491–500 of 589 posts
Does anyone have any suggestions for approaches they are taking to avoid the potential for this? Something I did recently in ChatGPT's 'Instructions' box (so far I have only used ChatGPT) is requesting it to "Make me think through the problem before just giving me the answer." and a few other similar notes.
This article was probably written by AI, because anyone with half a brain could not read the study and come to the same conclusions. Basically, participants spent less than half an hour, 4 times, over 4 months, writing some bullcrap SAT type essay. Some participants used AI. So to accept the premise of the article, using an AI tool once a month for 20 minutes caused noticeable brain rot. It is silly on its face. What…
> What the study actually showed, people don't have an investment or strong memory to output they didn't produce. Problem with LLMs is, when you pass hours feeding prompts to solve a problem, you actually did help (a lot!) to produce the output.
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> Just beware the “real programmers hand-write assembly” fallacy. It was said that compilers would produce a generation of programmers unable to understand the workings of their programs. In some sense, this is true! But, almost nobody thinks it really matters for the actual project of building things. One of the other replies alludes to it, but I want to say it explicitly: The key difference is that you can generall…
I don't follow; you can read the code that your LLM produces as well. It's way easier to drill down in this way than the bytecode/assembly vs. high-level language divide.
You can. You can also read the code a compiler produces perfectly well. In fact https://godbolt.org/ is a web site dedicated to programmers do just that. But ... how many programmers do you know who look at the assembler their compiler produces? In fact how many programmers do you know who understand the assembler?
Now lets extrapolate a bit. I've seen people say they've vibe coded a some program, yet they can't program. Did they read the code the LLM produced? Of course not. Did it matter? Apparently not for the program they produced.
Does the fact that they can vide program but not read code alter the types of programs they can produce? Of course it does. There limited to the sort of programs an LLM has seen before. Does that matter? Possibly not if the only programs they write are minor variations of what has been posted onto the internet already.
Now take two people, one who can only vide code, and another who knows how to program and understands computers at a very deep level. Ask yourself, who is going to be paid more? Is it the one who can only write programs that have been seen many times before by an LLM, or is it the one who can produce something truly new and novel?
I believe this is true for literally anything that replaces practice. We're meant to build muscle memory for things through repetition, but if we sidestep the repetition by farming it out to another process, we never build muscle memory.
Does anyone have any suggestions for approaches they are taking to avoid the potential for this? Something I did recently in ChatGPT's 'Instructions' box (so far I have only used ChatGPT) is requesting it to "Make me think through the problem before just giving me the answer." and a few other similar notes.
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>I think the "just tweak the prompts bro" people are missing out on learning. Alternatively they're just learning/building intuition for something else. The level of abstraction is moving upwards. I don't know why people don't seem to grok that the level of the current models is the floor, not the ceiling. Despite the naysayers like Gary Marcus, there is in fact no sign of scaling or progress slowing down at all on A…
LLMs are plateauing, and you’re in denial.
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I can count the amount of times in my 20 year career that I've had to look at compiler generated assembly on one finger and I've never looked at the machine code produced by an assembler (other than when I wrote my own as a toy project) is the same true of LLM usage? absolutely not and it never will be, because it's not an abstraction
It is an abstraction. Just because you end up looking at what the prompt looks like “under the hood” in whichever language it produced the output, doesn’t mean every user does. Similar as with assembly, you might have not taken a look at it, but there are people that do and could argue the same thing as you. The lines will be very blurry in the near future.
> Similar as with assembly, you might have not taken a look at it, but there are people that do and could argue the same thing as you.
... No. The assembler is deterministic. Barring bugs, you can basically trust that it does exactly what it was told to. You absolutely cannot say the same of our beloved robot overlords.
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No, but depending on your governance structure, we have software engineers abstract over domains. And then we draw boxes and arrows around the works of your colleagues without looking inside the box.
You wish! Bus factor risk is why you don’t do this. Having siloed knowledge is one of the first steps towards engineering, unless someone else code is proven bug free, you don’t usually rely on that. You just have someone to throw bug tickets at.
*towards bad engineering, unless*
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The vast majority of programmers don't know assembly, so can in fact not work without all the abstractions they rely on. Do you therefore argue programming languages aren't abstractions?
> Do you therefore argue programming languages aren't abstractions? Yes, and no. They’re abstractions in the sense of hiding the implementation details of the underlying assembly. Similarly, assembly hides the implementation details of the cpu, memory, and other hw components. However, except with programming languages you don’t need to know the details of the underlying layers except for very rare cases. The abstrac…