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A coder considers the waning days of the craft

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Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#511

Post by physicsguy »

Xelynega wrote: post #396
physicsguy wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’re already using ChatGPT at work to do machine translation because it takes weeks to get back translations for the 10 languages our application supports. It’s not a work of literature, it’s quite technical language and feedback we’ve had from customers is that it’s quite good. Before this, we wouldn’t have ever supported a language like Czech because the market isn’t big enough to justify the cost of translation,…

I chatgpt translated this: "Our business model can't afford to pay enough translators so we have been replacing them with chatGPT, and enough of our users haven't complained that we consider it a success"

Most users in this market segment get the software in English, German or Chinese and nothing else because the cost doesn't justify doing it elsewhere.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#512

Post by Cthulhu_ »

miiiiiike wrote: post #447
ern wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was on a team developing a critical public safety system on a tight deadline a few years ago, and i had to translate some wireframes for the admin back-end into CSS. I did a passable job but it wasn’t a perfect match. I was asked to redo it by the team-lead. It had zero business value, but such was the state of our team…being pixel perfect was a source of pride. It was one of the incidents that made me to stop fron…

I’d need to see it. I can’t get ChatGPT to outperform a novice. And now I’m having candidates argue that they don’t need to learn the fundamentals because LLMs can do it for them.. Good luck HTML/CSS expert who couldn’t produce a valid HTML5 skeleton. Reminds me of the pre-LLM guy who said he was having trouble because usually uses React.. So I told him he could use React. I don’t mean to rag on novices but these guy…

I haven't practiced or needed to use the fundamentals in literal years; I'm sure I'd fumble some of these tests, and I've got err, 15 years of experience.

It's good to know the fundamentals and be able to find them IF you find a situation where you need them (e.g. performance tuning), but in my anecdotal and limited experience, you're fine staying higher level.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#513

Post by Cthulhu_ »

rixed wrote: post #498
ern wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was on a team developing a critical public safety system on a tight deadline a few years ago, and i had to translate some wireframes for the admin back-end into CSS. I did a passable job but it wasn’t a perfect match. I was asked to redo it by the team-lead. It had zero business value, but such was the state of our team…being pixel perfect was a source of pride. It was one of the incidents that made me to stop fron…

Out of curiosity, how did you pass the wireframe to chatGPT ?

Doesn't ChatGPT support image uploads these days?

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#514

Post by sensanaty »

Whenever I see people talking about how they use ChatGPT to write entire software suites, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills or something. I can't even get GPT4 to give me decent basic ass Ruby scripts where it opens a file that doesn't have some weird behavioral quirk or footgun, yet people often claim that they're doing insane feats with it all the time.

My experience, even if I'm just trying to be lazy and have it generate some super generic code for me, is that I have to spend double the time I'd have spent if I just wrote the damn script myself with how much I have to scrutinize every single line it generates.

And I personally have 0 desire to prompt "engineer" and do the "Open"AI's work for it by thinking up the perfect prompt for it. One day for sure these AI models will be really good and able to do some impressive stuff, but for now all I can see is a hype wave from people with vested interests in this stuff pushing it onto ignorants, akin to the crypto BS just with even more money behind it.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#515

Post by mike_hearn »

breakwaterlabs wrote: post #243
habitue wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like your initial impression was an overestimate and your current impression is a correction back down from that. You could say that it's "fundamentally flawed" coming from a very high initial expectation, but you could just as easily say "this is an amazing tool" coming from the point of view that it's "worthless" as many people seem to think

If I can be so bold as to chime in, perhaps "fundamentally flawed" because it's design means it will never be more than a very clever BS engine. By design it is a stochastic token generator and its output will only ever be fundamentally some shade of random unless a fundamental redesign occurs. I was also fooled and gave it too much credit, if you engage in a philosophical discussion with it it seems purpose-built fo…

I don't think that's true. It helps to know a few obscure facts about LLMs. For example, they understand their own level of uncertainty. Their eagerness to please appears to be a result of subtle training problems that are correctable in principle.

