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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

#61

Post by moonchrome »

barbazoo wrote: post #50
chupaolo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's my bias ? I want this to work - I want to expend less effort to do my job - so far the problems where ChatGPT would fit in the workflow it's taken me more time to fact check the plausible bullshit it generates than doing it the old fashioned way.

Copilot is way better at generating boilerplate.

The one task I did find it useful was converting model types to open API spec - out of trying to use it for a month.

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

#62

Post by ducktective »

p1necone wrote: post #42
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…

Can you prove Fermat last theorem via giving a high parameter LLM a very large amount of mathematical knowledge?

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

#63

Post by SoftTalker »

ilaksh wrote: post #49
SoftTalker wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 problem…

I have never tried GPT of any version, for any purpose.

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

#64

Post by nico »

Syonyk wrote: post #9
nico wrote: post #2

I propose the complete opposite. Just surrender and enjoy the freedom. Of course you can always choose, just like you can choose to remember people’s phone numbers and driving directions. But you don’t need it.

Freedom? You've got a weird definition of "freedom" if you think surrendering your autonomy to whoever happens to be running the services you rely on is "freedom." The problem is that long term, you won't have any idea if what it's spitting out is reasonable or not. We already have more than enough problems with systems being too complex to understand. Solving that with "more complexity we can't understand" doesn't s…

That is already case.

Are you able to verify every single news article you read? Every source? Every journalist? All the info you read or hear?

You can’t, so you just trust. And let go of the complexity, you don’t need to consciously manage it and you are still ok.

Just like you trust your body to breath or to digest.

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

#65

Post by nonethewiser »

xg15 wrote: post #27
msoad wrote: post #3

Much like the evolving layers of abstraction in technology, the necessity for individuals to master the intricate, underlying layers wanes as time progresses. The article brings to mind the analogy of Assembly programming; 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 comp…

Yeah, and you can thank those abstractions that today, we have Microsoft bragging that they got the Teams chat client down to only 9 seconds loading time on a machine with several multi-GHz cores and gigabytes of RAM. But that's all fine I guess, because it's good enough . Good enough for what? Good enough that people will grudgingly use it because instantly quitting their job over it would be overblown. Their life w…

Teams is probably written in C# right? Are we really sure C# isn’t performant enough for desktop apps? Seems like a rather hot take.

Otherwise what is the non performant abstraction? I think the reality is just that teams is poorly done.

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

#66

Post by zamnos »

moonchrome wrote: post #61
barbazoo wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

What's my bias ? I want this to work - I want to expend less effort to do my job - so far the problems where ChatGPT would fit in the workflow it's taken me more time to fact check the plausible bullshit it generates than doing it the old fashioned way. Copilot is way better at generating boilerplate. The one task I did find it useful was converting model types to open API spec - out of trying to use it for a month.

Your bias is that you want it to do your job, but extrapolating that since it's no good at that (for whatever reason), that it's no good for anything and forgetting that there are many other jobs out there.

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

#67

Post by nico »

13years wrote: post #18
Syonyk wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freedom? You've got a weird definition of "freedom" if you think surrendering your autonomy to whoever happens to be running the services you rely on is "freedom." The problem is that long term, you won't have any idea if what it's spitting out is reasonable or not. We already have more than enough problems with systems being too complex to understand. Solving that with "more complexity we can't understand" doesn't s…

We already have more than enough problems with systems being too complex to understand. Indeed, aligns with my own thoughts on the impossibility of AI alignment. "However, each new layer and new tech that we add becomes a greater separation between what we can perceive and the complexity of the machine that becomes ever more incomprehensible. So we build ever more tech to help us understand the existing tech with eac…

It’s always going to be a back and forth. You can’t fixate something forever.

We adapt to AI and AI adapts to us, and we keep iterating to cooperate.

AI alignment as exposed on Wikipedia reads almost like condoning AI slavery.

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

#68

Post by moonchrome »

majormajor wrote: post #25
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 think there's two camps of think-piece authors emerging - the ones who've tried a bunch of different examples of things and got passable-to-great-looking results; and the ones going deeper into specific areas and hitting the wall in terms of expertise and specificity. Using the GPT 4 API, I'm definitely often hitting limitations, especially around depth of information, and having to "prompt engineer" my way around…

I agree with this, for me scenarios where I know what I want are better handled by copilot - I'm way better at writing code than gpt prompts - copilot then picks up the boilerplate as I go along - and since I know what I want it's easy to fact check.

There are some scenarios where it would be useful to have chat like interface in editor to prototype fast - hopefully copilot x delivers.

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

#69

Post by ducktective »

texuf wrote: post #60
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…

Imagine you’ve only been a programmer for 2 years. Imagine not knowing what imagemagick is. Now get an answer that gets you 99% of the way to where you want to be. Now look at the documentation to see why the parameters aren’t doing what you want them to do. You just saved hours of work.

Yes, GPT and LLMs got to be the most significant leap in the field of AI from 2010s onwards...It kinda "solves" NLP. It is the best human-language-based UI that humanity has every created.

But the point is, this thing does not understand what it's doing...it's become a cliche but the people who coined the term "statistical parrot" really knew what's up.

Like, I think there could be some GOFAI technique that may solve "figuring out how to use a tool like imagemagick/ffmpeg" mathematically, formally and deterministically.

And again, I'm all basing my view on the fact that this "emerging intelligence" is a mirage.

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

#70

Post by dahwolf »

"The thing I’m most excited about in our weird new AI-enhanced reality is the way it allows me to be more ambitious with my projects. In the past I’ve had plenty of ideas for projects which I’ve ruled out because they would take a day—or days—of work to get to a point where they’re useful. I have enough other stuff to build already!"

If these projects are somehow meaningful to you on a personal level or in a small circle, great. However, let's not look past the fact that pretty much every human will achieve this super productivity. Hence, in a broader sense most projects will not be interesting, competitive...or more likely...looked at because of sheer abundance.

The other thought I'm having is regarding the rate of change in mastering AI. It's frankly inhumane. You can work in tech and thrive on a tech stack for some 5 years, sometimes 10. Working the AI...whatever you learn is outdated the next week.

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