The only thing ChatGPT etc. is useful for, in every language, is to get ideas on how to solve a problem, in an area you don’t know anything about.
ChatGPT, how can I do xy in C++?
You can use the library ab, like …That’s where I usually search for the library and check the docs if it’s actually possible to do it this way. And often, it’s not.
It’s good at refactoring smaller bits of code. The longer the input, the more likely it is to make errors (and you should prefer to start a new chat than continue a long chat for the same reason). It’s also pretty good at translating code to other languages (e.g. MySQL->PG, Python->C#), reading OpenAPI json definitions and creating model classes to match, and stuff like that.
Basically, it’s pretty good when it doesn’t have to generate stuff that requires creating complex logic. If you ask it about tasks, languages, and libraries that it has likely trained a lot on (i.e. the most popular stuff in FOSS software and example repos), it doesn’t hallucinate libraries too much. And, GPT4 is a lot better than GPT3.5 at coding tasks. GPT3.5 is pretty bad. GPT4 is a bit better to Copilot as well.
I’ve found it great for tracking down specific things in libraries and databases I’m not terribly familiar with when I don’t know the exact term for them
Yeah, it’s amazing at showing you the idiomatic way to do really specific, narrow-scoped things in a language you’re not familiar with… except for when it’s wrong.
Don’t forget that GPT4 was getting dumber the more it learned from people.
On a more serious note, ChatGPT, ironically, does suck at webdev frontend. The one task that pretty much everyone agrees could be done by a monkey (given enough time) is the one it doesn’t understand at all.
I don’t think it’s very useful at generating good code or answering anything about most libraries, but I’ve found it to be helpful answering specific JS/TS questions.
The MDN version is also pretty great too. I’ve never done a Firefox extension before and MDN Plus was surprisingly helpful at explaining the limitations on mobile. Only downside is it’s limited to 5 free prompts/day.
Chat gpt is also great if you have problems with Linux. It is my nr 1 trouble shooting tool.
GPT 4 Turbo is actually much better than GPT 3.5 and 4 for coding. It has a way better understanding of design now.
The one task that pretty much everyone agrees could be done by a monkey
A phrase commonly uttered about web dev by mediocre programmers who spend 99% of the time writing the same copy-paste spring boot mid-tier code
most of the websites are bloated and shit. Webdev is shit upon because they write code that can’t work 4 months without needing a rewrite
I agree, and in addition to way too many trackers and advertisements clogging up the page, this is also due to the time, effort, and knowledge not being provided to write performant and compliant code, which should be important given the infinite possibilities of client machines. This can be worsened by only having full stack developers who aren’t knowledgeable in web dev (especially CSS) or by sacrificing performance for trendy javascript-bloated design features
You do of course realize that you just said that the problem with the modern web is that webdev can be and far too often is done by monkeys?
I agree that there is a vast difference, even from an end user’s perspective, between a good web developer and a bad one, but the fact remains that the bar for calling oneself a web dev is appallingly low and ChatGPT nevertheless fails to clear it
I suppose you could see it like that, but I’m saying it can’t be done by “monkeys”, and the pervasive notion that it can has led to broken websites across the Internet
I think I see what you mean. Many a very competent backend dev (and many more a kid in their bedroom with zero programming experience) has thought to themselves “how hard can webdev possibly be?” and blindly stumbled through making a website that looks fine on their machine without bothering to understand what the various CSS units do and turning it into an utter monstrosity if you even slightly change the size of the browser window, and the web suffers for it.
As a primarily backend dev myself who’s tried my hand at web once or twice, I still think that web developers are by far the most pampered in the industry when it comes to development tools (I can change CSS parameters with sliders right in my browser, see the page update in real time, and when I’m done I can just export the modified .css file to disk and upload it directly to my server with zero touchup to make my changes live? Are you KIDDING ME?) but I also think it’s important to treat the practice with the respect it deserves. By that I mean taking the time to learn the languages, read through MDN’s excellent documentation, and take the time to fully understand what each CSS parameter actually does instead of trial-and-erroring your way into something that only works for you. The same thing you’d do if you were learning any new programming language. Once you do that, apart from a few hiccups due to browser inconsistencies (any time Safari would like to stop eating glue I’d appreciate it) and having to come up with something that looks good in portrait, and get past a metric f**k ton of googling and memorizing the minute differences between dozens of very similar parameters, it’s some of the most fun I’ve had as a programmer. I love being able to just go “I want a bunch of circles at the top of my page that bounce up and down in sequence.” “Sure, give me two minutes.” I’d stress about that for days in any other environment. Why didn’t anyone tell me it could BE like this?
