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Post-GPT Computing

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Re: Post-GPT Computing

#181

Post by komposit »

angarg12 wrote: post #158

Last week I used ChatGPT for the first time for a real world task at work. It was a self-contained lambda function to perform some admin tasks, so it seemed like an ideal fit. Although the experience was good, it's far from the end of programmers. This was my experience: * Although ChatGPT is pretty good at generating code, it kept making simple mistakes such as calling non-existing APIs or introducing bugs. Some of…

This skepticism absolutely baffles me. Have you been using gpt-4? To unlock gpt for real you have to be careful to prompt it correctly and find a way to improve the feedback loop for improving code. It is only a matter of time until tools arrive that integrate this into your development environment and give it access to test/console output such that it can suggest code and iterate over the result. It's not perfect yet, but I'm seriously feeling the nature of our work will change fundamentally over two years already.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#182

Post by crop_rotation »

angarg12 wrote: post #158

Last week I used ChatGPT for the first time for a real world task at work. It was a self-contained lambda function to perform some admin tasks, so it seemed like an ideal fit. Although the experience was good, it's far from the end of programmers. This was my experience: * Although ChatGPT is pretty good at generating code, it kept making simple mistakes such as calling non-existing APIs or introducing bugs. Some of…

For the sake of completeness, can you specify whether you used GPT4 or GPT3.5 ChatGPT. The difference is huge. I too was not too impressed by the default ChatGPT. But GPT4 is a huge improvement.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#183

Post by yoyohello13 »

raldi wrote: post #150
btbuildem wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From your comment: > I don’t get the overall doom and gloom towards LLMs on the software field. From the second line of your comment: > Now you don’t need to hire junior devs Do you need GPT to put the two together? I think it's pretty obvious why folks are freaking out.

Now junior devs don't have to build the product of someone else's dreams; they can build the product of their own dreams.

Not everyone wants to do that though. There is a lot of extra crap that being a business owner entails. Some people just want to put in their work time and focus on other things. This basically forces everybody devote their lives to entrepreneurship.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#184

Post by anonyfox »

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #173
anonyfox wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Focussing on the climbing is the core problem I think. Why even do this? We collectlively should own the machines and guarantee just wealth distribution, so that its impossible for a few to have much more than than others. Then every increase in machine work is a great thing for everyone, instead of increasing competition between fewer and fewer people. Europe in itself is (together) the single biggest market/economy…

Luddites failed the first time around. What could they do this time to succeed?

french revolution and socialist revolutions went different. its not preventing the machines, its strictly solving the problem of who owns them - fairly easy thing. It "only" needs to build up a bit more suffering for the masses until this naturally happens again.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#185

Post by olalonde »

freeone3000 wrote: post #162
olalonde wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt this third option exists. If the AI(s) lack empathy for us and we are useless to them, they will either exterminate us directly, or indirectly by denying us resources. If they have empathy for us, they will probably let us live good lives. I doubt we will be useful to them, so I doubt there is a scenario where we live miserable lives working for the AI(s).

It’s not the AIs who are in charge, it’s rich humans.

By super intelligent, I meant AIs that have a will of their own. In the meantime, AIs are just a tool at our disposition. And I don't see why those tools would just be in the hands of the rich, anymore than electricity, the Internet, the personal computer or the smartphone is.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#186

Post by green_man_lives »

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #173
anonyfox wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Focussing on the climbing is the core problem I think. Why even do this? We collectlively should own the machines and guarantee just wealth distribution, so that its impossible for a few to have much more than than others. Then every increase in machine work is a great thing for everyone, instead of increasing competition between fewer and fewer people. Europe in itself is (together) the single biggest market/economy…

Luddites failed the first time around. What could they do this time to succeed?

The first time around (and every subsequent time) the tools used for production, lets call them capital, made laborers more efficient and cheapened goods and drove wages up (mostly). In all of these cases there was still the need for a laborer.

