181–190 of 205 posts
I’m exploring alternative careers and kind of want programming to just be a hobby.
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I do Mac/iOS development and am constantly asking ChatGPT about various APIs and frameworks. Apple's documentation is not great for explaining how to actually use APIs, unless you can find the one WWDC video that explains it or a sample project that they released years ago. I would normally google for sample code, blog posts, tutorials, or Stack Overflow posts. Something that might take an hour of searching and readi…
I wonder how this is affecting what you consider knowledge going forward. This strikes me as students using google to answer homework questions and forgoing the actual “learning” part.
A common thing I've searched for, for instance, is the various date formatting options and types I need for managing time zones. I suppose I could sit down and learn the plethora of options, but I don't see that is information that's worth memorizing internally. Similarly, I suppose I could really internalize the complete syntax of regular expressions, but is it worth it? I've used them so many times before ChatGPT, but I've not memorized absolutely all the options available to me.
The other side of the coin is this is allowing me to make so much progress that I'm needing to even use more APIs than I would've previously. If I had done it the old way, I might only have time and energy to devote to a small number of tasks, but with ChatGPT I can "explore" more territory than I wouldn't have previously.
The only thing ChatGPT is good for me is to replace Google for knowledge access. But I have to validate those answers in case they are hallucinated or just plain wrong.
Software like GPT should be a tool, not a crutch. There is a lot that people can do to maintain their mental acuity over the decades, and I know first-hand the difference between doing it and not doing it. Those who do nothing, and especially those that increasingly lean on crutches, soon learn just how much worse it can get. Even a genetically lucky brain can be squandered.
Watch the Huberman Lab podcast and ask yourself if you'd like the kind of mental acuity that 48yo Dr Andrew Huberman effortlessly demonstrates every single time. His worst off days are better than most people in their prime. That's what is possible when people actually research and apply tools to improve their own health and abilities directly. There are a lot of rabbit holes this can go down, but just acknowledging it as an axis worth working on is the most important first step.
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> People have been talking about the threat of automation since the very beginning of the industrial revolution. And the prediction that only the ownership class would benefit from technological improvements is at least as old as Marx.
And it's proven to be unequivocally true hasn't it? Just take a look at the accumulation of wealth since 1970.
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The only solution is to rapidly scale these up so that they can disrupt every aspect of everyone's life until we all decide to throw our hands up and decide it's time for a new social construct. I'm surprised someone hasn't replace politicians with an LLM. Imagine not having to pay their salaries when ChatGPT can send "thoughts and prayers" to Maui over Twitter 24/7.
It’s not a new social construct. It’s a very old one: a thin layer of rich people, and a large number of poor people fighting to survive because they don’t have anything to contribute beyond their own manual labour. Head out of the developed world and you can see this type of society everywhere. This meme of AI -> upheaval -> basic income utopia has got to die. It’s wishful thinking. It’s “clean coal” for programmers…
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I don't think so. Junior engineers will learn much much faster than the past (think about how much more effective GPT4 is as a learning tool than the "rubber ducky method" or manpages or even stackoverflow). And a part of their role will morph into prompting GPT4 (much like this senior engineer has started doing). If GPTx ends up in the narrow area where it's universally smarter than junior engs but definitely not ca…
> I don't think so. Junior engineers will learn much much faster than the past (think about how much more effective GPT4 is as a learning tool than the "rubber ducky method" or manpages or even stackoverflow). That's bunk. The OP is literally "feel[s] the need to hire junior" engineers because he can ChatGPT that work. How are they going to learn a job they won't be given the opportunity to have much faster? > If GPT…
They are to become an independent person, taking independent actions, aligned with the current vision and goals.
I don’t want a permanent increase of my own workload which is what working with chatgpt feels like.
Can you elaborate on how you're actually using ChatGPT? I'm a developer and I haven't felt any need to use ChatGPT constantly. What tasks are you delegating to ChatGPT that were previously done by humans? Most of my input from others is regarding current information specific to the task at hand. I don't see how ChatGPT would have any idea what I'm talking about. Do you have some specific examples you could share?
I have a bunch of examples myself. Here's a good recent one (prompts are linked about half way down the post): https://simonwillison.net/2023/Aug/6/annotated-presentations... A few more: - "Write a Python script with no extra dependencies which can take a list of URLs and use a HEAD request to find the size of each one and then add those all up" https://simonwillison.net/2023/Aug/3/weird-world-of-llms/#us... - "Show…
I really wanted to know what vague things OP's humans were doing, but they haven't responded to anything.
I've been reading your blog since the dark ages. Thanks for the great content over the years!
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OTOH, chatGPT can make a good rubber duck if you want to talk through a problem. It's advice is often useless (which is fine) but occasionally it may say something useful.
I find ChatGPT is scary BAD for rubber ducking. You have to already have an idea of what's right and wrong to verify. It is insane how often ChatGPT is wrong when I ask it things. like 90% of the time it is wrong. It's probably because everything I ask is way too specific and because it's just pattern matching on roids and not reasoning, it's impossible for it.
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I think Simon has a lot of experience solving hard problems: https://simonwillison.net/about/
That's irrelevant, we are taking about solving hard problems with ChatGPT none of the examples are even slightly complex.
I'm excited about using ChatGPT/GPT-4 because it takes the time I need to figure out how to do something "easy" down from half an hour to sub-5-minutes.