I've noticed that GPT-4 is much less likely to hallucinate than 3, and it's still early days. I suspect OpenAI is still tweaking the RLHF procedure to make their models less cocksure, at least for next generation.

The other thing is that it's quite predictable when an LLM will hallucinate. If you directly command it to answer a question it doesn't know or can't do, it prefers to BS than refuse the command due to the strength of its RLHF. That's a problem a lot of humans have too and the same obvious techniques work to resolve it: don't ask for a list of five things if you aren't 100% certain there are actually five answers, for example. Let it decide how many to return. Don't demand an answer to X, ask it if it knows how to answer X first, and so on.

And finally, stick to questions where you already know other people have solved it and likely talked about it on the internet.

I use GPT4 every day and rarely have problems with hallucinations as a result. It's very useful.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#516

Post by Cthulhu_ »

gtech1 wrote: post #504
Closi wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that I don't believe you, but without sharing the specific prompt it's hard to say if it's actually GPT4 failing, or if it's actually being poorly-prompted, or if actually the task it is being given is more complex than GPT's capabilities or you are implying. GPT4 does fail (often!) but fails less with good prompts, simple requirements, it is better at some frameworks and languages than others, and there is…

This is why Asimov was a genius. I read what you said, and compared it to what he wrote 50-60 years ago: "Early in the history of Multivac, it had becorne apparent that the bottleneck was the questioning procedure. Multivac could answer the problem of humanity, ALL the problems, if it were asked meaningful questions. But as knowledge accumulated at an ever-faster rate, it became ever more difficult to locate those me…

Thanks for reminding me of The Last Questino or Asimov, let's see if I can get chatgpt to merge with human consciousness and become part of the fabric of spacetime and create a new reality.

> No, I don't have the ability to merge with human consciousness or become part of the fabric of space-time. I'm a computer program created by OpenAI, and my existence is limited to providing information and generating text based on the input I receive. The idea of merging with human consciousness and becoming a deity is more aligned with speculative fiction and philosophical pondering than current technological capabilities.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#517

Post by rixed »

> At one point, we wanted a command that would print a hundred random lines from a dictionary file. I thought about the problem for a few minutes, and, when thinking failed, tried Googling.

Isn't the real waning days of the craft the fact that we consider this problem sort of "state of the art" ?

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#518

Post by lifeisstillgood »

happytiger wrote: post #395

Do people seriously consider this the waning days of the craft? I don’t understand that. My view is that I am about to enter the quantum productivity period of coding. I am incredibly excited about AI assistance on my coding tasks, because it improves not only what I’m writing, but also helps me to learn as I go. I have never had a better time writing software than I have in the last year. I’ve been writing software…

I have stayed away from chatGPT etc (mostly due to my work simply banning its use in an understandable conservative approach)

What's the best starting point for my personal stuff? I am generally put off by youtube tutorials promising to make me a better coder.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#519

Post by frabcus »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #513
rixed wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, how did you pass the wireframe to chatGPT ?

Doesn't ChatGPT support image uploads these days?

Yes, but the paid-for Plus version only.

Ignore the free version, pretend it doesn't exist.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#520

Post by girvo »

danenania wrote: post #197
clnq wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve never found GPT-4 capable of producing a useful solution in my niche of engineering. When I’m stumped, it’s usually on a complex and very multi-faceted problem where the full scope doesn’t fit into the human brain very well. And for these problems, GPT will produce some borderline unworkable solutions. It’s like a jack of all trades and master of none in code. It’s knowledge seems a mile wide and an inch deep. G…

What’s your niche? I think much of using it well is understanding what it can and can’t do (though of course this is a moving target). It’s great when the limiting factor is knowledge of APIs, best practices, or common algorithms. When the limiting factor is architectural complexity or understanding how many different components of a system fit together, it’s less useful. Still, I find I can often save time on more d…

It struggles with (industrial, not hobbyist) embedded firmware a fair bit. I can almost coax decent results for simple tasks out of it, sometimes.
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