Artificial intelligence still has some way to go

you know what they say about assumptions

the idea that any one technology will just continue to rapidly improve forever is IMHO pretty dubious, the typical pattern is rapid initial improvement then slowing incremental progress, airplanes not being that much better than they were 50 years ago is a classic example, of course with ai it doesnt do any human intelligence tasks so we havent even reached the threshold where rapid improvement can begin

i like lagoon's view on this. we won't all be paid in woims just yet!

xp- do you not find copilot useful for coding? still gotta debug it every few times but i've been getting great stuff out of it

yeah i like copilot for single line code completion, even then you gotta keep an eye on it it will do weird things it doesnt care, tho it can be good for longer things if you just dont know the syntax youre supposed to be using, get it to spit something out then try to figure out what its talking about

c0ding ais are interesting, people are like its gonna take the jobs but code is for humans its literally writing something for humans to read, if it really wanted to take the jobs it would just produce a binary, of course some black box binary wouldnt be of much use unless somehow the ai got it perfectly right, and it wouldnt get it perfectly right cause even if it got really good normal conversational speech isnt precise enough instruction to specify a computer program, you need something better, something more purposes built for the job, you need... code, lol, thats my conference speech on why ai will not take the programming jobs, that and also theres fundamentally an infinite demand for programming

there was a thinky lecture upthread i think from some programming dude whose whole point was this, that his view is that LLMs will eliminate the need for programming altogether. you will tell the model what you want and it will do it and nobody needs to look at code. of course like a whole lotta this stuff..... that's a ways off

even then it would still need to talk to a person to get instructions, that person would be a programmer

its pretty funny to think about how much more frustrating the already very frustrating task of debugging would be if you had to talk to the computer that created the bug in order to debug it

however, ai debugging tools, pattern recognition and so forth, in a normal programming workflow will prob be useful

the idea that any one technology will just continue to rapidly improve forever is IMHO pretty dubious, the typical pattern is rapid initial improvement then slowing incremental progress, airplanes not being that much better than they were 50 years ago is a classic example, of course with ai it doesnt do any human intelligence tasks so we havent even reached the threshold where rapid improvement can begin

Yep. There’s no reason to believe that transformers will dramatically accelerate beyond their current state. I won’t discount the usefulness of transformer applications for some problems but the idea LLMs will replace programmers is absurd.

its pretty funny to think about how much more frustrating the already very frustrating task of debugging would be if you had to talk to the computer that created the bug in order to debug it

however, ai debugging tools, pattern recognition and so forth, in a normal programming workflow will prob be useful

― lag∞n, Monday, December 11, 2023 12:16 PM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

I find “chain of thought” extremely frustrating. It doesn’t help that the LLM magic disappears immediately when the model keeps ignoring your prompts.

yeah thats the most obvious tell that its not intelligent

pop culture always wants to make machine humans but technology tends to produce smaller more purpose build solutions, so instead of a robot butler we get a dishwashing machine

YOU’LL STILL NEED A HUMAN TO LOAD THE DISHWASHER

- Biz Marley

and thats why the demand for butlers will remain high

i require my butler to check my spelling

theres an alternate reality where computers are called information butlers

I am a bit bummed that the parts of my job that are subject to automation are mostly the parts I enjoy (the hands-on creative tasks). Which leaves me with bullshit management tasks and going to meetings and calling people on the phone.

Welp. I guess I just need to survive another decade or so.

I agree with lagoon on this, I don't think AI is gonna be writing all our code anytime soon but I do think it could be incredibly useful for testing and auditing. also it's not like we really 'write' code by hand anyway, like when it comes to syntax and field names I'm pretty much just copy/pasting and relying on autocomplete 90% of the time anyway, I can definitely see AI plugins doing a more sophisticated version of that

Yep. There’s no reason to believe that transformers will dramatically accelerate beyond their current state. I won’t discount the usefulness of transformer applications for some problems but the idea LLMs will replace programmers is absurd.

― Allen (etaeoe), Monday, 11 December 2023 17:17 (one hour ago) link

i really hope so. i do not think society as it is currently constituted would benefit from a "superintelligence" or even a machine that would cause job disruptions of the sort that has been prophesied.

Agreed, treeship, but I am not aware of many instances of technologists stopping and saying "wait, is this good for society?" and then backing off.

On the contrary. I have talked to data mining, VR, and AI practitioners who say something along the lines of "If I don't do this, someone else will, and they may not pursue it as ethically as I intend to."

not trying to blow up anyones spot here but fwiw allen does know stuff about ai

"you know what they say about assumptions"

it means you get a lot of ass

thats right

just umptions of ass

Assumptions happenin here
What they are ain't exactly clear

umption's mcgee

I’d agree that mechanized programming won’t be fully displacing human programmers soon, but not because they wouldn’t be capable, but rather there’s a lack of will to do it, which kind of dovetails with the Graeberian idea of bullshit jobs. There’s already plenty of tech jobs that really shouldn’t exist now even without any advances in automated programming.

At the same time I’d always bristled at the idea of overly ambitious parents and trend forecasters pushing their kids into learning coding, learning Mandarin, etc… and to see your average search engine threatening to make these skills trivial from a competitive advantage POV, while at the same time being a great pedagogical aid to anyone genuinely interested in the subjects, is gratifying in a very German way.

people seem really perplexed an d wary of ai - I swear we are headed for a Dune future of forbidden thinking machines and stillsuits

lets do it give me the space drugs

heh https://www.fal.ai/camera

fun but also demonic

"some shit wants to access your camera"

um, nah. hard no.

You know it's not actually your soul

more like stillsluts

yea that's more creepy than anything. just to test it I wanted to see if it could generate the teenage version of myself and what came out was a man of a completely different ethnicity

i made myself into tom cruise im tom cruise now

i loved your work in days of thunder

thank you it was my pleasure

if you're really tom cruise, then tell me this: who was your first wife

mrs tom cruise 1

Rookie error she wasn't called mrs tom cruise 1 at the time she was called mrs tom cruise: a new hope

https://skatingnerds.com/about-author/

When I was 12, a skatepark was inaugurated in our colony which was the happiest day of my life. How do you do fellow humans.

this shit is so fucking creepy.

that site at least makes sense. it is an affiliate marketing trap. so they want people to click there links for recommended products and dip over to amazon.

As noted, I am not especially offended by the idea of technology making things easier. That is the central job of technology.

For example, I own a washing machine and a dishwasher. I am not annoyed that they deprive me of the pleasure of washing clothes or dishes.

What I am offended by is that what AI is getting praised for is actually repackaging the work of people like my colleagues and my friends and, well, me. Without attribution or credit or remuneration.

I have been feeding this creature for literally half of my life. If it gets my job (which it almost certainly will), what severance do I get? I am guessing: none.

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:6vuuim25dojphhftwj56enbc/bafkreigxajvmlyi3lpzvs5lvic3ntvs7cn6wjaoztt36gorvs46ktu3rni@jpeg

A beginner could not make this.

an advanced prompter could not make this. only the coolest guy in the world could make this.