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In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

cyberdemon.org

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Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#41

Post by gwoolhurme »

fauxpause_ wrote: post #15
JohnFen wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> while there are undoubtedly experts in this domain whose contributions are indispensable, the majority of programmers can comfortably rely on higher-level abstractions without delving into the complexities of Assembly. True. You don't need to be an assembly expert to be a great programmer, but I do think you need to have a solid understanding of how computers work all the way down to the CPU level in order to be a…

I don’t know anything about assembly and I can’t say I’ve ever thought about it.

You’ve never learned about it in university? It’s still a semi important concept to learn how a compiler is kind of rewriting your code and optimizing things. In rare occasions it can mess things up when you use optimization options. Even in rare iOS and Android development cases and LLVM. Not exactly assembly but similar logic. I think that goes to the original point, if you are just trying to make something? Sure JavaScript is enough, but I don’t think that’s a good mindset to have if you are trying to be an expert in computing/computer science.

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#42

Post by p1necone »

ducktective wrote: post #38

I asked GPT-4 for the Imagemagick command to make the white parts of an image, semi-transparent. It generated a command that made the fuzzy white parts [+1 on fuzzy] fully transparent [bad]. I told it that the result is not semi-transparent. It apologized and gave me another command that produced a blank image. In another case a grayish image. I told it this is not what I wanted, and it just looped here saying I'm so…

> Aside from the possibility of "emerging intelligence", I don't think this is the way to the AGI.

My intuition is that this is the only way to create AGI. I don't think anyone is ever going to carefully intentionally construct an AGI, it's almost certainly going to emerge from something conceptually fairly simple.

I don't think it's impossible that our own brains are also basically just a big statistical prediction model too. Maybe AGI just requires our models to be 10/100/1000x as good. Or our training data needs to be broader in a qualitative way rather than a quantitative way that we haven't quite worked out yet.

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#43

Post by mrbombastic »

waboremo wrote: post #14

In a way, people who are concerned about skills atrophying are repeating the cycle of previous generations, shaking their fist at higher level programming languages or drawing digital images. How dare you not keep the skills of those who came before you! Time will not be so kind to this view. Some skills will atrophy, as article mentions we don't really care about road navigation anymore. But this is not a bad thing,…

Its not a bad thing until its a bad thing. There are certainly computer related tasks I am happy to relegate to AI, my concern is that we are already bad at maintaining software made by humans. If old school software engineering becomes an arcane art as everyone becomes prompt engineers and software starts to explode in complexity we better hope AI learns to maintain it too.

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#44

Post by whatshisface »

aiappreciator wrote: post #39
CuriouslyC wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prompt engineer won't go away, it'll get more "engineer"-like. Knowing how to describe a point in a model's latent space for the generation you want is here to stay, but the black magic and art aspect of it will go away. For example, in stable diffusion land, lots of people have intuition about the relationship between certain prompts and the output they produce. That intuition is embedding and training data specific…

Prompt engineering is merely the entry-drug to AI-wrangling. SD has gotten to the point that someone can fine tune a model (LORAs) with 2 days of time and $2 of GPU time. There'll be roles for AI wranglers in every large company, where you'll be gathering the dataset and building LORA plugins for the AI to adapt specifically for your codebase/customerbase/documentation etc. There's also processes involved in building…

"Language model, write me a python script to finetune a language model."

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#45

Post by ilaksh »

hgsgm wrote: post #28
ilaksh wrote: post #10

I feel the same way I think. These days, I am happy when I am able to use GPT4 to complete a task faster or easier, but am also happy when I write some code "by myself". However, as far as the conclusion of the article. This "age" started only a few months ago. If you are going to call it an age, then the conclusion doesn't hold up. In the long term, programming "by hand" is likely to be similar to wood carving today…

You don't even need antique examples like "wood carving". Modern web app developers rarely write HTML by hand. They generate it from higher level language or templates.

