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A coder considers the waning days of the craft

newyorker.com

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Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#211

Post by k0k0 »

simonw wrote: post #181
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…

He didn't say he couldn't do it. He said that while he was getting into the task, Ben had already fixed it.

Somebody that has claimed 20 years of experience and doesn't at least know instantly (this doesn't require "thinking" about for minutes) that this is a one liner in the shell or a few lines of pick your poison script, Perl, Python, Ruby, who cares, even if they can't remember the specifics is not an expert in programming.

And I get it, there are highly specialized people that get very deep in the weeds in maybe HPC or embedded, even so most of them will at least still be aware, but moreover these people lack the knowledge to comment on programming or software engineering in the large, I wouldn't call them experts outside their limited domain if they really can't begin to know where to look to do a fucking permutation of a word list.

The old saying that for some 20 years of experience is 1 year and 19 repeats probably applies.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#212

Post by chrnola »

ahungry wrote: post #183
gavmor wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$ 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?

Bravo - for these simple things, typing in a GPT prompt or search query is more work than the command. Even things like "what flags to use with ffmpeg" are a shell reverse-history search away, assuming one has ever used them in the past.

That’s quite the assumption! You’d also have to know that your shell maintains a history and know how to search it. None of these things are obvious to those who do not already know them. We all had to learn at some point.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#213

Post by Izkata »

arp242 wrote: post #198
Izkata wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, when I read that I also tried the first thing that popped into my mind - extremely crude/slow but works in bash and only took like 20 seconds without looking anything up: cat /usr/share/dict/words | while read LINE; do echo "$RANDOM $LINE"; done | sort -h | head -n 100 | awk '{ print $2 }'

sort -R is fairly widely supported, although arguably that's cheating.

I thought something like that might exist and was tempted to check for that, but given the context I really wanted to do it without looking anything up. I see now there's also "shuf".

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#214

Post by alexmuro »

Dave_Rosenthal wrote: post #113
somewhereoutth wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chess is a closed problem. Whereas software development very much isn't. You will also have to provide a source for 'chess engines are so strong now that any human intervention just holds them back', a cursory search suggests this is by no means settled.

Yes, the rules of chess are simpler, which is why all this happened many years ago for chess. https://gwern.net/note/note#advanced-chess-obituary -- here is a reference about centuar/advanced chess. The source isn't perfect as the tournaments seem to have fizzled out 5-10 years ago as engines got better and it all became irrelevant. Sadly this means we don't have 100 games of GM+engine vs. engine in 2023 to truly set…

I think closed vs open problems are not simply different in magnitude of difficulty but qualitatively different. When I'm programming most of the interesting things I work on don't have a clear correct answer or even a way of telling why a particular set of choices don't get traction.

I guess it's possible that just being "smarter" might in some cases get a better solution from a seeies of text prompts but that seems too vague an argument to hold much water for me.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#215

Post by qbrass »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #180
jxy wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the point is that there are different levels of coders. For coders who can't write code that print a hundred random lines from a dictionary file, GPT-4 is already a significant threat. On the other hand, even if you can write it, does it mean you should write it? How much time does it cost you to write it? How much money your company is paying you in that amount of time? Is it more economical for GPT-4 to do…

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#216

Post by [deleted] »

half-kh-hacker wrote: post #167
silenced_trope wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

a whole script? surely it's just something like `find . -name '*.aiff' | parallel ffmpeg -i {} {}.mp3`

[deleted]

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#217

Post by arp242 »

djbusby wrote: post #171
gavmor wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$ 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?

You're missing that some folk haven't learned that yet - and that others have forgotten it. In 2013 I was using complex ffmpeg commands and using filters in there. Could remember the stuff easy. Now, I've gotta reference my ffmpeg notes more frequently. Where's that XKCD about using the tar command?

ffmpeg is kind of a special case; the CLI for that is far more complex than almost anything else I've ever seen.

tar xf for extract. Add v to show the files. tar cf to create. tar tf to "test" (list). Add -C dir at the end to extract to different directory. Set file to "-" for stdin.

That's all there's to it for 99% of use cases. I don't get how anyone can have difficulty with that: f for file, and x/c/t are pretty mnemonic.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#218

Post by 4death4 »

golergka wrote: post #108
ryandrake wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the real point. If the profits from AI (or robots) replacing Job X were distributed among the people who used to do Job X, I don't think anyone would mind. In fact it would be great for society! But that's not what's going to happen. The AI (and robots) will be owned by the Shrinking Few, all the profits and benefits will go to the owners, and the people who used to do Job X will have to re-skill to gamble on…

> If the profits from AI (or robots) replacing Job X were distributed among the people who used to do Job X, I don't think anyone would mind. Why on Earth would you expect something so unjust and unfair? Do you expect to pay a tax to former travel agents when you buy a plane ticket online? Do you pay to descendants of calculators (as in profession — the humans who did manual calculations) every time you use a modern…

What is just and what is fair? To quote George Costanza: "We're living in a society!"

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#219

Post by briHass »

c2occnw wrote: post #138
commandlinefan wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There’s so much of the world that would be better off if GOOD software was cheaper and easier to make. But… we’d need far, far fewer programmers. And programming was the last thing humans were supposed to be able to do to ear a living.

When we get to that point -- beyond a machine regurgitating reasonable facsimiles of code based on human examples, but actually designing and implementing novel systems from the ground up -- we'll need far, far fewer workers in general.

Exactly. Far before high-level software engineering is perfected by machines, a revolution will have already come for the vast majority of white-collar work. This includes all creative work as well, since software engineering has a large component of that also.

Coding is not uniquely vulnerable to AI, it just feels that way because initial AI products are targeted at technical audiences, and a large corpus of training data could be snagged with minimal legal burdens.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#220

Post by 998244353 »

golergka wrote: post #133
labster wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m pretty sure New Yorker writer is the first job that LLMs will replace.

Writers and musicians wont be replaced with AI because the authors persona is part of the product.

Poets and novelists maybe, but not many people pay particular attention to who exactly wrote a particular magazine article.
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