A good chunk of that has to do with trackers and ads. Things forced on webdevs by management.
Not that webdevs couldn’t improve anything otherwise; there are certainly optimizations to be had. But pop open the dev network panel on your browser, clear cache, and refresh the page. A lot of the holdup and dancing elements you’ll see are from third party trackers and ads.
I still have nightmares dealing with a11y requirements
Same but it’s very important
Right, the pretty little button needs more shadows
I am astonished at your ignorance and your arrogance
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Bruh this cracked me up
Bruh good to hear bruh, bruh
Wow, there is a lot of pearl-clutching and gatekeeping ITT. It’s delicious!
These morons are probably going to train AI wrong so job security for the next 100 years.
Engineering is about trust. In all other and generally more formalized engineering disciplines, the actual job of an engineer is to provide confidence that something works. Software engineering may employ fewer people because the tools are better and make people much more productive, but until everyone else trusts the computer more, the job will exist.
If the world trusts AI over engineers then the fact that you don’t have a job will be moot.
People don’t have anywhere near enough knowledge of how things work to make their choices based on trust. People aren’t getting on the subway because they trust the engineers did a good job; they’re doing it because it’s what they can afford and they need to get to work.
Similarly, people aren’t using Reddit or Adobe or choosing their cars firmware based on trust. People choose what is affordable and convenient.
What’s being discussed here is the hiring of engineers rather than consumer choices. Hiring an engineer is absolutely an expression of trust. The business trusts that the engineer will be able to concretely realize abstract business goals, and that they will be able to troubleshoot any deviations.
AI writing code is one thing, but intuitively trusting that an AI will figure out what you want for you and keep things running is a long way off.
In civil engineering public works are certified by an engineer; its literally them saying if this fails i am at fault. The public is trusting the engineer to say its safe.
Yeah, people may not know that the subway is safe because of engineering practices, but if there was a major malfunction, potentially involving injuries or loss of life, every other day, they would know, and I’m sure they would think twice about using it.
It’s more thrust than trust.
As someone who works on the city side of development review, I can firmly say I’ll trust a puppy alone with my dinner than a Civil Engineer.
Are civil engineers known to eat off people’s plates?
Think they confused it with uncivil engineers
Very interesting point. Probably the most pressing problem then is to find a way for the black box to be formally verified and the role of AI engineers shifts to keeping the CI\CD green.
Hmm. I’ve never thought about it that way. It took a long time for engineering to become that way IIRC - in the past anybody could build a bridge. The main obstacle to this, then, is that people might be a bit too risk-tolerant around AI at first. Hopefully this is where it ends up going, though.
Might be about time for testers to start cr4pping their pants tho.
Tbf I don’t really wanna do ops work. I barely even wanna do DevOps. Let me just dev
Me too 😭
I don’t want to “kubectl”, I want to " make" 😭so write a Makefile that calls kubectl!
You don’t need to convince the devs, you need to convince the managers.
ಠ_ಠ
I predict that, within the year, AI will be doing 100% of the development work that isn’t total and utter bullshit pain-in-the-ass complexity, layered on obfuscations, composed of needlessly complex bullshit.
That’s right, within a year, AI will be doing .001% of programming tasks.
Can we just get it to attend meetings for us?
Legitimately could be a use case
“Attend this meeting for me. If anyone asks, claim that your camera and microphone aren’t working. After the meeting, condense the important information into one paragraph and email it to me.”
Here is a summary of the most important information from that meeting. Since there were two major topics, I’ve separated them into two paragraphs.
- It is a good morning today.
- Everyone is thanked for their time. Richard is looking forward to next week’s meeting.
The rest of the information was deemed irrelevant to you and your position.
Holy cow! You’ve done it! You could wrap this (static text block) in a web API and sell it.
Edit: /s, I guess. But that text really is easily an 80% solution for meeting summaries.
Hell yes! I’ll join the front of the hype train if they can demo an AI fielding questions while a project manager reviews a card wall.
Y’know… that seems reasonable. I’d place my bet that there’d be something good enough in only a few years. (Text only, I’d bet)
Big companies will take 5 years just to get there.