Well.. lol.. guess I am not a modern web developer then because until GPT came out I wrote all of my HTML by hand, at least for the last several years. Before that I had phases with ASP/ASP.NET , WPF, and PHP.

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#46

Post by waboremo »

throwbadubadu wrote: post #21
876978095789789 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all I'm getting out of chatgpt is bullshit and hallucinations Are you using GPT3 or 4?

4 and full agree and still confusedly wondering.. I know I will be shouted down, but what are all you "tech guys" doing in your daily biz, just glueing hyperdocumented boilerplate together and spitting out the same textbook examples, I don't get it.

Yes that's exactly what I do, except they're not really all that well documented.

What are you doing in your daily biz? Could you provide some specific examples I'd like to see how chatgpt reacts to them.

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#47

Post by killjoywashere »

I feel like, if anything, AI will push people to upskill. A) it's obviously necessary, B) you will increasingly find yourself increasingly identifying edge cases, C) if you're in an exposed field (e.g. diagnostic medicine) you will find fewer people coming into the field, so there won't be a lot of backfills in the workforce.

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#48

Post by polalavik »

throwbadubadu wrote: post #21
876978095789789 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all I'm getting out of chatgpt is bullshit and hallucinations Are you using GPT3 or 4?

4 and full agree and still confusedly wondering.. I know I will be shouted down, but what are all you "tech guys" doing in your daily biz, just glueing hyperdocumented boilerplate together and spitting out the same textbook examples, I don't get it.

straight up don't understand the dialogue around chatGPT replacing tech jobs lmao.

Ok can chatgpt understand the super ambiguous requirement demanded by the customer, translate it into something meaningful to implement, anticipate what the customer actually wants (or will need in the future) and make sure the implementation meets that nuanced complexity? doubt it.

are you all writing hello world for a living?

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#49

Post by ilaksh »

SoftTalker wrote: post #19
ilaksh wrote: post #10

I feel the same way I think. These days, I am happy when I am able to use GPT4 to complete a task faster or easier, but am also happy when I write some code "by myself". However, as far as the conclusion of the article. This "age" started only a few months ago. If you are going to call it an age, then the conclusion doesn't hold up. In the long term, programming "by hand" is likely to be similar to wood carving today…

Funny to hear that. I'm closer to 60 than 50, and it never occurs to me to use GPT to write my code. So I wonder if it's partly based on how long someone has been doing something. In retrospect, I never copied code from StackOverflow either (have used it occasionally to get ideas, but mostly felt the code I'd find there just wasn't very good, or at least was too different from my personal coding style to be something…

I'm 45. Programming to some degree for 37 years. Same thing I always ask -- are you using GPT4 or 3.5? Can be a very big difference.

I think it really depends on what kind of programming you are doing as much as something like age. If you are trying to solve new problems in a new programming language or framework, then it will make more sense to get machine help than if you have a lot of experience in similar problems with the same language and libraries.

But that equation changes with GPT4 and especially beyond. Eventually you will probably try GPT4/5/ whatever and start using it.

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#50

Post by barbazoo »

chupaolo wrote: post #36
moonchrome wrote: post #13

All this talk about chatgpt replacing programmers and skill atrophy - meanwhile all I'm getting out of chatgpt is bullshit and hallucinations. Copilot is amazing at boilerplate, but that's about it - I don't even read any suggestions that don't fall into that category anymore. Copilot is amazing because it lets me stay in the flow when I need to churn out stuff (when I already know what I want). I would pay over 100$…

I'm surprised with this response. I myself have found it extremely useful and ChatGPT has saved me tons of time with programming and non-programming tasks.

> all I'm getting out of chatgpt is bullshit and hallucinations

> ChatGPT is cheap at 20$/month but not even worth that price.

This is so general obviously it's not true. It's providing lots of value to lots of people. To me this sounds like someone with the goal of confirming their own biases.

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