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ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

tedgioia.substack.com

411–420 of 444 posts

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#411
I think "con artist" isn't too far off, but "dream simulator" also applies.

I think it's kind of an open question: can we learn anything from dreams? It's likely a yes, though I doubt we'll prove the Riemann hypothesis with it or anything like that.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The most mind blowing thing to me is how it’s responsive to feedback like this. It’s like pair programming with a junior. It might be faster for me to just type it myself, but it’s doing what I tell it and filling in a fair amount of blanks itself.

But is it responsive? If I gave ChatGPT the same 6502 prompt now that it's done it once would I also have to correct it about the addition as well?

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I got out of school I went to work for Oracle and decided to read the database manuals, even though I wasn't working on database stuff. When I left I read other database manuals and was able to help people code database stuff, not because I was a real database expert, but because I had read the manuals and they hadn't. I think something similar is going on here? For some subjects and some questions, ChatGPT acts…

I was actually literally thinking about that as I worked on my solo project. This is like a coworker I can ask questions of and bounce ideas off of. It actually gives some insightful ideas. I was working on a file rotation scheme and it suggested naming the files uuid_ _ with the intent that resolution conflicts won’t need to be walked very often if ever optimizing the common case of file.0, file.1, etc. This isn’t l…

For solo dev this is such a game changer. I found it difficult to work on solo projects in the past because there is no one to talk to who understands what I am doing. Now whenever I feel "stuck" I just write my thoughts to ChatGPT and it often helps me get ideas to unstack. Also, in the past I often procrastinated when I needed to code something that is obvious and hence boring. No longer the case, somehow it just feels more natural and fun explaining it to ChatGPT in words.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#414

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).

I can tell you why I dislike ChatGPT, it's because it's not trustworthy. Somebody that is not well versed in the subject cannot distinguish the hallucinations of the machine, and for somebody that is well versed, they are better served by a rubber duck that doesn't lead them astray

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most mind blowing thing to me is how it’s responsive to feedback like this. It’s like pair programming with a junior. It might be faster for me to just type it myself, but it’s doing what I tell it and filling in a fair amount of blanks itself.

But is it responsive? If I gave ChatGPT the same 6502 prompt now that it's done it once would I also have to correct it about the addition as well?

You are not asking for something impossible, its just not there yet. The speed of progress in the field is something few can extrapolate well over next 5 years.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#416
post #305
post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're confounding the problem of feeding a system with incorrect inputs ( calculator ), with a system that, provided the input are correct, will throw garbage totally at random. This is a very different kind of system with very different kinds of problems caused to its users.

And you have missed the point. To be a liar requires creativity This a computer. Creative. This is huge. The most astounding thing is its ability to con you. We will learn to use it. Hydraulics for cognition. Amazing

It doesn’t lie, it just picks whatever static noise there is after training and converts it into a coherent speech. It is as creative as few TB of /dev/random sprinkled with encrypted facts and decrypted back as a whole.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#417
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still waiting on those autonomous cars. Unlike many other software development tools, I've found ChatGPT to be useless so far.

Not even for satisfying your curiousity?

It has but not helped me work.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#418

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…

It is a text generator, trained on a huge corpus including the public web. Given the prevalence of this kind of threads on the corpus, it seems likely it should be able to piece together an intelligible text on it.

Maybe a more fitting question to ask when evaluating the technology as a tool for programmers is if it is better than searching Stack Overflow alone?

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#419

Does anyone else have issue with having to provide a phone number to access it? I signed up, verified email, and then was told I needed to verify with phone. This means, to me, (lest I read their TOS) that they are associating any queries I make with my identity. I can't wait for this tech to go open source and local on devices.

This is, IMO, the most important comment in this thread.

Requiring a phone number has privacy implications, but the total consequences are more far-reaching.

You must have a smart phone, you must have your location, your habits, and your characteristics tracked by corporations and governments, you must be a good consumer, you must have a credit rating, you must participate in the wanton destruction of the planet via the two-year planned obsolescence cycle.

Otherwise, you can't play with our shiny new thing.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why are people reading mediocre content with questionable accuracy? For most people that consume content, accurate information is not a priority. Being entertained, belonging to a group, or satisfying some immediate need or want matter more for most people, most of the time. It's doubtful that people who consume content will change their wants to prize accuracy (most of the time). Partly, this is because accurate,…

>> The problem is not: how to quickly and cheaply create content which is marginally less mediocre and marginally more accurate than what we currently have > this sounds like exactly the arms race that content creators are engaged in until it stops paying I don't think they're trying to achieve these things at all. Look at the broken incentives you raised in the first part of your response, that's what this is about,…

I don't disagree, with one caveat. I'm still curious about your opinion on your own question:

> Why are people reading mediocre content with questionable accuracy?

How would you answer this?

I don't believe bad incentives explains it fully.

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