Fellow freelancer, I see.
ChatGPT is hilariously incompetent… but on a serious note, I still firmly reject tools like copilot outside demos and the like because they drastically reduce code quality for short term acceleration. That’s a terrible trade-off in terms of cost.
they drastically reduce code quality for short term acceleration.
Oh boy do I have news for you, that’s basically the only thing middle managers care about, short tem acceleration
An unpopular opinion, I am sure, but if you’re a beginner with something - a new language, a new framework - and hate reading the docs, it’s a great way of just jumping into a new project. Like, I’ve been hacking away on a django web server for a personal project and it saved me a huge amount of time with understanding how apps are structured, how to interact with its settings, registering urls, creating views, the general development lifecycle of the project and the basic commands I need to do what I’m trying to do. God knows Google is a shitshow now and while Stackoverflow is fine and dandy (when it isn’t remarkably toxic and judgmental), the fact is that it cuts down on hours of fruitless research, assuming you’re not asking it to do anything genuinely novel or hyper-specific.
I’m still convinced that GitHub copilot is actively violating copyleft licenses. If not in word, then in the spirit.
Copyleft violences.
It helps a complete newbie like me get started and even learn while I do. Due to its restrictions and shortcoming, I’ve been having to learn how to structure and plan a project more carefully and thoughtfully, even creating design specs for programs and individual functions, all in order to provide useful prompts for ChatGPT to act on. I learn best by trial and error, with the ability to ask why things happened or are the way they are.
So, as a secondary teaching assistant, I think it’s very useful. But trying to use the API for ChatGPT 4 is…not worth it. I can easily blow through $20 in a few hours. So, I got a day and a half of use out of it before I gave up. :|
they drastically reduce … quality for short term acceleration
Western society is built on this principle
Sort of. Nobody’s cutting corners on aviation structural components, for example. We’ve been pretty good at maximizing general value output, and usually that means lower quality, but not always.
I’m going to say that’s the exception that proves the rule, assuming they were structural parts and not a minor controller chip for de-icing or something.
The company themself announced it without being prompted, and if whoever introduce these unapproved parts into a small number of engines is caught there’s going to be real hell to pay. The stuff that stops you from falling out of the sky is serious business, and is largely treated as such.
On the other hand, a software function that’s hacked together and inefficient will just fly below the radar, and most people will prefer two cheap outfits to one that’s actually well made for the same price, so quality goes right out the window.
Tell me about it…
I left my more mature company for a startup.
I feel like Tyler Durden sometimes.
How you liking it? How many years have you aged in the months working at your startup?
My hairline has started receding very rapidly. There’s there’s these fine hairs all over my desk, and I see the photo I took when joining directly before turning on my camera every meeting.
Doesn’t sood good at all. I’m sorry to hear that, friend. I really hope there’s enough upsides there compared to working at a more mature company for you.
Biggest problem with it is that it lies with the exact same confidence it tells the truth. Or, put another way, it’s confidently incorrect as often as it is confidently correct - and there’s no way to tell the difference unless you already know the answer.
it’s kinda hilarious to me because one of the FIRST things ai researchers did was get models to identify things and output answers together with the confidence of each potential ID, and now we’ve somehow regressed back from that point
did we really regress back from that?
i mean giving a confidence for recognizing a certain object in a picture is relatively straightforward.
But LLMs put together words by their likeliness of belonging together under your input (terribly oversimplified).the confidence behind that has no direct relation to how likely the statements made are true. I remember an example where someone made chatgpt say that 2+2 equals 5 because his wife said so. So chatgpt was confident that something is right when the wife says it, simply because it thinks these words to belong together.
ChatGPT what is the Gödel number for the proof of 2+2=5?
Gödel numbers are typically associated with formal mathematical statements, and there isn’t a formal proof for 2+2=5 in standard arithmetic. However, if you’re referring to a non-standard or humorous context, please provide more details.
Of course I don’t know enough about the actual proof for it to be anything but a joke but there are infinite numbers so there should be infinite proofs.
there are also meme proofs out there I assume could be given a Gödel number easily enough.
