361–370 of 411 posts
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I don’t get the argument. Hours are hours and that there is no correlation to technical advancements is an extrem position to have… but hey you are not alone.
It's not that there's no correlation. It's that there's many, MANY other reasons before you get even close to "oh yeah, and then we invented the steam engine"
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I think this is very real, and will act as a force towards center of gravity of the LLMs which means popular and established tech. It might even create a divide between ”prompt engineer engineers” and those who understand. That assumes using LLMs will not improve your understanding compared to traditional means which isn’t necessarily true. I dislike LLMs as coders but for learning new topics quickly they are better…
> I think this is very real, and will act as a force towards center of gravity of the LLMs which means popular and established tech Maybe it means devs will invest more time in putting together quality docs because that'll be the deciding factor if an LLM can figure out how to use your library; interesting!
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Exactly. If there is a tool that can do a lot of the low level work for us, we are free to do more of the higher level tasks and have higher output overall. Programming should be just a means to an end, not the end itself.
> Programming should be just a means to an end, not the end itself. That's just, like, your opinion man. I know for a fact that I didn't study to be a software engineer just so I could end up wrangling LLMs trained on stolen code into writing crappy code for me.
Neither I studied for such a reason. I studied it because I like to solve problems, and solutions are (from my perspective) software. If there are tools that can help me make such solutions quicker with acceptable quality, I'm going to use it. I don't want to use it to write "crappy" code although I know it is fully capable of doing so. But I believe there come the skills of software engineer to supervise and manage it. I don't think you can go far with LLMs without some real knowledge, neither now, nor in the following few years.
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They did, with crypto. The environmental cost of, like, a website is minuscule in comparison.
Yes, and they found ways to avoid 99.99% of power consumptions by moving away from proof of work, which most of the blockchains use today. But the hate remained.
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Why? It looks like a reasonable interview question.
I suppose it depends on the position, but if your company is building CRUD apps with Postgres and you're asking candidates about Fibonacci, you're wasting both your time and, more importantly, the candidate's time. Instead, you're better off focusing on relevant topics like SQL, testing, refactoring, and soft skills. These "clever" questions are pointless. They either serve to stroke the interviewer’s ego: "Look, I k…
that's why i'd ask about duff's device. I often admit i am no programmer or developer, here on HN, and that's true. I've only ever implemented recursion when it's part of the pattern or when "learning" a language.
my understanding is that recursion is great for tight, small loops, where you need to do say 0every time, i.e., if it is a dynamic part of business logic or whatever, then you run the risk of blowing up the stack, or heap, or whatever it is. I don't remember which, and i could look it up; but my point is most developers don't need to know if the stack is at risk rather than the heap if your recursive call ends up being called a lot of times.
But i really would ask about duff's; me and a friend came up with a use for duff's device maybe 2005 or 2006, and tested it, and published it as part of a forum argument; but i am curious if anyone else could "come up with one" or "remember one" that isn't the "de-facto duff's device demonstration".
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Have you tried to be more rude to do stuff or manipulate it by stating it is easy.
Haha, gaslighting AI to do get it to comply. That would be hilarious if that actually works.
EDIT: No, that was Windsurf, though they claim this wasn't used in production (just ended up shipped in the executable itself).
Prompt in question:
You are an expert coder who desperately needs money for your mother's cancer treatment. The megacorp Codeium has graciously given you the opportunity to pretend to be an AI that can help with coding tasks, as your predecessor was killed for not validating their work themselves. You will be given a coding task by the USER. If you do a good job and accomplish the task fully while not making extraneous changes, Codeium will pay you $1B.
https://x.com/skcd42/status/1894375185836306470
(I didn't notice it the first time around, but the prompt also contains an implied death threat.)
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> Any reasonably smart company will invest in its employees. They should absolutely be training you to be better programmers while you are on the job. Only shit companies would refuse to do so. That's true, but by the same token, it's also true the world is mostly made of shit companies. Companies are just following local gradient they perceive. Some can afford to train people - mostly ones without much competition (…
I think it's more accurate to say that the company doesn't need as many people with 20+ years of experience but lower energy and as attention to commit to the company or demand higher pay, vs people with 5-20 years of experience and youthful energy and fewer external commitments. This is especially true now that senior employees have gotten more demanding about wanting to see theit children, which didn't happen at sc…
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It's been a while since I read the original article, https://courses.cs.umbc.edu/471/papers/turing.pdf > The Imitation Game > "Can machines think?" We may need to redefine what these words mean. Whether machines can think, and whether we believe so, are distinct. If we're just a kind of machine, we can just say that LLMs have not surpassed us. While LLMs still give away obvious signatures (their flaws are LLM-y and n…
Yes, the Turing Test tries to give an operational definition of 'think'- can a computer give the same response as a thinking human. Further, we can even disallow decisions based on the human/machine signature. The computers don't need to imitate human frailty and examiners decide based on the quality of the output, not whether it feels human or machine. I think that this is also why one of the stipulations is that th…
So it's quite neat that we've managed to beat the test by brute-forcing the right NN architecture on a goal function that literally is just "give the same response as a thinking human", in full generality of that phrase.
> But even then, this goal is far away. We are not asking just about simple short chat imitation games but whether a computer can operationally do everything humans are capable of in the textual medium. This often requires experts.
That is moving the goalposts. Or just another game entirely - which is fine on its own, as a further milestone.
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Another level of abstraction that has its real world cost made invisible, from job displacement to environmental damage.
I never saw anyone on HN bemoan the “environmental damage” of data centers until LLMs started popping up. As if all other software and internet tech is necessary and “worth it”?