Like many things in life, the answer is just "because I want to" and "because I can". Not everything has to be a linear progression or a level-up mechanic like a mmorpg.
Sometimes you want to create something out of creativity and you like seeing it done. The same way a painter wants to create something, not to show off skills, not to linearly progress onto something, but because they like making something out of nothing.
Well it’s more like commissioning art than making art yourself right? You want a painting of some specific thing to exist, so you find an artist you like and pay them to make it.
It’s not art, but I recently commissioned a translation of a manga that I wanted to read in English. The process was very similar to working with an LLM, just more expensive and the turn length was longer (and of course the output quality is much higher than an LLM generated scanlation would be at this point in time). I would pay for a chapter, he would send me a draft, we would go back and forth iterating on romanization and fixing typos until I was happy, then we’d move onto the next chapter. I achieved my goal of having the manga readable in English when it wasn’t before, but I wouldn’t call it my project.
I don't buy into the AGI commercial hype, and I treat LLMs as nothing more than pseudo-random text generators.
It just happens that at certain size the flow of words look a lot like "reasoning" because of the emergence phenomena (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence). But they do not have a theory of mind, they can't visualize and they do not have a sense of purpose.
A very significant difference is that AIs are programs, not people.
Perhaps it might be because i don't use any cloud LLMs, but the LLMs i use are all just data for a program running on my computer just like any other program and i don't really see them as any different than running -say- Bison to write a lexer or whatever (sure, Bison gives you the same output for the same input, but that is because LLM inference engines just add some randomness in the mix as that works better for the overall output - again, not any different than, say, rendering a 3D scene with a pathtracer that takes random samples: same input, different output -- or really any other thing that involves randomness).
That the combo of an LLM inference engine and weights kinda writes like a human and works with text in natural languages doesn't mean it is any different than any other piece of software.
I mean, i don't know about you but personally i'm not a fan of the idea of commissioning GCC to compile my code or Awk to process my text - even if i suspect there are business people out there who would love it :-P
I personally don't mind cloud LLMs as long as I'm aware of what's being sent to the internet.
I was thinking that it's a new thing for our field for such products only to be available behind a paid service. Before LLMs, there was always a local version of a product that worked just fine but with less capacity. Say, amazon vs local kubernetes, or CGI machines at Disney vs local Blender.
But on many other fields is normal for that to happen. Blacksmiths don't usually have a small steel furnace in their homes. Nurses don't buy a personal version of a CT Scanner to practice at home.
You really can’t see a difference between what Bison and GCC do and what an LLM does? You cannot tell GCC “I want a ZX Spectrum GUI” and get a working result.
The difference is that you'll get a different "ZX Spectrum GUI" each time with an LLM, but the same result with a compiler.
The actual work in both cases is not to write the source code, but to figure out and describe exactly what you want. In one case (traditional programming) this specificion happens directly in non-ambigious source code, in the other case (steering an LLM) you specify via an imprecise human language.
Quite often the human language specification is actually "good enough" to get what you wanted, but the more you need to go into specific details, the more the difference to traditional coding disappears.
You can say the same for building computers. You didn't actually "built" a computer from the ground up. You just bought the pre-made hardware and plugged it in the places that are made to be easily pluggable.
Everything in tech is about standing in the shoulders of what came before.
At least when plugging a computer together I know who built the components. When building with LLMs I have no idea who actually wrote the code snippets that are thrown into the mixer ;)
Not for me. I do like having an agent at my disposition that accelerates the way into making those little experiments a reality.
A sloppy reality? Maybe. But It's just tinkering, there's no other use case for this outside of saying "So this can be done, huh? Okay time to go to for a walk".
While it's totally respectable to treat your code as your personal zen garden, I like the idea of having a highway where I can make reality anything that comes from my imagination, and also having time for family, friends, work and exercising out of sedentarism.
Thats your life and your opinion which you are fully entitled to, but dont make the mistake of thinking your life and opinion is better than anyone elses. It suits you, thats whats important.
No - it means that Charles III is an independent monarch for two separate nations.
The monarchy is 99% ceremonial in Canada but it's important to note that the Canadian Crown isn't the UK Crown... Canada is not a dependent of the UK in anyway, simply the person that wears the Crowns is the same person.