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It’s helped me a bit with resolving weird tomcat/Java issues when upgrading to RHEL8, though. It didn’t give me an answer, but it gave me ideas on where to look (in my case I didn’t realize fapolicyd replaced selinux)
That’s the point - you have the expertise to make proper sense of whatever it outputs. The people pushing for “AI” the most want to rely on it without any necessary expertise or just minimal efforts, like feeding it some of your financial reports and have generate a 5-year strategy only to fail miserably and have no one to blame this time (will still blame anyone else but themselves btw).
It’s not the most useless tool in the world by any means, but the mainstream talk is completely out of touch with reality on the matter, and so are mainstream actions (i.e. overrelying on it and putting way too much faith into it).
Yeah, it can speed up the process but you still have to know how to do it yourself when it inevitably messes something up.
I enjoy using copilot, but it is not made to think for you. It’s a better autocomplete, but don’t ever let it do more than a line at once.
The problem I have with it is that all the time it saves me I have to use on reading the code. I probably spend more time on that as once in a while the code it produces is broken in a subtle way.
I see some people swearing by it, which is the opposite of my experience. I suspect that if your coding was copying code from stack overflow then it indeed improved your experience as now this process is streamlined.
I use Codeium and I’ve found it helpful for things like guessing what the next line is if it’s similar to the line I just wrote, but terrible if I’m thinking about how to actually solve a problem and it keeps suggesting wrong answers that make me think about them, realize they’re wrong, forget the solution I was working on in my head before that.
Same as ChatGPT is better web search.
id rather search the web than chatgpt because i fact check it anyway
I don’t know if it does yet, but if ChatGPT starts providing source for every information, then it would make it much faster to find the relevant information and check their sources, rather than clicking websites one by one.
Yep, ChatGPT4 allows optional calls to Bing now.
It used to have a problem with making a claims that were not relevant to or contradicted its own sources, but I don’t recall encountering that problem recently.
Yup, AI is a tool, not a complete solution.
As a software engineer, the number of people I encounter in a given week who either refuse to or are incapable of understanding that distinction baffles and concerns me.
That’s because it’s being advertised as a solution. That’s why you have people worried it’ll take their jobs when in reality it’ll let them do the job better.
But LinkedIn bros and corporate people are gonna gobble it up anyways because it has the right buzzwords (including “AI”) and they can squeeze more (low quality) work from devs to brag about how many things they (the corporate owners) are doing.
It’s just a fad. There’s just a small bit that will stay after the hype is gone. You know, like blockchain, AR, metaverse, NFT and whatever it was before that. In a few years there will be another breakthrough with it and we’ll hear from it again for a short while, but for now it’s just a one trick pony.
I always forget Metaverse is a thing.
Is it still a thing?
I actually had ‘was’ first then edited after Googling. It appears it is still a thing but can’t really tell for what.
It was never a thing.
https://www.facebook.com/business/metaverse
It very much is a thing you can get started with right now.
I should’ve elaborated… It’s supposed to be a vast seamless network of interconnected spaces isn’t it, but that doesn’t exist yet. I think they jumped the gun in that everyone thought Horizons was it. It’s only just starting to be built.
I disagree, because unlike those things, ai actually has a use case. It needs a human supervisor and it isn’t always faster, but chat gpt has been the best educational resource I’ve ever had next to YouTube. It’s also decent at pumping out a lot of lazy work and writing so i don’t have to, or helping me break down a task into smaller parts. As long as you’re not expecting it to solve all your problems for you, it’s an amazing tool.
People said the same things about 3d printing and yeah, while it can’t create literally everything at industrial scale, and it’s not going to see much consumer use, it has found a place in certain applications like prototyping and small scale production.
ChatGPT is OK at summarizing popular, low specificity topics that tons of people have already written a ton about, but it’s terrible at anything else. When I tested its knowledge about the process of a niche interest of mine (fabric dyeing) it skipped completely over certain important pieces of information, and when I prompted it to include them it basically just mirrored my prompt back at me.
Which has pretty much summed up my ChatGPT experience: it just regurgitates stuff I can find myself, but removes the ability to determine if the source is reliable. And if it’s something I’m already having trouble finding detailed information about it usually doesn’t help.
i’d argue that chat gpt is mostly great at taking human bullshit tasks from humans, who dontwant to dothe bullshit, like regurgitating the text from a textbook in different words, writing cover letters for job applications, that are often machine analyzed for buzzwords anyways.
So its use case only exist in the domain of bullshit tasks that only exist to occupy two people without any added value.
