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noogle commented on New GitHub Copilot research finds 'downward pressure on code quality'   visualstudiomagazine.com/... · Posted by u/ceejayoz
ben_w · 2 years ago
> I cancelled my subscription after 2 months because I was spending way too much mental effort going over all of the code vomit fixing all of the mistakes. And it was basically useless when trying to deal with anything non-trivial or anything to do with SQL (even when I frontloaded it with my entire schema).

Good to know, that means I'm still economically useful.

I'm using ChatGPT rather than Copilot, and I'm surprised by how much it can do, but even so I wouldn't call it "good code" — I use it for JavaScript, because while I can (mostly) read JS code, I've spent the last 14 years doing iOS professionally and therefore don't know what's considered best practice in browser-land. Nevertheless, even though (usually) I get working code, I can also spot it producing bad choices and (what seems like) oddities.

> I weep for the juniors that will be absolutely crushed by this garbage.

Indeed.

You avoid the two usual mistakes I see with current AI, either thinking it's already game over for us or that it's a nothing-burger.

For the latter, I normally have to roll out a quote I can't remember well enough to google, that's something along the lines of "your dog is juggling, filing taxes, and baking a cake, and rather than be impressed it can do any of those things, you're complaining it drops some balls, misses some figures, and the cake recipe leaves a lot to be desired".

noogle · 2 years ago
The criticism from the second camp stems from the fact that the WHOLE job is to not drop anything.

A fence with a hole is useless even if it's 99% intact.

A lot of human jobs, especially white collar, are about providing reassurance about the correctness of the results. A system that cannot provide that may be worse than useless since it creates noise, false sense of security and information load.

noogle commented on Growing share of Americans favor more nuclear power   pewresearch.org/short-rea... · Posted by u/freedude
robviren · 3 years ago
Worked in nuclear power for five years and wish people could divorce themselves of bias when considering power. When you plug things in it has a cost greater than the dollars you are paying. In raw deaths per megawatt nuclear wins above all else. I'm not saying we should avoid solar and wind. I'm saying we should dive headlong into every form of power that seems a reasonable risk to human life and the environment before 1000+ human death wildfires, starvation, and every other natural disaster becomes common place. Belching coal exhaust or gas turbine exhaust into the air seems a careless act when I have personally sat inside, on top of, under, and to the side of nuclear reactors and have yet to fall over dead. Spent fuel can be handled and most import you don't need to breath it and it doesn't warm the planet. Everything has a cost and I would gladly bare the cost of nuclear for a world worth living in.
noogle · 3 years ago
We need to shift from thinking of solar/wind as "electricity sources" to thinking of them as "fuel sources". The marginal cost of producing a transferrable fuel from solar/wind is already lower than current electricity prices. The challenge is the capital expenses on equipment (hydrolyzers, fuel cell etc.)
noogle commented on Driving is more expensive than you think (2020)   news.harvard.edu/gazette/... · Posted by u/throw0101a
thatfrenchguy · 3 years ago
$10 each way is $100 a week, a car’s going to cost you more than $400 a month?
noogle · 3 years ago
No. A car can cost much less than $400. Hence I own a car instead of taking taxis.
noogle commented on Driving is more expensive than you think (2020)   news.harvard.edu/gazette/... · Posted by u/throw0101a
fer · 3 years ago
My mom's (then) boyfriend sold his car back in '96. He was a science man but not on a particularly number-hard field (veterinarian).

He still ran the numbers.

I was too young to fully understand but basically accounting for every cost it was cheaper to call a cab or rent a car for every situation that actually requires a private vehicle, plus it saved loads of time overall (repairs, maintenance, checks, cleaning...) and headaches in general.

The discussion stuck to me, and I'm always amazed at how it became a realization for so many people decades after.

Granted, this was Western Europe where public transit is ages ahead of most of the US.

noogle · 3 years ago
I had the opposite experience: using taxis/Uber/Lyft was far more expensive than owning a car so after Uber stopped subsidizing rides I had to buy a vehicle. That was in a city with a metro system, living in one of its main boroughs.

Even today, a cab to anywhere (even 3 miles) would cost me at least $10 each direction, and we have at least 5 such trips weekly. This easily surpasses the cost of the car, including depreciation and fuel.

noogle commented on So long “prompt engineering,” we hardly knew ya   medium.com/art-interrupte... · Posted by u/thm
beachy · 3 years ago
> if you want a long-lasting career in AI you need to work on the actual AI stuff, not just using the AI stuff.

