencies.

We don't know what humans are because they are a black box, we use some imperfect models that have limited usability in specific contexts.

LLM is white box that we know for sure is just a statistical next token predictor and nothing more. It's not a just a model of some black box we are trying to understand but the whole actual thing. That people think it's something more or could be something more is on them. If you understand that then you understand the flaws, limitations and vulnerabilities which is very useful.

There is no such thing that you can always keep adding more of and have it automatically be effective.

I tend to automate too much because it's fun, but if I'm being objective in many cases it has been more work than doing the stuff manually. Because of laziness I tend to way overestimate how much time and effort it would took to do something manually if I just rolled my sleeved and simply did it.

Whether automating something actually produces more with less labor depends on nuance of each specific case, it's definitely not a given. People tend to be very biased when judging the actual productivity. E.g. is someone who quickly closes tickets but causes disproportionate amount of production issues, money losing bugs or review work on others really that productive in the end?

There is more than molecules, neurons and synapses. They are made from lower level stuff that we have no idea about (well, we do in this instance but you get the point). They are just higher level things that are useful to explain and understand some things but don't describe or capture the whole thing. For that you would need to go to lower and lower level and so far it seems they go on infinitely. Currently we are stuck at the quantum level, that doesn't mean it's the final level.

OTOH, an LLM is just a token prediction engine. It fully and completely covers it. There is no lower level secrets hidden in the design nobody understands, because it could not have been created if there was. The fact that the output can be surprising is not evidence of anything, we have always had surprising outputs like funny bugs or unexpected features. Using the word "emergence" for this is just deceitful.

This algorithm has fundamental limitations and they have not been getting better, if you look closely. For instance you could vibe code a C compiler now, but it's 80% there, cute trick but not usable in real world. Just like anything, it cannot be economically vibe coded to 100%. They are not going back and vibe coding the previous simpler projects to 100% with "improved" models. Instead they are just vibe coding something bigger to 80%. This is not an improvement in limitations, it is actually communicating between the lines that the limitations cannot be overcome.

Also, enshittification has not even started yet.

I can bake a cake while having 0 understanding of the chemistry that powers the transformation. One is a pile of wet flour, the other is delicious.

A dog can create a snack by doing a trick. Doesn't mean that there isn't some mechanism going on there that neither of them understand.