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Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

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Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#671

Post by anon7725 »

qsort wrote: post #575
Jupe wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the "Chat" part of ChatGPT already doing something close to this? I mean the clarification comes from the end-user, not from the AI, but with enough of this stuff to feed upon, perhaps AIs could "get there" at some point? For example, this guy was able to do some amazing stuff with ChatGPT. He even managed to get a (mostly working) GPU-accelerated version of his little sample "race" problem. See: https://youtu.…

> Isn't the "Chat" part of ChatGPT already doing something close to this? No, the amount of handholding you have to do to get it to work effectively presumes you already know how to solve the problem in the first place. The best way to use it is the opposite everyone is busy selling : as a linter of sorts that puts blue squiggles below my code saying stuff like "hey stupid human, you're leaking memory here", or even…

I agree with your point about how to best use it today. We have seen that each new model generation both improves the prior tasks and unlocks new ones through emergent behavior. That’s the fascinating/scary part of this development. And yes, it’s “just” a language model. It’s “just” predicting next token given training + context. We don’t really understand why it’s working and it’s evolving non-linearly.

I asked GPT-4 to give me an SVG map of my town. I then asked it to put dots on some local landmarks. The map was toddler level, but the landmarks were relatively accurate in terms of their relationship to each other and the blob that it drew.

So this is a language model that has some emergent notion of space in its code generation abilities.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#673

Post by [deleted] »

chii wrote: post #284
dmpk2k wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's been the promise of increasing productivity for many decades, and yet...

if you were to life with only what was around at the time such productivity increases occurred - e.g., no internet, phone, and high speed computing, access to medical/transport improvements etc - you'd probably be able to live off minimum wage easily. People worked more today because they desired more. In fact, the desire outstripped their ability to increase their wages!

[deleted]

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#674

Post by ambrose2 »

howderek wrote: post #392
eldritch_4ier wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All points the horses made before cars all but replaced them. “The humans need to get from A to B and it’s not like they’ve gotten any faster with their own 2 legs”. How does this manager-engineer look like now? Managers specify what they need in plain language, and both parties go back and forth with increasing complexity to create based on the shared vision. Managers can already pull off a similar dance with ChatGP…

The horse population has decreased by half or so since the early 1900s. And horses have stayed pretty valuable, too. Most of them just don't have to work as hard anymore. The horses used for sport never went away, only the horses used for labor or transport. So if your horse analogy is accurate, then maybe half of software engineers lose their jobs and the industry stops growing. Those that keep their jobs keep their…

Wouldn’t a better statistic be the ratio of horses to people? I’m sure that has gone done much more since the early 1900’s.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#675

Post by ozim »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #259
carlmr wrote: post #29

Looking back we had one CS professor who in 2007 predicted we'd all be jobless in ten years, i.e. 2017. His prediction was based on the trends he was seeing at the time. But it wasn't even AI. Instead he made this prediction because he saw the rise of no-code tools replacing software developers because managers could finally cut out the pesky "translators", i.e. software developers. I said it then and I will say it n…

> So exact in fact that they will need to specify a program in a click and drag interface, or in human language. This. I started programming in Machine Code, where the "editor" was a pad of graph paper. I've watched management- and business-focused people sneer at us geeks for my entire career, and watched them drool over the thought of finally getting rid of us. Hasn't happened yet. > I'd be surprised if the next st…

To some level I agree - but at some point there is also much on the "business side" that cannot be easily dealt with. Like having connection or some kind of relation with people who will buy the stuff or would have people who would be interested in buying stuff you make.

Yes there are these "idea people" who don't have any clue about business side and don't have any clue about technical side and in the end don't even have the right connections or business network. But they think they can make it because they have an idea(TM). These could basically play lottery and outcome would be the same they might make it but chances are 1:1000000 at best.

