181–190 of 246 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess the idea that a programmer can create software that then runs on multiple computers would have blown their mind.
VisiCalc was published in 1979.
Lisp machines were also created in 1979, pushing the concept that using a computer is programing.
LLMs seem to be a significant step forward in converting language to code, but they don't seem to engage self-directed abstraction.
> The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts at Manned Flight
Anyone banking that this technology isn't going to decrease the demand for programmers, or that it's going to offset the lost jobs with new, related ones ("prompt engineer") are kidding themselves. And frankly, it's probably a good thing, at some level, in that there are far too many people in tech with no business being there. How many "developers" are effectively just gluing bits of JavaScript together and juggling NPM dependencies, all day? And how many of them can't even accomplish this feat without a steady supply of Adderall? Ironically, these people seem to be some of the most enthusiastic AI adopters, so it's in some ways fitting that they'll likely be the first to be made redundant.
I recently stumbled upon this delightfully titled book from 1982, "Application development without programmers": https://archive.org/details/applicationdevel00mart Which includes this excellent line: > Unfortunately, the winds of change are sometimes irreversible. The continuing drop in cost of computers has now passed the point at which computers have become cheaper than people. The number of programmers available p…
Despite all the astounding developments in AI/ML though, I still think there's still a critical need for the application of human/biological imagination and creativity. Sure the amount of leverage between thoughts and CPU cycles can be utterly giant now, but it doesn't seem to diminish the need (where performance or correctness/less-bugs are needed) for a full understanding of what the computer actually gets up to in the end.
For what it's worth, we do have an ML department at RSP and they are doing great! But I'm not sure we'd get very far if we tried to vibe-code the underlying pipeline, as it really requires full understanding of many interlocking pieces.
If you are a good engineer you can dictate data structures to it too. It then performs even better.
I believe the writing is on the wall a this point, it does a very adequate job if I invest enough time in writing and refining the specs and give it the data structures (&/| database schemas) I want it to use. And there is no comparison in the number of hours I spend wrangling it and the number of the hours it would take me to do the code myself.
This is the worst it's going to be and it's already quite good, it wasn't that good a mere three months ago.
The main pitfall is trying to get an LLM to read your mind, in doing so you are putting too much load on whatever passes for their intelligence quotient. That isn't how you get good results or get a good measure of their capabilities.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, people misuse this term "democratized" all the time. Because it sounds nice. But it's incorrect. Democracy is about governance, not access. A "democratized" LLM would be one in which its users collectively made decisions about how it was managed. Or if the companies that owned LLMs were ran democratically.
I've been wondering recently if there's some practical path forward for some sort of co-op based LLM training. Something which puts the power in the hands of the users somehow.
I find it so fundamentally unhinged that people think things will get fully automated to the point that humans no longer matter. We are centuries into the deep automation of certain things, like looms, but people with deep understanding of those things are still needed to guide the automation and keep it working to meet human needs. To ignore that pattern and say everything's going to be automated and humanity will b…
Fundamentally unhinged? How presumptive of you to declare with confidence AI will never become more capable than humans.
But I suppose it's fitting. If after all that has happened your priors still have not budged then I'm sorry to say you will probably never understand this.
> I should be extremely skeptical about excitable tech guys predicting big things in short time frames.
Edit: I read your other comment. I don't disagree with you here.