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

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

#91

Post by gwoolhurme »

fauxpause_ wrote: post #90
gwoolhurme wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think you are being difficult at all! Also, in fairness I've only ran into it once that I can remember off the top of my head but there was a problem with an optimization flag settings. A crash would only happen with a certain higher level optimization flag (you can also get linker issues but that is not really the issue here). When you get a compiler bug, or it feels like there is no way your source code could be wrong, sometimes it can be at a level that looking at the disassembly code can be inspected compared it with your written source code. In 10 years of doing iOS stuff I've only ever had to do it once. An edge case of an edge case, but I am glad that I could have run into that problem.

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

#92

Post by AverageDude »

simonw wrote: post #72
AverageDude wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. I always wonder why is my experience not like others? Are those PR people for Microsoft? Example: I gave chatgpt a list. Which looked like st street av avenue Convert this to yaml format as st: name: street And so on. It failed spectacularly. Not even once but about 10 times. Even if it succeeded, it kept changing the output by doing ops which I never mentioned in the prompt (like reordering and merging duplicat…

I have human intelligence and I can't figure out what the output you're hoping for here is. Update: I tried that with GPT4 and got this: st: name: street av: name: avenue GPT 3.5 didn't know what to do with it.

It’s a yaml key value format using a map. And even if it nailed the format, it kept changing the output on it’s own. I mentioned not to change order or remove duplicates, it kept doing that anyway. I gave it 100 elements, it kept giving me around 80. And yeah, it was GPT 3.5.

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

#93

Post by PeterisP »

polalavik wrote: post #48
throwbadubadu wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Parts of our job that require skill and parts of our job that require time are not the same.

"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" takes skill, but that is NOT what takes up most of the workday, implementation does - and if a tool saves some meaningful time on the implementation part, then the same project can be done in the same time with less people, i.e. replacing some jobs.

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

#94

Post by 317070 »

ducktective wrote: post #62
p1necone wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Yes.

I would even be surprised if in 10 years an AI wouldn't be able to decide on the Riemann hypothesis given enough compute.

The rate of progress made in the last 10 years has been enormous, but blanks in comparison to the acceleration of the last year. Unless there are yet unknown limits to our current methods, there does not seem anything to stop us from building machines that outperform the field of human mathematics.

I could sketch you a couple of paths there if we manage to leverage current LLM to become self-improving. But even if we don't manage to do that, there are paths to leverage LLM's to solve mathematics. I can outline truly remarkable approaches, which this comment is too small to contain.

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

#95

Post by throwbadubadu »

PeterisP wrote: post #93
polalavik wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Parts of our job that require skill and parts of our job that require time are not the same. "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" takes skill, but that is NOT what takes up most of the workday, imp…

> that is NOT what takes up most of the workday, implementation does - and if a tool saves some meaningful time on the implementation part

Sorry no, completely untrue here, its about debugging and inter system complexity and getting stuff like debug artifacts together, using various tools, debugger, sniffers here, trace analyzers there, having clue and figuring out the bug, and then fixing it, but please not the surface quick fix, but understanding the root cause (though ChatGPT couldn't even do the first thing well even if guided to most of these I guess, unless trained on multiple 100k to million loc code bases, which would not happen for other reasons)...

Pure implementation is the easy part (even if actually hard) and not taking up the workday, I'd wished it would more often..

It can help on those fun tasks like doing a visualization of some data for these things sometimes.. but there it is 50% great, other 50% I would have better used google skills and directly headed to docs or Stackoverflow where I can judge answers better, or transfer them to my problem more easy.

I personally doubt even ChatGPT10 will be able to do all these various tasks and reason between them...and even if, how much computing power should be there for how many tech people world-wide? I wonder I never read about scaling and limits..

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

#96

Post by majormajor »

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…

I'm not sure most codebases are unique enough for that. There will certainly be some of that at places that are doing new things, but for the average online service backend or frontend app programming tasks, I think things like Copilot will see enough and get trained well enough out of the box to be pretty one-size-fits-all.

There will be a lot of business pressure towards using the "good enough" out of the box ones too. If you've got a team of less than a hundred people, rolling your own "datasets, LORA plugins, APIs for AI, vector databases, monitoring, etc" is a multi-person team and significant chunk of new expense. So is the incremental gain their for small to medium teams with relatively "standard" problems?

Kinda like self-hosting at that scale vs using a cloud vendor.

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

#97

Post by digging »

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 half your age and don't really find ChatGPT useful for my programming work. Maybe I'm not creative enough, but it often seems like more work to get ChatGPT to understand my problem than it is to solve the problem.

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

#98

Post by goldfeld »

TOMDM wrote: post #7
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 think any individual needs to be an assembly expert, but as a community developers still need some people to be assembly experts. Our systems will rot without people to maintain them, the AI aren't infallable yet. The greater worry isn't that the general user will let mostly defunct skills rot, it's that we need a path to raise the next generation of experts in these niche skills.

Oh, do not you worry, that path is called SNES emulators and teen crackers reverse engineering new releases' product activation loops. Curious teens are a staple of civilization.
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