>the Crown has had both a shared and a separate character: the sovereign's role as monarch of Canada has been distinct from their position as monarch of any other realm,[n 4][16][65][66][67] including the United Kingdom.[n 6][69][70][71][72] Only Canadian federal ministers of the Crown may advise the sovereign on any and all matters of the Canadian state,[n 7][70][73][74][75][76][77] of which the sovereign, when not in Canada, is kept abreast by weekly communications with the federal viceroy.[78] The monarchy thus ceased to be an exclusively British institution and, in Canada, became a Canadian,[40][79][80][81] or "domesticated",[82] establishment, though it is still often denoted as "British" in both legal and common language,[40] for reasons historical, political, and of convenience.
It's not just theoretical -- IIUC, if Charles, William and George get hit by the same bus, Charlotte would become Queen of the UK while Louis would become King of Canada.
I'm sure that in that scenario Canada would quickly update their primogeniture laws to give Charlotte primacy over her younger brother, but at the moment the primogeniture laws of the two countries are different.
The monarchy is essentially ceremonial in the UK too - the position gives the monarch a platform for advocating for inoffensive things like the environment, and the pomp of state visits is perhaps sometimes useful, but the monarch really has no wield-able political power despite technically being the boss and inviting the winner of elections to run the country.
As an ex-Brit I was always pro-monarchy, enjoying the pageantry and historical continuity, although the current crop of royals don't have much going for them. Perhaps William will turn out OK.
I guess if going in the UK gets tough the royals could move somewhere else to reign. Sigismund was king of Sweden and Poland, though he couldn't maintain both. Maybe we'd need some drama with usurpers and uncles and so on to keep the populace entertained. Without the civil war part...
These countries choose voluntarily to hold ties with the UK, and each other, and some accept the UK's monarch as nominal head of state, but don't be mistaken; they are all fully independent countries. Some are republics, some are kingdoms with their own monarch. They value each other's friendship, shared values and heritage, but they're not beholden to the UK or each other.
There is no King of England. Charles III is King of the United Kingdom, and all places within. The UK does not have a King of England any more than they have a King of Scunthorpe or a King of North Piddle.
The last King of England was William of Orange, who died in 1702 and was succeeded by Anne, who was the last Queen of England. The Act of Union 1707 merged the Kingdom of Scotland and Kingdom of England into a single successor state, the Kingdom of Great Britain. In 1801 that became the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and in 1922 became the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
> Charles III is King of the United Kingdom, and all places within. The UK does not have a King of England any more than they have a King of Scunthorpe or a King of North Piddle.
It really shouldn't surprise you to learn this, but the ordinary name for the "United Kingdom" is "England".
You seem to be completely unaware of... something. But you're not making it clear what. I'm confident you know that the ordinary name for the United States is "America".
We avoid doing this (only a few silly old men and bigots do it, as a dog whistle in national politics).
You should not do this.
It is not, in any sense, the "ordinary name" of the UK. It was pure chauvinism even when it was in common use. Don't do it; it will inevitably and correctly annoy people.
ETA: Even "Britain" and "British" are pretty complex. "Britain" is not really a place in any meaningful or legal sense. The islands are "the British Isles" but only cartographers and mariners really say that (because Ireland is one of them). Great Britain is an island. No identifiable map region is called Britain. "British" is a citizenship and a passport; whether people say they are British is increasingly a personal decision and people have a really wide variety of reasons for their choice.
Safer to say "The UK" when you mean it, and England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland only when you specifically mean those.
Anything else is quite likely to get your drink spilled over you.
His title is "His Majesty Charles the Third, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of His other Realms and Territories King, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith" but he can claim many others. In Canada he is announced as King of Canada.
Even if your tool learns to talk and to make decisions, it's still a tool, not a person. You're the person and the one responsible for the decisions you make based on your tools.
Going back from the analogy, the problem is that we conflated software <engineers> with "coders".
A lot of people thought their job was to create code, we gave them a tool to generate a lot of code fast, and they truly think that "more code" = "more good"
My main problem with liquid glass is it's slow, and the trade off is... a worse user experience in literally every conceivable way? Wow, okay, not a very good deal.
Granted, most downgrades in things like legibility or density are very slight. But they're still downgrades. Downgrading is only worth it if you get something out of it.
Like many things in life, the answer is just "because I want to" and "because I can". Not everything has to be a linear progression or a level-up mechanic like a mmorpg.
Sometimes you want to create something out of creativity and you like seeing it done. The same way a painter wants to create something, not to show off skills, not to linearly progress onto something, but because they like making something out of nothing.
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