Then there are these business people who have the right connections and have understanding of niche/business they are in .. that need technical help to execute their idea and these are worth their weight in gold.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#676

Post by the_only_law »

senbrow wrote: post #565
choppsv1 wrote: post #33

I love to code, as much as I loved math in college, but coding paid better and I'm pretty good at it. Those were my choices though b/c I want to do something I love. Sure, I keep my eye on the "Delivered Value" by making sure I engineer solutions to real problems, but I've never wanted to move out of coding and into managing engineers to build stuff. I want to code. It seems to me that the advice given here would be…

I ultimately decided to leave tech when I realized I didn't care much about delivering value and actually just wanted to write beautiful code. The former was a nice bonus for me, but the latter was profoundly captivating. I'd unfortunately tried to make that mismatch work for too long, and as a result I completely destroyed all of my programming interest via severe burnout. If this resonates with whoever reads this:…

Where did you go? I’ve wanted out for years. I recognized the mistake almost immediately after going professional, but I just don’t really see anything else that looks appealing without spending years of my life and a stupid amount of money “retraining” by going back to school.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#677

Post by ghaff »

gregjor wrote: post #660
ghaff wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Before Oracle (mid-80s) every company did write their own database code. Not really. There were a ton of ISVs competing with Oracle and pretty much every mainframe and minicomputer maker also had their own database products, many of them non-SQL.

Oracle was the first commercial RDBMS (1979), with an early version of SQL. At that time every mainframe and minicomputer company offered one or more “databases,” often little more than file managers with a library of utilities. ISAM was a popular model but that describes a lot of data management systems, not a product or standard. All commercial databases pre-Oracle were non-SQL. Watching that history get rediscover…

I was thinking Db2 might have been a little earlier but you're right. And it's fair that the earlier databases definitely lacked elements of what we'd consider a database management system today even if they handled a lot of the low-level database heavy lifting for companies.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#678

Post by lumb63 »

carapace wrote: post #607
linsomniac wrote: post #584

30 years ago I got tired of writing the same code over and over, so I went looking for something to cut out the repetition. Around a decade later I got tired of rewriting libraries or programs to make them exactly fit my needs. I used to really enjoy just coding for the sake of coding. But I started to value my time much more. I called this phase "losing my immortality". Any code that ChatGPT can write, I don't want…

This. It's pretty obvious that any software that can be written by machine should be. (It's almost tautological, eh?) Otherwise you're doing what David Graeber famously called "Bullshit Jobs": pointless work that only serves to establish your position in the economic structure. The immediate issues are: who decides the boundaries of (publicly) acceptable thought -and- who profits? I think you touch on the deeper and…

“Can answer” is doing a lot of work, too. I can write you a program that “can answer“ any question you throw at it. I can assure you the answer won’t be correct in most cases. This is a hyperbole for ChatGPT, but my point is that designing a system that can answer correctly, rather than can answer, is a far more worthwhile effort than retooling humans to be lie detectors, IMO.

We can see from how hard it is to find consensus on trivial topics (are eggs good for you?) amongst experts who study these matters day after day. And the public, who does not, is left confused. A great deal of the problems we face are too complex for the human mind to be able to decide which of several reasonable-sounding options is correct. This is especially true when there is no rationalization for answers given.

Look at our media system. How many people on both sides are stuck in “other side bad” simply because the talking heads on television networks tell them that, or someone on the internet wrote something. A lot of the content that drives them to conclusions isn’t even true. We are very poorly equipped to be vetting answers from a fallible machine.

Maybe I’m too old school, but I’d rather we learn how to solve the more complex problems so that we can do it and understand it rather than take guesses at which of a number of generated options is correct.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#679

Post by throwaway4aday »

ilaksh wrote: post #559
ricksunny wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"One of the biggest differences that we saw from GPT-3.5 to GPT-4 was this emergent ability to reason better," Mira Murati, OpenAI's Chief Technology Officer, told ABC News." https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/openai-ceo-sam-altman-ai-r... I neither know how LLMs work nor how our brains work. And I don't know what could be parallel between these two. For my very very limited knowledge of how properties can emerge from…

It's 100% doing reasoning.

A type of reasoning. It's still bad at mathematical reasoning and advanced programming or at least translating very complicated written instructions into working code without any human intervention. We also don't know how good it is at reasoning about the physical world although I think Microsoft was doing some research on that. Then there's theory of mind and the reasoning that goes along with it. Then there's reasoning about the future, how one's actions will affect outcomes and then reasoning about that subsequent future.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#680

Post by latency-guy2 »

awestroke wrote: post #440
bjornsing wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an engineering manager I’m usually more concerned with those engineers that tend to spend all their time fiddling with IDEs etc, so that they will some day (that never comes) be soooo productive.

If you were my manager I'd quit immediately, and I'm a top performer.

Don't worry, you're fired.
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