> Yesterday, I watched someone upload a video file to a chat app, ask a language model “Can you extract the first 5 s of the video?”, and then wait as the language model wrote a few lines of code and then actually executed that code, resulting in a downloadable video file. I missed this. Can someone show me what he is talking about?
Post-GPT Computing
111–120 of 504 posts
Re: Post-GPT Computing
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, and look at where YouTube is now. Millions of creators grinding for pennies while the lucky ones that got in early and made it rake in the profits. I think success in tech is going to become extremely pyramidal in the coming years. This is a huge shame, as this was one of the only fields out there where you could make a really good living without going to the "right" school for years and years and years.
Yes, but we are in a world of abundance. Most people carry around what would be in 1980 a 10 million dollar supercomputer in their pocket. 10 years from now we might have the equivalent of what today costs 10 million dollars today. Automated farming means what today we consider high end and expensive produce becomes almost free. Automated transportation means that food gets delivered to you for almost nothing. Imagin…
>Yes, but we are in a world of abundance. Most people carry around what would be in 1980 a 10 million dollar supercomputer in their pocket.
Most people also don't have $1000 for an emergency, live hand to mouth, and are dead scared of the cost and impact of a potential health issue. They are also overworked, underpaid, and with raising expenses, and sick of it, with depression levels skyrocketing. Having "a 10 million dollar supercomputer in their pocket" is not that comforting compared to that.
We've killed old style job security, cheap college education, affordable housing, the middle class and decent working class jobs, public infrastructure, and many other things (not to mention the environment), but in return we can have a rectangular gadget to access "all of the world's information in an instant" (which practically is just used to distract ourselves to death). Hurray!
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/more-americans-are-using-b...
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/19/56percent-of-americans-cant-...
Re: Post-GPT Computing
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital. You are overestimating the vast amount of "software engineers" in the world. The overwhelming majority of us are just programmers, we are just gluing together CRUD spaghetti in the random language we grew up with. We don't care too much about work or a career. And most of us don't want to do more, we want…
If your goal was to spend the rest of your life doing something you learn once and getting paid well for it you seriously picked the wrong industry. Engineers have been told to constantly learn new things, know multiple languages etc since the dawn of programming. I’ve worked with tons of programmers like you describe. I’ve continued to tell them that simple UIs and CRUd interfaces to dbs are solved problems we shoul…
> simple UIs and CRUd interfaces to dbs are solved problems
I can see how you might think that... until you start actually talking in depth with enough actual users and executives and trying to get them to agree on how all that stuff should work and what it should be capable of.
Most of the development process is about trying to wrangle abstract ideas about how business logic should be implemented/improved from flawed humans who aren't great at communicating those ideas. Your 'simple' CRUD app still often has to be highly customized by someone willing to do the difficult work of dealing with people. And that's before you even start getting into working with more regulated businesses.
Code monkeys/plumbers using 'outdated' tech who can deliver something that makes a workplace more efficient in the long run will continue to be in demand. There was enough functionality in software by the 1970s to handle the vast majority of business needs. Someone still has to understand those business needs (which ultimately have little to nothing to do with software) well enough to translate them into something that works. Whether it works for those who are using it is all that really matters.
Re: Post-GPT Computing
#114I don’t get the overall doom and gloom towards LLMs on the software field. If you are a software engineer, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital. In my opinion this technology will be as democratising as the YouTube’s early days. Instead of worrying, learn to work with it. It wil…
Not everyone is adept at becoming a solo founder
Re: Post-GPT Computing
#115I could just be rationalizing here, but I think AI will be illegal soon. The idea of banning AI to protect many well paid middle-class jobs will be a slam dunk for any politician.
There will be no Post-GPT computing world, just the Turing police and console cowgirls.
