Re: The Slopification of the CCG

ne 19. 4. 2026 v 1:49 odesílatel Marcus Engvall <marcus@engvall.email>
napsal:

> Hi all,
>
> I’m glad to see that we have some healthy discourse in this thread with a
> variety of views. I would like to address some of the points made.
>
> On 18 Apr 2026, at 01:50, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> LLMs have the advantage that they know most or all of the specs
> inside-out, due to their training. Most humans (with notable exceptions),
> including on this list, have partial understanding of the complete works of
> web standards.
>
>
> This is a real advantage that these tools have and it should not be
> understated. I use them professionally for referential lookups and for
> confirming hypotheses, and I have no doubt that they have the ability to
> accelerate otherwise excellent standards work. But I am also careful to not
> fall into the trap of assuming that their lexical consistency can fully
> substitute  for human judgement. LLMs are probabilistic models with
> encyclopaedic knowledge, they are not deterministic oracles with the
> capacity to rigorously derive that same knowledge. In the context of the
> kind of work done in this group I think it is important to not confuse the
> two. I trust an LLM to give me a comprehensive overview of a standards
> framework - I do not, however, trust it to prescribe the framework itself
> without and human review and editorial judgement.
>
> I do however concede on your point on testing methodology, and I think you
> raise a good point that Manu eloquently touched on.
>

Good points. However LLMs outperform humans on medical exams,
olympiad questions and many other tests, often by wide margins. They are
much more than prediction machines or probabilistic guessers. What I'm
saying is that I predict LLMs would exceed humans in the standards setting
on any quantitative evaluation. We just have not the tools to evaluate yet.
However, I believe the picture will be much clearer one year from now.


>
> On 18 Apr 2026, at 02:24, Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com> wrote:
>
> Technology transitions, especially ones around human communication can
> be rough to navigate. This one is no different, and sometimes it takes
> decades to figure out the norms around a new medium (the printed page,
> radio, television, BBSes, mailing lists, AOL, ICQ, Napster, Twitter,
> Digg/Reddit/Discord, and so on).
>
>
> You are completely right that this is a transition, and I think we are all
> trying to map this new technology onto our existing mental models of what
> discourse should and could be. Friction and contention is bound to arise.
> It is clearly counterproductive, as you and later Amir rightly stated, to
> enforce neo-Luddism and reject the technology wholesale.
>
> My point however is that the ability to passively follow and occasionally
> contribute to developments and discussions in this group is immensely
> valuable, both commercially and technically. Compressing the
> signal-to-noise ratio raises the bar for both comprehension and
> participation, and my fear is that the inevitable intractability will, as
> you pointed out in the other thread, overwhelm people and alienate them,
> especially those of us with many other commitments and who do not have the
> time or ability to participate in every group call. That said, it is, as
> you suggested, our responsibility to moderate our own information
> ingestion, as has been the case for time immemorial in any rhetorical forum.
>
> Perhaps LLMs will simply change the structure of how discourse is
> conducted in forums like these rather than drown it out, as some other
> writers have suggested in the thread. If the cost to contribute text tends
> to zero, naturally the valuable discussions will shift elsewhere to forums
> that still have a cost, such as the group calls. I just hope the work
> doesn’t lose the diversity of opinions that is crucial to develop a refined
> and well-considered standard.
>
> --
> Marcus Engvall
>
> Principal—M. Engvall & Co.
> mengvall.com
>
>