111–120 of 475 posts
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I read one characterization which is that LLMs don't give new information (except to the user learning) but they reorganize old information.
That’s only true if you tokenize words rather than characters. Character tokenization generates new content outside the training vocabulary.
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> Solving problems for real people. Isn't the answer here kind of obvious? Look at the majority of the tech sector for the last ten years or so and tell me this answer again. Like I guess this is kind of true, if "problems for real people" equals "compensating for inefficiencies in our system for people with money" and "solutions" equals "making a poor person do it for them and paying them as little as legally possib…
Those of us who write software professionally are literally in a field premised on automating other people's jobs away. There is no profession with less claim to the moral high ground of worker rights than ours.
"Yes, yes... Satellites stay in orbit for a while. What about it?"
"Looks a bit cramped in there."
"Stop complaining, at least it's a real job, now get in, we're about to launch."
There's nothing stopping you from coding if you enjoy it. It's not like they have taken away your keyboard. I have found that AI frees me up to focus on the parts of coding I'm actually interested in, which is maybe 5-10% of the project. The rest is boiler plate, cargo-culted, Dockerfile, build system and bash environment variable passing circle of hell that I really could care less about. I care about certain things…
Even more so, I remember making a Chrome extension and feeling intimidated. I knew that I'd be comfortable with most of it given that JS is used but I just didn't know how to start.
With an LLM it is way faster to spin up some default config and get going versus reading a tutorial. What I've noticed in that respect is that I just read what it does and then immediately reason why it's there. "Oh, there's a manifest.json file with permissions and a few other things, fair, makes sense. Oh, so you have the HTML/CSS/JS of the extension, you have the HTML/CSS/JS of the page you're injecting some code into and you have the JS of a background worker. Ah yea, I get that."
And then I just get immediately on coding.
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Those of us who write software professionally are literally in a field premised on automating other people's jobs away. There is no profession with less claim to the moral high ground of worker rights than ours.
I often think about the savage job-destroying nature of the open source community: hundreds of thousands of developers working tirelessly to unemploy as many of their peers as possible by giving away the code they've written for free. (Interesting how people talk about AI destroying programming jobs all the time, but rarely mention the impact of billions of dollars of code being given away.)
Open source software is not just different in the license, it’s different in the design
Linux also doesn’t take jobs away - the majority of contributors are paid by companies, afaik
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Not even close, those were all deterministic, this is probabilistic.
The output of the LLM is probabilistic. The code you actually commit or merge is not.
The output of the LLM is determined by the weights (parameters of the artificial neural network) estimated in the training as well as a pseudo-random number generator (unless its influence, called "temperature", is set to 0).
That means LLMs behave as "processes" rather than algorithms, unlike any code that may be generated from them, which is algorithmic (unless instrcuted otherwise; you could also tell an LLM to generate an LLM).
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I often think about the savage job-destroying nature of the open source community: hundreds of thousands of developers working tirelessly to unemploy as many of their peers as possible by giving away the code they've written for free. (Interesting how people talk about AI destroying programming jobs all the time, but rarely mention the impact of billions of dollars of code being given away.)
Would vim or python be created by a company? It’s hard to see how they take jobs away Open source software is not just different in the license, it’s different in the design Linux also doesn’t take jobs away - the majority of contributors are paid by companies, afaik
There's nothing stopping you from coding if you enjoy it. It's not like they have taken away your keyboard. I have found that AI frees me up to focus on the parts of coding I'm actually interested in, which is maybe 5-10% of the project. The rest is boiler plate, cargo-culted, Dockerfile, build system and bash environment variable passing circle of hell that I really could care less about. I care about certain things…
> The rest is boiler plate, cargo-culted, Dockerfile, build system and bash environment variable passing circle of hell that I really could care less about. Even more so, I remember making a Chrome extension and feeling intimidated. I knew that I'd be comfortable with most of it given that JS is used but I just didn't know how to start. With an LLM it is way faster to spin up some default config and get going versus…
How if it hallucinate and gives you wrong code and explanation? It is better to read documentations and tutorials first.
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> Solving problems for real people. Isn't the answer here kind of obvious? No. There are a thousand other ways of solving problems for real people, so that doesn't explain why some choose software development as their preferred method. Presumably, the reason for choosing software development as the method of solving problems for people is because software development itself brings joy. Different people find joy in di…
> That would pretty much be a life crisis, as I'd have to find and train for something else. There's inertia in the industry. It's not like what you're describing could happen in the blink of an eye. You may well be at the end of your career when this prophecy is fulfilled, if it ever comes true. I sure will be at the end of mine and I'll probably work for at least another 20 years.
And what happened? Programmers make the queries and embed them into code that creates dashboards that managers look at. Or managers ask analysts who have to interpret the dashboards for them... It rather created a need for more programmers.
Compare embedded SQL with prompts - SQL queries compared to assembler or FORTRAN code is closer to English prose for sure. Did it take some fun away? Perhaps, if manually traversing a network database is fun to anyone, instead of declaratively specifying what set of data to retrieve. But it sure gave new fun to people who wanted to see results faster (let's call them "designers" rather than "coders"), and it made programming more elegant due to the declarativity of SQL queries (although that is cancelled out again by the ugliness of mixing two languages in the code).
Maybe the question is: Does LLM-based coding enable a new kind of higher level "design flow" to replace "coding flow"? (Maybe it will make a slightly different group of people happy?)
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> So it's unfair to say they don't exist. Rather, it seems they're structured in an unhelpful way for those who are working double jobs, etc. I'll be sure to alert the next person I encounter working UberEats for slave wages that the resources exist that they cannot use. I'm sure this difference will impact their lives greatly. Edit: My point isn't that UberEats drivers make slave wages (though they do): My point is…
Slave wages? Like the wages for a factory worker in 1918[1]? $1300 after adjusting for inflation. And that was gruelling work from dawn to dusk, being locked into a building, and nickel and dimed by factory managers. (See the triangle shirtwaist factory). The average Uber wage is $20/hour[2]. Say they use 2 gallons of gas (60 mph at 30 mpg) at $5/gallon. That comes out to $10/hour, which is not great, but they're not…
I think they were using “slave wages” as a non-literal relative term to the era.
As you did.
A hundred years before your example, the “slave wages” were actually slave wages.
I think it’s fair to say a lot of gig workers, especially those with families, are having a very difficult time economically.
I expect gig jobs lower unemployment substantially, due to being convenient and easy to get, and potentially flexible with hours, but they lower average employment compensation.
There's nothing stopping you from coding if you enjoy it. It's not like they have taken away your keyboard. I have found that AI frees me up to focus on the parts of coding I'm actually interested in, which is maybe 5-10% of the project. The rest is boiler plate, cargo-culted, Dockerfile, build system and bash environment variable passing circle of hell that I really could care less about. I care about certain things…
They perhaps haven’t taken away your keyboard but anecdotally, a few friends work at places where their boss is requiring them to use the LLMs. So you may not have to code with them but some people are starting to be chained to them.