Re: Post-GPT Computing
#116What happens to social mobility in the post GPT world. Given that knowledge work (not just software) has been one big option for people to climb the social ladder. If the AI can reasonably do all knowledge work in future, the amount of social climbing opportunities will drastically decrease. And no, UBI will not create more opportunities for social mobility. It seems like more and more people will have to compete wit…
What does GPT know beyond what we have (directly or indirectly) taught it? Could it have figured out how to extract five seconds of video from an MPG file if that knowledge had not been made available to it? Would it have invented the MPG format (or something comparable) on its own? Would it have developed the web and HTTP protocol on top of TCP/IP?
And so on. Maybe the answer is in fact "yes", or even "yes, and it would have done these things even better than humans did". But so far it seems to be amazingly good at doing things that we showed it how to do.
If we stop creating actually new things, will it do that for us also?
Why would it care to do so? What interest does it have in creating new things on its own?
Re: Post-GPT Computing
#117I don’t get the overall doom and gloom towards LLMs on the software field. If you are a software engineer, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital. In my opinion this technology will be as democratising as the YouTube’s early days. Instead of worrying, learn to work with it. It wil…
> Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital. You are overestimating the vast amount of "software engineers" in the world. The overwhelming majority of us are just programmers, we are just gluing together CRUD spaghetti in the random language we grew up with. We don't care too much about work or a career. And most of us don't want to do more, we want…
As a "software engineer", it's frustrating to work with the people you describe: people who "don't care too much". I'm looking forward to the purge.
Re: Post-GPT Computing
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, and look at where YouTube is now. Millions of creators grinding for pennies while the lucky ones that got in early and made it rake in the profits. I think success in tech is going to become extremely pyramidal in the coming years. This is a huge shame, as this was one of the only fields out there where you could make a really good living without going to the "right" school for years and years and years.
Yes, but we are in a world of abundance. Most people carry around what would be in 1980 a 10 million dollar supercomputer in their pocket. 10 years from now we might have the equivalent of what today costs 10 million dollars today. Automated farming means what today we consider high end and expensive produce becomes almost free. Automated transportation means that food gets delivered to you for almost nothing. Imagin…
> Yes, but we are in a world of abundance.
We have an abundance of inessentials. Housing is still scarce and food is volatile. Health care and education are expensive. Many people are sleeping on the streets or falling into lifestyles of despair.
Progress has been applied unevenly and most critically not to the factors of life that form the base of Maslow’s hierarchy.
Re: Post-GPT Computing
#119I don’t get the overall doom and gloom towards LLMs on the software field. If you are a software engineer, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital. In my opinion this technology will be as democratising as the YouTube’s early days. Instead of worrying, learn to work with it. It wil…
> If you are a software engineer, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital. This 10x productivity absense of a 10x expansion of programming industry (which is very unlikely) translates to less developers in general, including senior ones. Even more so in an economy like this... > It…
[deleted]
Re: Post-GPT Computing
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, and look at where YouTube is now. Millions of creators grinding for pennies while the lucky ones that got in early and made it rake in the profits. I think success in tech is going to become extremely pyramidal in the coming years. This is a huge shame, as this was one of the only fields out there where you could make a really good living without going to the "right" school for years and years and years.
Yes, but we are in a world of abundance. Most people carry around what would be in 1980 a 10 million dollar supercomputer in their pocket. 10 years from now we might have the equivalent of what today costs 10 million dollars today. Automated farming means what today we consider high end and expensive produce becomes almost free. Automated transportation means that food gets delivered to you for almost nothing. Imagin…
The problem is, even with automation we are still burning up to 10 calories of petrochemical energy to get 1 calorie of food energy.
We are going through 2.5 earth's worth of non-renewable resources each year in order to maintain our current lifestyles --- this simply isn't sustainable.
Let's turn things around:
- under what circumstances should a person be allowed to use more than 1/7 billionth of the solar energy which the earth receives each day?
- under what circumstances is at acceptable for a person to create more heat than 1/7 billionth of what the planet is able to radiate out into space on a daily basis?