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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

#81

Post by nonethewiser »

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…

I think about it in the same terms. We make better and better abstractions which makes it easier and easier to code. Usually with some performance loss that better hardware can cover.

The implication of that is this will have a similar impact as previous abstractions.

But two questions:

1. Does this scale?

2. Is the type of difference between Python and Assembly the same as between Python and AI Codegen?

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

#82

Post by nonethewiser »

KeplerBoy wrote: post #76
nonethewiser wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

that's the thing: it's not C#, it's chromium+react. They can't be bothered to write a truly native app for their own platform. Heck, they can't even be bothered to dogfood their in-house react alternatives. All of that for an app that's used by hundreds of millions of people every day. It's those things that make me think Casey Muratori really is onto something.

Thank you for clarifying, and I recognize that React does lots of extra work because “it’s good enough” but is that really the limiting factor of teams? Slack is built on electron which we can chide for being resource inefficient as well.

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

#83

Post by nonethewiser »

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,…

> 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.

Maybe some.

But I resonate with the title because I noticed I started leaning on ChatGPT to avoid having to think through things. I found myself tweaking ChatGPT prompts and hoping for a better response when the previous one wasn’t good enough. Often a better response is not found, then I have to struggle to start thinking for myself.

Over time that leads to less repetition thinking through problems and more difficultly thinking through problems when you can’t use ChatGPT. Is that a good trade off?

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

#84

Post by ilaksh »

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…

Did you try pasting in the relevant reference sections for those ImageMagick commands/options?

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

#85

Post by nonethewiser »

EarthLaunch wrote: post #53
mrbombastic wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe it'll be like hard goods; a blender you buy today is made of moulded plastic and lasts 5 years, instead of being metal and made to last 20 years. For 1% of the price.

That is an excellent, albeit concerning analogy.

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

#86

Post by ducktective »

ilaksh wrote: post #84
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…

Did you try pasting in the relevant reference sections for those ImageMagick commands/options?

No, I didn't know exactly what commands were useful. And I'm not subscribed to the pro version so pasting the whole documentation would cost a lot.

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

#87

Post by nonethewiser »

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.

> 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.

You do need to if your phone can’t store certain phone numbers. And you will be worse at it if you don’t practice.

Why can’t it store certain numbers? It’s impossible to know. Which phone numbers won’t it be able to store? It’s impossible to know.

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

#88

Post by nico »

Syonyk wrote: post #77
nico wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. Or I can read a variety of sources from across the political spectrum to look for common elements, and I can try to avoid news articles and such in favor of longer form magazine articles written after the fact, and I can, and do, prefer to read "multiple books" on a topic instead of a simple art…

That is totally fine :)

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

#89

Post by rizzom5000 »

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.

I agree with your general sentiment and have been slumming on r/singularity lately where there has been a ton of hype. One thing that I think I've gleaned from my reading the comments there, is that people who aren't as skilled at using search engines find ChatGPT to be magical.

To my way of thinking, crafting the perfect prompt is about the same, or more, effort than crafting the perfect Google search. In both cases I'll probably have to double check the sources if I want a critical analysis of the results.

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

#90

Post by fauxpause_ »

gwoolhurme wrote: post #73
fauxpause_ wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a programmer. I’m not a computer scientist. I didn’t study computer science. I agree it’s probably important to computer science.

Sorry I didn’t mean it that way. What I mean to say is that even in cases of iOS and Android, there are edge cases where assembly knowledge does help. While LLVM isn’t exactly assembly it’s similar in logic. It’s not to say “computer science” more so, than it is to say it’s still a decently good topic to at least know and be familiar with when you get the build button on a native app even. Granted these are rare edge…

So I’m not trying to be difficult, but can you give an example of how it could help with some sort of iOS task? Because I really don’t know and I’m curious.
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