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Post-GPT Computing

grady.io

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Re: Post-GPT Computing

#81

Post by dopeboy »

I appreciate this article and can sympathize with the disorientation the author and many here at HN feel. It can feel unnerving to know that parts of our jobs might become automated.

I'm processing this news in realtime like many of you and forming a plan:

1. Understand how LLMs work. I've heard the Wolfram paper is good; open to more suggestions here.

2. Continue to practice using real implementations of LLMs including ChatGPT and co-pilot.

3. Finding painpoints within our company that AI can make more efficient and implementing solutions.

If anyone feels the same way and wants to form a working group with me, give me a shout. Email is in my bio.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#82

Post by Traubenfuchs »

muffles wrote: post #79
agentultra wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yikes. Your full potential isn't your work. We are all creative beings with deep emotional lives and connections to everything around us. And there are a ton of jobs in programming that pay well enough that you can live relatively well in a capitalist society. Some people find fulfillment in their families, neighbours, art, and dreams. How many jobs in modern society are complete bullshit? A good deal of them, I woul…

I'm not suggesting your work is the only source of fulfillment or that one's career should be the sole measure of their self-worth. Rather, the importance of finding value and meaning in one's work is a complementary means of achieving personal fulfillment and happiness. It is still possible to find value and meaning in jobs that do not align with a person's interests or passions. The key is to find a balance between…

> Rather, the importance of finding value and meaning in one's work is a complementary means of achieving personal fulfillment and happiness.

I wholeheartedly agree! I do know a few people that love their jobs and I envy them to no end, they are inspiring, shining suns. But I remain firm on my opinion that this is far out of reach for most people.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#83

Post by TeMPOraL »

falcor84 wrote: post #39
grugagag wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s always a cost to beeing more greedy than you can handle

Please elaborate

Stupid greed is taking so much as to starve your supply. Smart greed is sustainable greed. Smartest greed is one that feeds back into the supply, making it grow exponentially.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#84

Post by dougdonohoe »

On the one hand, I think a lot of what ChatGPT can do is pretty amazing and a bit scary as a software engineer. On the other hand, I look at the projects I've done recently and throughout my career and find it hard to see how something that can solve bite-sized problems can tackle a software project that takes months to come to fruition. I'm currently working as an engineer doing a mix of kubernetes, cloud, Golang, bash scripting, git manipulation and other type of work. I recently upgraded 40+ repos to migrate to out latest build infrastructure and I had to reconcile 5+ years of folks doing things slightly differently. There was a constant process of running some script to make changes, finding outliers and one-offs, figuring out the fixes, running tests and figuring out the right way to ensure things were correct. I just don't see how ChatGPT can have done that project. Maybe it could have reduced the time it took me to write some supporting scripts, but I don't see it material improving the time it took to do this project.

I suspect many large IT organizations are like this.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#85

Post by MrMan »

agentultra wrote: post #66
muffles wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We don't care too much about work or a career. And most of us don't want to do more, we want to get a decent salary for our boring work. Yikes. Productive work is not just a way to earn a living but also a way to achieve personal fulfillment and happiness. It's a means of creating value and contributing to society. A person who works just for the salary and does not find any meaning in his work is not living up to…

Yikes. Your full potential isn't your work. We are all creative beings with deep emotional lives and connections to everything around us. And there are a ton of jobs in programming that pay well enough that you can live relatively well in a capitalist society. Some people find fulfillment in their families, neighbours, art, and dreams. How many jobs in modern society are complete bullshit? A good deal of them, I woul…

[dead]

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#86

Post by agentultra »

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #82
muffles wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not suggesting your work is the only source of fulfillment or that one's career should be the sole measure of their self-worth. Rather, the importance of finding value and meaning in one's work is a complementary means of achieving personal fulfillment and happiness. It is still possible to find value and meaning in jobs that do not align with a person's interests or passions. The key is to find a balance between…

> Rather, the importance of finding value and meaning in one's work is a complementary means of achieving personal fulfillment and happiness. I wholeheartedly agree! I do know a few people that love their jobs and I envy them to no end, they are inspiring, shining suns. But I remain firm on my opinion that this is far out of reach for most people.

