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Don't you mean extinct?

fabiensanglard.net

121–130 of 145 posts

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#121

This analogy has layers that OP probably doesn't recognize. The film industry loves cgi because none of the digital vfx houses are unionized and they can treat the artists like crap. It severely devalued a ton of skilled labor around miniature and set design. Now, after 20 years of hard swing into cgi, people are starting to recognize just how much better movies from the practical era looked, and there is a push back…

> Project Hail Mary was predominantly practical effects Don't drink the Kool Aid. The studios love to make this sort of claim — recent examples include F1: The Movie, Top Gun: Maverick, and Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, and you'll see interviews where the main actors say it was all real — but it's just marketing. Project Hail Mary leans heavily on CG. For example, while they did hire a puppeteer (he ende…

The end credits to PHM had A LOT of people credited for graphics!

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#122
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I'm using my local working brain to work on other things. If I'm thinking about my family or making dinner I'm not thinking about the code I need to write. Or the email that needs to get sent, or setting up an eye doctors appointment. I'd pay for something to deal with that.

Do you frequently think of the code you are needing to write when you are thinking about your family or making dinner?

I find inspiration often strikes while taking a shower or after a good sleep.

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No but it lets you iterate faster. Who hasn't come up wit the most perfect elegant design, only to come up against three reality of implement and an "oh we forgot about that" aspect. Except by then, it's too late to change, so you march on. Writing code faster lets you find the things you didn't think of faster so then you get to design it again but better this time.

That sort of trial and error design seems like a really unprofessional way of working.

The waterfall method of software development is well studied and while agile is no panacea, there's a reason the industry has moved away from multi-year waterfall development practices.

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#124
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are statistical prediction machines, they're always going to produce the most "average" code because they reproduce what they're trained on. Average code is bad , and it's going to get a lot worse as people's skills degrade and the training set degrades. If the code isn't readable to humans, there's no particular reason to think it's going to be magically readable by LLMs either.

Until this year, you would have been right, but in May, the Erdős unit-distance conjecture was disproven by an AI. This required novel thought and reasoning, not just recombining already known facts. The view that they are only statistical prediction machines is becoming increasingly disconnected from their current abilities. I probably should have put the word 'easily' before readable. After all, if it is valid code…

None of that changes that it's a statistical prediction machine. This isn't me speculating, it's just literally what it is. You can buy a book on how to implement one (I have one!) The fact that it solved a math problem doesn't change that, it just means it was trained on enough math to be able to apply a known technique. These things aren't magic.

Also, I'm really suspicious of any result that comes from OpenAI. AFAIK frontier labs hire people to solve problems for the AI to train the AI, not to mention it scraping the internet. I think it's easily possible that a human might have already provided a 90% of the solution and AI filled in the gaps. I don't know that for sure, but I do not trust these companies published results at all. I'm only interested in 3rd party independent results.

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#125
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you frequently think of the code you are needing to write when you are thinking about your family or making dinner?

I find inspiration often strikes while taking a shower or after a good sleep.

It stopped striking like that when you let agents write the code? You don’t think about what agents you can direct while taking a shower or making dinner?

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#126
The #1 rule when using AI (IMHO) is simple: don't outsource your thinking.

Use AI to brainstorm, implement features, learn new things, improve your writing, or speed up repetitive work.

Just make sure you keep thinking while doing so!

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#127
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find inspiration often strikes while taking a shower or after a good sleep.

It stopped striking like that when you let agents write the code? You don’t think about what agents you can direct while taking a shower or making dinner?

I wish I could stop thinking when I wanted to. The problem is my working memory is very full and being able to hand some of that off, to a paper notebook or a todo app on my phone, or an agent, is valuable.

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#128
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think for some people, it's partly that they think that, unlike physical work, work that involves thinking is somehow special, and humans are the only beings capable of it. In the 40s, the argument was that computers will never think because they are made of matter, Turing rebutted this by saying that brains are made of matter and introduced The Turing Test, which was then replied to by Searle with his famous 'Chin…

Yes, also the whole motivated reasoning part, where people are quite reasonably terrified of losing their jobs and having no income and so deny the possibility. I think we tend to downplay the potential positives though. We may come to a point where we look back at the concept of work and see it as some kind of indentured servitude; the idea that you have to spent the majority of your waking hours serving someone els…

Such a utopian future is unlikely to materialize however. The salary that one gets paid is backed by the generated (and perceived) value of the work they did, and if people do not have anything to offer in form of labor, then it will create pressures to reduce any UBI style wages paid out, as well as provoke internal conflict as people try to come up with justifications for why they should have a larger share of said basic wages, etc.

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#129
The article conflates general use of LLMs with LLMs for programming and is a worse article for this reason.

As an example, I already heavily leverage LLMs to ask questions about unknown codebases and concepts, and even some debugging, for which it is immensely useful. However, given the AI messianism inherent in some companies, I fear that management’s impression is that millions of LOCs will get written in days, and I’m not ready just yet to abdicate my personal responsibilities in meeting business and performance requirements.

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sort of trial and error design seems like a really unprofessional way of working.

The waterfall method of software development is well studied and while agile is no panacea, there's a reason the industry has moved away from multi-year waterfall development practices.

Agile is in now way incompatible with measuring before you cut.
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