At a point when all labor is obsolete there will be literally no method of survival for anyone who doesn't own the "compute capital". The two options will be to let everyone starve because they weren't lucky enough to shareholders in the company that owns all the bots, or just make that enterprise socially-owned and pay the unemployed workers.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#187

Post by tablespoon »

raldi wrote: post #177
tablespoon wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What are the barriers to a junior dev creating their own product? Are you seriously asking that question? What are the barriers to a junior dev writing the Linux kernel from scratch by themselves? What are the barriers from climbing from the bottom to the top of a ladder where the rungs are 20 feet apart? Sure, start at the top, then it's great. Very few start at the top.

Yes, I'm seriously asking. If a junior programmer wants to create a mobile app, or a desktop app, or a cloud service, what are the barriers? All the ones I can think of will get lower, not higher, as a result of the AI revolution. If I'm missing one, or a class of product with different barriers, I genuinely would like you to point that out.

> Yes, I'm seriously asking. If a junior programmer wants to create a mobile app, or a desktop app, or a cloud service, what are the barriers? All the ones I can think of will get lower, not higher, as a result of the AI revolution.

Seriously, think about it a bit, without being sanguine.

The junior dev is inexperienced, in everything, and now has no path to build up that experience. No one's going to want their 18/22 year old amateur-hour "chatgpt make me a cloud app" (which is in competition against millions of others). So unless they're extremely lucky, they goto fail.

Maybe after 10 years of those failures they could build up enough experience through trial-and-error to maybe see a little success with a "chatgpt make me a cloud app," but how are they going to feed themselves the meantime? Maybe that will work if they have rich parents, but otherwise they're probably going to have to use up their energy to scrape by. So another goto fail.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#188

Post by chordalkeyboard »

WillAdams wrote: post #129
olalonde wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure secretaries had similar thoughts about the arrival of personal computers. Yet, few would argue that computers have made the world a worse place. The truth is people will do less work, or it will feel like it. Most of our ancestors did not have the comfortable software jobs we have today. Life will become easier, products and services will become more abundant. Of course, the transition will be harder for tho…

Yes, but there aren't many secretaries working these days, and certainly the skill set has changed (though I'll never forget the company owner who was surprised when he was called out on promises made to women running a local college and couldn't understand how they could repeat his statements back to him verbatim along w/ the time/date of the phone call in question --- had to explain that they'd all come up through…

> The bottom line is, at some point in time, automation is going to reduce the amount of human work which needs to be done

Jevons paradox [0] proposes that as automation reduces the cost of labor then people will find new uses for automation, and this seems to be the historical trajectory. Hundreds of years since the industrial revolution and we still haven't run out of work to do (this could be better or worse given your philosophical premises).

> and render some folks unemployable

If automation truly causes more actually productive work to be done, then as a first-order effect there should be a surplus available to support these people without making anyone else (much) worse off. However as you observe the higher-order consequences of this are very much an open issue.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#189

Post by chipgap98 »

dudeinhawaii wrote: post #143
Jevon23 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don’t want my productivity to increase. Worst case scenario is that it gets SO good at writing code that software engineering teams are severely downsized or are made obsolete altogether, and I find myself out of a job. I’m not expecting UBI to start falling out of the sky any time soon, especially while there are still manual labor jobs that robots can’t do. Alternative scenario is that individual developer…

I think the rapid rate of change in modern software libraries has left me underwhelmed with ChatGPT when it comes to new libraries, C++, or niche APIs (financial, etc). If you're writing react/python/angular or something popular it seems to do amazing things and spit out entire websites (per demos). Unfortunately, when I try to put together C++, Rust, or even C# using recent libraries like Blazor it chokes up. I full…

But with the plugins they announced yesterday this should no longer be an issue. You'll be able to easily connect other APIs or data sources to OpenAI so that your model will write the code exactly the way you want.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#190

Post by anon7725 »

WillAdams wrote: post #123
anon7725 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Housing isn't scarce, it's not evenly allocated. Lots of properties being kept vacant so as to drive up rents/prop up property values, and it's difficult to get low-income housing built because of NIMBY.

“Cornering the market” results in real scarcity and the housing market has been permanently cornered.
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