Indeed it is given the preponderance of bullshit jobs.

Capitalism maximizes profits, not happiness. The market for software development jobs is much bigger for people who know popular frameworks and are content with validating forms, querying databases, aligning buttons, sending reports, etc. It's a lot easier (and rewarding) to find fulfillment elsewhere.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#87

Post by TeMPOraL »

brushfoot wrote: post #20

> I think over time, we’ll see that what many of us really liked about building software deep down wasn’t coding, but intricately imagining the things computers could do for us and then getting them to do it. Spot on. It's a good time for existential reflection: Who would you have been hundreds or thousands of years ago? Who will you be now that technology is radically changing again? There will always be interesting…

> Who would you have been hundreds or thousands of years ago?

Given how I grew up ingesting science and science fiction alike, literally attributing half my personality to Star Trek: The Next Generation being on TV during my formative years? It's really hard to tell. I have very little connection to things which were possible before late 19th / early 20th century.

In my mind, being thrown back centuries in time, I'd spend my life trying to use everything I remember from present day to give everyone a head start on science and technology. Being thrown back centuries in time, but without the memory of specific things I've learned in present day? That sounds like a particularly sadistic death sentence.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#88

Post by barrkel »

I don't think this is quite correct.

If the LLM has seen lots of instances of usage of an API, it can write code to target the API. It can generalize to some degree, but things go off track the further your requirements are away from the training data.

If your code is a lot of duct tape between well-documented, or at least well-named, APIs, that code can be automated. Which is great. That kind of code was always boring to write.

I'm less convinced that LLMs will be great at inventing new abstractions to map to a problem domain, and wiring up these new abstractions in a large codebase.

They'll need augmentation, fine-tuning, guidance, and it's not clear how well it'll all fit together, and where the limitations of the tech will show up as capability cliffs.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#89

Post by the_only_law »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #87
brushfoot wrote: post #20

> I think over time, we’ll see that what many of us really liked about building software deep down wasn’t coding, but intricately imagining the things computers could do for us and then getting them to do it. Spot on. It's a good time for existential reflection: Who would you have been hundreds or thousands of years ago? Who will you be now that technology is radically changing again? There will always be interesting…

> Who would you have been hundreds or thousands of years ago? Given how I grew up ingesting science and science fiction alike, literally attributing half my personality to Star Trek: The Next Generation being on TV during my formative years? It's really hard to tell. I have very little connection to things which were possible before late 19th / early 20th century. In my mind, being thrown back centuries in time, I'd…

I was thinking less of “what if I went back in time” and more “what if I was my ancestor”

Obviously you won’t be able to tell for sure, but I’d guess that 1000 years ago I’d probably be a serf, and 100 years ago, likely would have fought in a large war and likely doing some form of physical labor or subsistence farming afterwards, based on what my family was doing then.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#90

Post by tjr »

meghan_rain wrote: post #8
dakial1 wrote: post #4

I don't get some coders/devs/software engineers surprised that LLM can now pretty much create a whole code out of a prompt. Wasn't this the final objective of the programming languages abstraction evolution? From Binary/Assembly to Natural Language Programming? I think it is awesome that more people will be able to create software/products as this accelerates innovation cycles a lot. And, for now, I believe devs that…

[flagged]

I have certainly gotten value out of Stack Exchange and the like, but pretty little overall. The answers to most of my software problems simply aren't there.

Nor are they elsewhere on the web.

Which leaves me feeling like it's unlikely that ChatGPT will have the answers either. Perhaps it will still be a useful tool toward arriving at the answers, but I am not presently anticipating that it is going to be churning out all of the code automatically.

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