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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

#151

Post by Uptrenda »

dang wrote: post #120
Uptrenda wrote: post #5

>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 Wow, this guys working on rocket science, everyone. Watch out! We might get replaced!

" Don't be snarky. " " Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: you've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines a ton lately (examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38215766 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38215679 https://news.ycombinator.c…

[flagged]

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#152

Post by gavmor »

gymbeaux wrote: post #134
hiddencost wrote: post #130

> 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. I made some false starts using what I could gather, and while I did my thing—programming—Ben told GPT-4 what he wanted and got code that ran perfectly. I mean ... IDK, if you can't write that on your own without research, I don't…

Yeah it’s not a challenging problem, but the specific code example isn’t the point. Replace his example with “at one point, we wanted a command that would convert a PNG to a JPG….” most of us couldn’t do that without Google.

$ cat /usr/share/dict/words | shuf | head -n 10

$ convert foo.png foo.jpg

Took me almost literally two seconds to come up with that, unless your point is that at one point I had to learn it which, yeah, sure. What am I missing?

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#153

Post by coliveira »

hiddencost wrote: post #130

> 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. I made some false starts using what I could gather, and while I did my thing—programming—Ben told GPT-4 what he wanted and got code that ran perfectly. I mean ... IDK, if you can't write that on your own without research, I don't…

The problem is not that I don't know the algorithm... the problem is that to implement the algorithm you need to remember what method from what class does the thing you want to do. And knowing that is very difficult, even for seemingly simple problems. That's why Google is the way to program modern programming languages. (Of course I could do the same task without any libraries, but in that case it would be considered bad by most modern programmers, because it would be a sign that I "don't know how to use the language properly"...)

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#154

Post by Affric »

jpatt wrote: post #126
waldohatesyou wrote: post #33

I feel like the headline does not match the article here. The headline implies that programming as a craft is to be replaced but the article ultimately argues that it will change significantly which matches my intuition as well. At the end of the day, the bar is being lowered. Is that a bad thing? From a selfish perspective, yes. From a societal perspective, no. At the risk of digressing, I think one of the issues th…

I don't really think law, medicine, and software engineering are the main drivers of wage inequality, though. If the lowest wage was minimum wage and the highest wage was a programmer salary, the Americas would be a very equitable economy. Automating America's remaining paths to the middle class will only serve to widen the gap between capital owners who will own infrastructure for automation and those shoved into a…

The comment you’re replying to is making that point: that people who earn a decent wage from the knowledge economy are threatened by AI and oppose it because of their interest in the current system’s inequality.

It follows that if it is unjust for those who are knowledge workers then it is unjust for those who are service workers (unless you can morally differentiate them).

Perhaps if inequality is wrong then it’s the system that creates inequality that should be looked at rather than preserving rent seeking by knowledge workers refusing to compete with AI while perpetuating inequality on those who aren’t powerful in the current economy?

Food for thought.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#155

Post by gavmor »

tingletech wrote: post #146
gymbeaux wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it’s not a challenging problem, but the specific code example isn’t the point. Replace his example with “at one point, we wanted a command that would convert a PNG to a JPG….” most of us couldn’t do that without Google.

why not use `shuf` from GNU core utils for the random and `convert` from ImageMagic for the png to jpg?

Why not, indeed? There must be a deeper point these people are trying to make. ImageMagick is not obscure, is it?

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#156

Post by [deleted] »

gymbeaux wrote: post #134
hiddencost wrote: post #130

> 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. I made some false starts using what I could gather, and while I did my thing—programming—Ben told GPT-4 what he wanted and got code that ran perfectly. I mean ... IDK, if you can't write that on your own without research, I don't…

Yeah it’s not a challenging problem, but the specific code example isn’t the point. Replace his example with “at one point, we wanted a command that would convert a PNG to a JPG….” most of us couldn’t do that without Google.

[deleted]

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#157

Post by cjbgkagh »

al_borland wrote: post #131
fisherjeff wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, I think we are quite a ways out from a tool being able to devise a solution to a complex high-level problem without online precedent, which is where I find the most satisfaction anyway. LLMs in particular can be a very fast, surprisingly decent (but, as you mention, very fallible) replacement for Stack Overflow, and, as such, a very good complement to a programmer's skills – seems to me like a net positive at l…

It's also where I find most of the work. There are plenty of off the shelf tools to solve all the needs of the company I work at. However, we still end up making a lot of our own stuff, because we want something that the off the shelf option doesn't do, or it can't scale to the level we need. Other times we buy two tools that can't talk to each other and need to write something to make them talk. I often hear people…

It’s not just about if a LLM could replace you, if a LLM replaces other enough other programmers it’ll tank the market price for your skills.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#158

Post by empyrrhicist »

silenced_trope wrote: post #141
hiddencost wrote: post #130

> 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. I made some false starts using what I could gather, and while I did my thing—programming—Ben told GPT-4 what he wanted and got code that ran perfectly. I mean ... IDK, if you can't write that on your own without research, I don't…

I'm the opposite. I feel like it is true. I very much will NO LONGER THINK about "simple" problems. My most recent thing is for a game I'm working on. I got a bunch of free sound FX from freesound.org, but they were AIFF format. I googled and found an online converter, then asked ChatGPT to use ffmpeg to write a script that goes through the directory converting the AIFFs to MP3s. In the past if I would have written s…

> use ffmpeg

Well there's your problem. Such a powerful tool, but that CLI is something else.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#160

Post by rrauenza »

hiddencost wrote: post #130

> 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. I made some false starts using what I could gather, and while I did my thing—programming—Ben told GPT-4 what he wanted and got code that ran perfectly. I mean ... IDK, if you can't write that on your own without research, I don't…

Does chatgpt know the reservoir sampling method?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservoir_sampling

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