Yeah, that is one thing it can do, but it’s not the only thing it does. I’m not sure how to get my point across well but, just because it gives you the wrong answer 25% of the time doesn’t mean it’s useless. In whatever you ask it to do, it often gets you most of the way there as long as you know how to correct it or check its work. The ability to ask specific or follow-up questions when learning something makes it invaluable as a learning tool (if you’re teaching yourself that is (ie. If you’re a university student)). It’s also very useful when brainstorming ideas or helping you approach a problem from a different angle. I can also ask it questions that are far more specific than what a search engine would get me.
It really comes down to if the human operator knows how (and when) to use it properly.
i never trust that information id rather learn with a book videos or just from websites if i ever use it i always fact check it. never blindly trust a computer
That was an integral part to this whole thing, you always fact check the ai. I said this in both of my comments.
I totally get preferring textbooks or videos though. I just find that the ai saves me time since i can ask specific questions about things, and it often gives me concise information that i understand more quickly.
Is there really any utility for blockchain and NFTs?
Yes, you could, for example, use it to manage who is allowed to park in a garage, anonymously. The owner of a parking spot NFT can unlock the door from the outside. Stuff like that.
However, it’s also possible to do that with a small web application. Just payments and transfer of the parking spots are less free and it’s not decentralized.
The proton vpn people are either using or working on using block chain as a sort of email verification. Iirc it won’t have any cost or change in usage to the consumer, just an added layer of security. I’m not smart enough to understand how but it sounds neat.
It sounds like bullshit
I may have misread, Its not clear to me if it’ll be a staple of their free email service or will be added as part of their paid subscription to all their services but it still sounds neat. It very well could be bullshit but I’m interested in learning more.
https://www.tomsguide.com/news/proton-mail-to-use-blockchain-to-verify-recipients-email-addresses
The hilarious thing about blockchain is that the core concept is actively making the whole thing worse. The matrix protocol is sort of essentially blockchain without the decentralized ledger part, and it’s so vastly superior in every single way.
NFTs just show how fundamentally dumb blockchains are, if you skip the decentralized ledger bit then you never need to invent NFT functionality in the first place…
is sort of essentially blockchain without the decentralized ledger part
So a [Merkle tree](http://www…com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree)?
i’m not sure whether matrix uses that, what i’m talking about is how it does the things everyone finds neat about blockchains without the inherent downsides like massive power usage and EVERYONE having to replicate the ENTIRE ledger.
i know IPFS uses merkle trees though, and hilariously blockchains largely rely on that to actually store any significantly sized data.
Well, if you stop listening to people who think it’s a way to get really rich really fast (which it obviously isn’t), cryptocurrencies are quite useful. International transfers are so much cheaper and easier with them.
Yeah, they think it can turn a beginner dev into an advanced dev, but really it’s more like having a team of beginner devs.
It’s alright for translation. As an intermediate dev, being able to translate knowledge into languages I’m not as familiar with is nice.
This AI thing will certainly replace my MD to HTML converter and definitely not misplace my CSS and JS headers
MD to HTML? You are a blessing dude.
Yea of course! I can link a bitbucket for the file if you’d like. It’s hardcoded to my file structure, but should still be useful if you need something like it
Not really a progrmmer myself (just bash and a bit of python and html), idk what a bitbucket is buy i’d take it just in case if I decide to learn it. Thx a lot!
only because ai hasn’t replaced the client… yet
Who has four thumbs and a top tier business plan? This AI!
What is the joke here?
Nobody else can see the files on your c:\ drive. Designing a “website” means little if you don’t have a place to host it
Idk, there’s a lot of people who have jobs designing websites without a place to host it. Shoot, people get paid to design an image of a website.
This sort of thing worked in the '90s. Many of the security restrictions in browsers these days means it doesn’t consider the local file to be actually local, and you have to host from some kind of server. There are mini servers that are trivial to spin up, like SimpleHTTPServer on Python.
Is it OK if I put them in D:\ 😂😂😂
Gotta be on the internet drive, I:\
User claims to have made a website using chatgpt, putting programmers out of their jobs. However, it’s revealed user knows next to nothing about making that website accessible for others, as revealed from the last line. User sent a local link (that works for their own computer only) to their friend (which naturally shouldn’t work).
The joke is it’s an iMessage chat and they are sending a Windows path which doesn’t make sense for iOS or Mac, the only two operating systems that support iMessage.
