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ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

tedgioia.substack.com

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Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#291

Post by bordercases »

qayxc wrote: post #275
Reptur wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, yesterday I just told it to write a Dockerfile for me, with exactly what I wanted. instead of changing anything by hand, I told it what to fix, without telling it how to. Took 20-30 follow-up messages, telling it to add things, remove things, fix things, make things compatible with the versions of software it was running etc. It worked. Running the container now, works great.

> Took 20-30 follow-up messages, telling it to add things, remove things, fix things, make things compatible with the versions of software it was running etc. So in other words you basically spent just as much time and effort as if you did it yourself?

The arc of software development is to make people depend on vaguer specifications to tell systems what they want, and rely on recognition of what they see being what they want with fast feedback loops, versus slowly recalling the syntax of how to state it.

It could be the same time spent, but not the same amount of cognitive effort.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#292

Post by freejazz »

raldi wrote: post #252
cj wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Totally unrelated) I wonder how an autonomous car would navigate my narrow dead end road. The road isn't wide enough for 2 cars to pass, so whenever 2 cars pass each other on the road, 1 car needs to pull off onto the shoulder to make room. I have a feeling an autonomous car would take up the whole lane, and not be smart enough to pull off onto the shoulder. Meaning both cars would be stuck there unable to pass each…

After the first one got stuck, don’t you think a programmer would teach it to do exactly what you suggest? Usually before deploying them somewhere, they have safety drivers take them up and down every road at least once, and sometimes dozens of times.

If by self driving car you mean a car that can only drive itself after a programmer specifically resolves whichever breaking problem it had (which may or may not occur after your life has ended DUE to this very problem), then I guess they are here!

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#293

Post by holoduke »

huijzer wrote: post #264
lyu07282 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the same experience with it, it's very useful, especially when you are unsure about what to even look for. I have a few theories I suspect it's just a bias we have, most people aren't doing or creating anything, they aren't solving problems or learning new things constantly like engineers do, so chatgpt feels useless to them. Or perhaps the problems we want to talk or learn about are just easier for an ai to a…

> I don't know I'm really confused about how some people think it's so worthless. Maybe because either they believe that ChatGPT is worthless, or they have to deal with the fact that their knowledge is becoming worthless (or, at least, worth less).

From either side there is a lot of belief with just minor real experience to fully judge. For me it saves tons of coding time. Together with copilot i am twice as productive. At least.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#294

Post by randomdigitz »

qayxc wrote: post #275
Reptur wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, yesterday I just told it to write a Dockerfile for me, with exactly what I wanted. instead of changing anything by hand, I told it what to fix, without telling it how to. Took 20-30 follow-up messages, telling it to add things, remove things, fix things, make things compatible with the versions of software it was running etc. It worked. Running the container now, works great.

> Took 20-30 follow-up messages, telling it to add things, remove things, fix things, make things compatible with the versions of software it was running etc. So in other words you basically spent just as much time and effort as if you did it yourself?

This is why I stopped using it as much. Realized it was taking more time asking it questions than just doing the work.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#296

Post by Reptur »

qayxc wrote: post #275
Reptur wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, yesterday I just told it to write a Dockerfile for me, with exactly what I wanted. instead of changing anything by hand, I told it what to fix, without telling it how to. Took 20-30 follow-up messages, telling it to add things, remove things, fix things, make things compatible with the versions of software it was running etc. It worked. Running the container now, works great.

> Took 20-30 follow-up messages, telling it to add things, remove things, fix things, make things compatible with the versions of software it was running etc. So in other words you basically spent just as much time and effort as if you did it yourself?

I understand your point, and you are right. Had I been familiar with the image I was working with, and the version differences in configuration etc. It probably would have taken me the same amount of time. I look at this from a more zoomed out perspective, this is just the beginning. The point is its capable and will improve.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#297

Post by hot_gril »

cribbles wrote: post #58

I would greatly appreciate a moratorium on this genre of article until there is compelling accompanying evidence that a meaningful portion of ChatGPT's users are unaware of these shortcomings. I have yet to encounter or even hear of a non-technical person playing around with ChatGPT without stumbling into the type of confidently-stated absurdities and half-truths displayed in this article, and embracing that as a lim…

> Is what ChatGPT tells me accurate?

> ChatGPT is trained on a large corpus of text, but like any AI model, it is not perfect and can make mistakes. The information provided by ChatGPT should be used as a reference and not as a substitute for professional advice. Additionally, the accuracy of the information provided by ChatGPT is limited by the knowledge cut-off date, which is 2021.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#298

Post by worik »

MagicMoonlight wrote: post #121
rqtwteye wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same for me. I fed it a few requirements and test objectives and its comments were pretty reasonable. With a little specialized training it will probably do better than most systems engineers or testers I know.

Okay so it generated a response which was “reasonable” How do you know it was correct? Because you checked it’s entire output manually and determined it probably wasn’t too wrong? So what happens if you now trust it to write firmware for some difficult old timey hardware that nobody understands anymore. It seems correct. But then it actually was just making it up and the coolant system of the power plant breaks and k…

> So what happens if you now trust it to write firmware for some difficult old timey hardware that nobody understands anymore.

How well would anyone do?

Would you trust me?

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#299

Post by moffkalast »

wvenable wrote: post #287
fnordpiglet wrote: post #17

I had a detailed conversion with chatGPT about how to gracefully handle terminating conditions of a rust program. It summarized cogently to register at_exit()’s for each thread, panic handlers, and register signal handlers. It advised and explain in detail on my query about the thread handling for each of these variants, gave really helpful advice on collecting join handles in a closure on the main thread and waiting…

I asked ChatGPT to create some 6502 assembly to multiply two numbers. It generated an iterative approach (add A to itself B times for A*B) but didn't include the actual addition. I told it that "hey, you forgot to do the addition in that code" and it promptly corrected itself. Personally, I don't consider that terrible given what I was asking it.

Yeah it feels like it performs really well if you know what needs to be done and how. Spare no detail from the description of how exactly it should do it and it'll usually get most of it right and save some of the time spent messing around with initial setup and boilerplate.
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