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ChatGPT Pulse

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181–190 of 766 posts

Re: ChatGPT Pulse

#181
"AI" is a $100B business, which idiot tech leaders who convinced themselves they were visionaries when interest rates were historically low have convinced themselves will save them from their stagnating growth.

It's really cool. The coding tools are neat, they can somewhat reliably write pain in the ass boilerplate and only slightly fuck it up. I don't think they have a place beyond that in a professional setting (nor do I think junior engineers should be allowed to use them--my productivity has been destroyed by having to review their 2000 line opuses of trash code) but it's so cool to be able to spin up a hobby project in some language I don't know like Swift or React and get to a point where I can learn the ins and outs of the ecosystem. ChatGPT can explain stuff to me that I can't find experts to talk to about.

That's the sum total of the product though, it's already complete and it does not need trillions of dollars of datacenter investment. But since NVIDIA is effectively taking all the fake hype money and taking it out of one pocket and putting it in another, maybe the whole Ponzi scheme will stay afloat for a while.

Re: ChatGPT Pulse

#182
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My personal productivity has skyrocketed in the last 12 months. Has your productivity objectively, measurably improved or does it just feel like it has improved? Recall the METR study which caught programmers self-reporting they were 20% faster with AI when they were actually 20% slower.

Not this again. That study had serious problems. But I’m not even going to argue about that. I want to raise something no one else seems to mention about AI in coding work. I do a lot of work now with AI that I used to code by hand, and if you told me I was 20% slower on average, I would say “that’s totally fine it’s still worth it” because the EFFORT level from my end feels so much less. It’s like, a robot vacuum mi…

Often someone’s personal productivity with AI means someone else have to dig through their piles of rubbish to review PR they committed.

In your particular case it sounds like you’re rapidly loosing your developer skills, and enjoy that now you have to put less effort and think less.

Re: ChatGPT Pulse

#183
post #82
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My personal productivity has skyrocketed in the last 12 months. Has your productivity objectively, measurably improved or does it just feel like it has improved? Recall the METR study which caught programmers self-reporting they were 20% faster with AI when they were actually 20% slower.

Objectively. I’m now tackling tasks I wouldn’t have even considered two or three years ago, but the biggest breakthrough has been overcoming procrastination. When AI handles over 50% of the work, there’s a 90% chance I’ll finish the entire task faster than it would normally take me just to get started on something new.

> I’m now tackling tasks I wouldn’t have even considered two or three years ago

Could you give some examples, and an indication of your level of experience in the domains?

The statement has a much different meaning if you were a junior developer 2 years ago versus a staff engineer.

Re: ChatGPT Pulse

#184

My pulse today is just a mediocre rehash of prior conversations I’ve had on the platform. I tried to ask GPT-5 pro the other day to just pick an ambitious project it wanted to work on, and I’d carry out whatever physical world tasks it needed me to, and all it did was just come up with project plans which were rehashes of my prior projects framed as its own. I’m rapidly losing interest in all of these tools. It feels…

> It feels like blockchain again in a lot of weird ways. Every time I keep seeing this brought up I wonder if people truly mean this or its just something people say but don't mean. AI is obviously different and extremely useful.. I mean it has convinced a butt load of people to pay for the subscription. Every one I know including the non technical ones use it and some of them pay for it, and it didn't even require a…

Obviously a lot of grifters and influencers shifted from NFTs to AI, but the comparison ends there. AI is being used by normal people and professionals every day. In comparison, the number of people who ever interacted with blockchain is basically zero. (And that's a lifetime vs daily comparison)

It's a lazy comparison, and most likely fueled by a generic aversion to "techbros".

Re: ChatGPT Pulse

#185
post #150
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m rapidly losing interest in all of these tools Same. It reminds me the 1984 event in which the computer itself famously “spoke” to the audience using its text-to-speech feature. Pretty amazing at that time, but nevertheless quite useless since then

It has proven very useful to a great number of people who, although they are a minority, have vastly benefited from TTS and other accessibility features.

I think it's easy to pick apart arguments out of context, but since the parent is comparing it to AI, I assume what they meant is that it hasn't turned out to be nearly as revolutionary for general-purpose computing as we thought.

Talking computers became an ubiquitous sci-fi trope. And in reality... even now, when we have nearly-flawless natural language processing, most people prefer to text LLMs than to talk to them.

Heck, we usually prefer texting to calling when interacting with other people.

Re: ChatGPT Pulse

#186
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My personal productivity has skyrocketed in the last 12 months. Has your productivity objectively, measurably improved or does it just feel like it has improved? Recall the METR study which caught programmers self-reporting they were 20% faster with AI when they were actually 20% slower.

If you want another data point, you can just look at my company github ( https://github.com/orgs/sibyllinesoft/repositories ). ~27 projects in the last 5 weeks, probably on the order of half a million lines of code, and multiple significant projects that are approaching ship readiness (I need to stop tuning algorithms and making stuff gorgeous and just fix installation/ensure cross platform is working, lol).

Sooo you launched https://sibylline.dev/, which looks like a bunch of AI slop, then spun up a bunch of GitHub repos, seeded them with more AI slop, and tout that you're shipping 500,000 lines of code?

I'll pass on this data point.

Re: ChatGPT Pulse

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>pick an ambitious project it wanted to work on The LLM does not have wants. It does not have preferences, and as such cannot "pick". Expecting it to have wants and preferences is "holding it wrong".

So are we near AGI or is it 'just' an LLM? Seems like no one is clear on what these things can and cannot do anymore because everyone is being gaslighted to keep the investment going.

Nobody knows how far scale goes. People have been calling the top of the S-curve for many years now, and the models keep getting better, and multimodal. In a few years, multimodal, long-term agentic models will be everywhere including in physical robots in various form factors.

Re: ChatGPT Pulse

#189
post #76
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m rapidly losing interest in all of these tools. It feels like blockchain again in a lot of weird ways. It doesn't feel like blockchain at all. Blockchain is probably the most useless technology ever invented (unless you're a criminal or an influencer who makes ungodly amounts of money off of suckers). AI is a powerful tool for those who are willing to put in the work. People who have the time, knowledge and crit…

> My personal productivity has skyrocketed in the last 12 months. Has your productivity objectively, measurably improved or does it just feel like it has improved? Recall the METR study which caught programmers self-reporting they were 20% faster with AI when they were actually 20% slower.

Yesterday is a good example- in 2 days, I completed what I expected to be a week’s worth of heads-down coding. I had to take a walk and make all new goals.

The right AI, good patterns in the codebase and 20 years of experience and it is wild how productive I can be.

Compare that to a few years ago, when at the end of the week, it was the opposite.

Re: ChatGPT Pulse

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>pick an ambitious project it wanted to work on The LLM does not have wants. It does not have preferences, and as such cannot "pick". Expecting it to have wants and preferences is "holding it wrong".

This comment is surprising. Of course it can have preferences and of course it can "pick".

preference generally has connotations of personhood / intellegence, so saying that a machine prefers something and has preferences is like saying that a shovel enjoys digging...

Obviously you can get probability distributions and in an economics sense of revealed preference say that because the model says that the next token it picks is .70 most likely...

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