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AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

simonwillison.net

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Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

#511

Post by qwertygnu »

thatwasunusual wrote: post #359
grph123dot wrote: post #160

Yesterday I asked chatgpt to compute the probability that two words of five letters both began with the same three letters and it could not solve it. It gave me about 10 different results but all were wrong, it seems the number five mislead the algorithm. Another question was computing the variance of the sum of 60 dices but omitting the results where the sum was greater than 200, the reasoning was incorrect in all c…

> Yesterday I asked chatgpt to compute the probability that two words of five letters both began with the same three letters and it could not solve it. IMO, this is irrelevant, because "normal people" would never ask this question. Because it has never been asked, there's also not a ChatGPT answer to it, because its answers are based on already existing information. This thinking that ChatGPT is AI is just wrong. It'…

Are you serious? That's your gotcha? It's just doing some math over a dictionary, it doesn't matter the language or characters. So yes, a human can solve a novel problem.

Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

#512

Post by throwaway689236 »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #30

What I really love is the unbounded optimism of the AI. How many colleagues could you ask "Can you write me a PoC for a horizontally scalable, probabilistic database in Rust, using Raft-based consensus?" that would then just think for a second and go "Certainly! Let's start by ...". These people exist, but they're one in a thousand (or million?). ChatGPT basically does that for almost every prompt you throw at it. So…

I also like the fact that you can ask it as many stupid question as you like, it's not bothered or irritated by it as a real person would be.

Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

#513

Post by holbrad »

spookybones wrote: post #452

I’ve found that AI prompting has been nearly as time consuming as doing it myself from the get-go. This includes content writing and visual art. Maybe I’m an edge case. I’m not a skilled programmer. However, I’m a decent writer and painter. At most, it generates quick, solid, though generic ideas. Unfortunately, I have to do a lot of reverse engineering and curation to make any valuable changes. Try writing a tech ar…

I've certainly felt that the public version of ChatGPT isn't great at helping to write fiction.

Does anyone know if version 4 is any better in this regard?

Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

#514

Post by jengland »

grph123dot wrote: post #160

Yesterday I asked chatgpt to compute the probability that two words of five letters both began with the same three letters and it could not solve it. It gave me about 10 different results but all were wrong, it seems the number five mislead the algorithm. Another question was computing the variance of the sum of 60 dices but omitting the results where the sum was greater than 200, the reasoning was incorrect in all c…

I prompted GPT-4 with this and I think it solved it. The first time it assumed the words were generated with random letters and solved it like a math textbook problem. Then I prompted it with this:

Ok, I see you calculated the probably using randomly generated "words" from the letters of the English alphabet. I am interested in the actual probably of two real words in English that are 5 letters wrong share the first three characters.

I am a Python developer, so I will understand it if you give me a Python script.

I gave me this which looks right to me:

  import nltk
  from collections import defaultdict
  
  nltk.download('words')
  from nltk.corpus import words
  
  # Get the English words
  english_words = words.words()
  
  # Filter the words to get only five-letter words
  five_letter_words = [word for word in english_words if len(word) == 5]
  
  # Create a dictionary to store the count of words with the same first three letters
  words_dict = defaultdict(int)
  
  # Count the words with the same first three letters
  for word in five_letter_words:
      key = word[:3]
      words_dict[key] += 1
  
  # Calculate the number of pairs with the same first three letters
  same_first_three_letter_pairs = sum((count * (count - 1)) // 2 for count in words_dict.values())
  
  # Calculate the total number of pairs from the five-letter words list
  total_pairs = (len(five_letter_words) * (len(five_letter_words) - 1)) // 2
  
  # Calculate the probability
  probability = same_first_three_letter_pairs / total_pairs
  
  print(f"Probability: {probability:.4f} or {probability * 100:.2f}%")

Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

#515

Post by Sakos »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #388
eloff wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went with a mechanic in a chair lift once. He was very nervous, saying he knows the kind of people who maintain these things, and he knows the kinds of things that can go wrong. I feel the same way about automation, whether it be self driving cars or an X-ray machine. I know the kind of people that program them, and the vast number of ways things can go wrong.

I work in the medical device field. Funny you should say that because just yesterday I was looking at some really crappy (but still safe, mind you!) code and wondering how I'd feel if I were being wheeled into the OR, knowing "how the sausage is made."

Do we at least still use hardware interlocks? I hope we still use hardware interlocks.

Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

#516

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

Sakos wrote: post #515
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in the medical device field. Funny you should say that because just yesterday I was looking at some really crappy (but still safe, mind you!) code and wondering how I'd feel if I were being wheeled into the OR, knowing "how the sausage is made."

Do we at least still use hardware interlocks? I hope we still use hardware interlocks.

Hardware "interlocks" are used when the risk cannot be reduced to an acceptable level by software alone.

Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

#517

Post by BehindBlueEyes »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #167
ak_111 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are sort of ignoring the bias in your own AI extremist prediction. People who have decided to go all in in learning an interpreted language like Perl or even PHP, had to continuously also learn react, js, ruby,... and gazillions of other languages and frameworks to remain in business over the last two decades. While people who invested in learning C, Java or SQL have as much healthy opportunities to pursue today…

You don't need to kill a chasing bear to survive, you just need to run faster than your friend.

"You don't need to kill a chasing bear to survive, you just need to run faster than your friend."

Problem with this approach is you run out of friends quick. People in bear country cary bear spray, have dogs to scare off bears and electric fences to keep them out.

We have tools and culture to not have to deal with/rely on survival of the fittest if we don't let fear control us - whether at work or in nature.

Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

#518

Post by digging »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #456
digging wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree that there's a fallacy at play here. The GP (GGP) should support their bold claim that "times have changed" and "people/teams aren't the same as they used to be." If anything, that's an extremely common fallacy and is not to be believed without sufficient evidence.

Actually, that's a fairly typical thing to say to someone that's older, and has lived through those times. And I am sorry. Things definitely used to be better than they are now, in some ways, and definitely used to be worse, in other ways (for example, it used to be a very white, very male demographic). It's not my fault that things went the way they did. Folks liked money, so folks built a culture that maximized pro…

> I know what I know. I lived it.

I don't disbelieve you, but I'm saying your experience can't be generalized in that way. Only aggregate data can tell us these things. Your experience may well have followed the exact trajectory you've described, but maybe 90% of people see the opposite.

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