Back in the day, when those new fangled relationship database things came on the scene, do you think people would have been well advised to try and find work on the actual database engine itself, instead of the more frivolous work of using the new technology to, say, solve actual business problems?

noogle · 3 years ago
"prompt engineering" is a self-destructing field. If you use any rigorous approach to optimizing the prompt, you end up with essentially supervised machine -learning: models can (and do) learn the optimal prompt once there is a yardstick for the goodness of the model's response. That's a classical for a data-scientist, but the skill set has little to do with prompts.

If you are not rigorous, then what you are doing is essentially "black art". It may work for some tasks ad-hoc, but with the rapid pace of model improvement your skill will likely become irrelevant/not needed quickly.

noogle commented on Neeva acquired by Snowflake   snowflake.com/blog/snowfl... · Posted by u/danielcampos93
nova22033 · 3 years ago
Which part of the transaction is against the principles of a free and open market?
noogle · 3 years ago
The government printing the fiat money that fueled a lot of this seems to be one.

Besides, the "free market" is not a goal on its own. It's a method that is frequently the most beneficial one, but not always.

noogle commented on Google Launches AI Supercomputer Powered by Nvidia H100 GPUs   tomshardware.com/news/goo... · Posted by u/jonbaer
gitfan86 · 3 years ago
So if you think that maybe OpenAI has other options if NVDA increases their prices why do you think that one of the other big names ( MSFT,GOOG,IBM,TSLA,AMD,INTC,Facebook ) also cannot do the same thing?

I'm not saying you are wrong or right, btw

noogle · 3 years ago
I guess for the same reason most of them keep buying from Intel - their market position allows them to pass on the cost to their customers, so it's not worth the distraction.

OpenAI is more of a "one-(very impressive)-trick-pony", so they have a stronger incentive.

noogle commented on Google Launches AI Supercomputer Powered by Nvidia H100 GPUs   tomshardware.com/news/goo... · Posted by u/jonbaer
faeriechangling · 3 years ago
Because making decisions on account of an asset's price being higher 2 years ago is just falling victim to price anchoring? Would Nvidia not be worth buying in 2020 because its price was much lower in 2018 and thus must be overvalued in 2020?

Investments should be based on the actual value of the company relative to its price, as well as relative to other investment oppertunities. Trying to making a profit by trading based on historical stock prices will get you whipped by quants who are already doing a much better job of that sort of thing than you could ever hope to do.

noogle · 3 years ago
That's a broader question, but in general: it doesn't matter what I think about Nvidia's business. I could be correct all the way, but if other people disagree with me, they won't pay me for the shares.

It's also not necessarily about the 2021 peak but why isn't Nvidia bigger? allegedly it's a necessary component to a technology that can replace hundreds of millions of people (worth trillions in economic output). And unlike OpenAI, Nvidia wins no matter which company wins the model competition.

noogle commented on Google Launches AI Supercomputer Powered by Nvidia H100 GPUs   tomshardware.com/news/goo... · Posted by u/jonbaer
smoldesu · 3 years ago
It doesn't necessarily depend on Nvidia hardware. Nothing stops you from training an AI on an adequately advanced ASIC or FPGA, in theory. Nvidia does accelerate it though, and they're also offering unparalleled performance-per-dollar to the audience that's in the market.

In a way, it feels like Nvidia is embarrassingly aware of this. They were the reluctant shovel salesman during the cryptocurrency gold rush, and they're rightfully wary of going all-in on AI. If I was an investor, I'd also be quantifying just how much of a "greatest technological advancement" modern machine learning really is.

noogle · 3 years ago
It's the ecosystem - everyone else is using CUDA, so you need a very good incentive to stray away from that ecosystem. a x2-3 cost of hardware won't justify such move.

The cryptomarket was less favorable to Nvidia because it harmed the loyal customers (gamers, AI) for a temporary market (crypto) that indeed largely declined.

noogle commented on Google Launches AI Supercomputer Powered by Nvidia H100 GPUs   tomshardware.com/news/goo... · Posted by u/jonbaer
gitfan86 · 3 years ago
It is unknown how much pricing power NVDA has. Can they 3x the price of everything And still sell out?
noogle · 3 years ago
Why not? They seem to be a lot of leeway before any specific company will find it cheaper to design their own chips, or even to move to AMD (ROCm is not as well supported).

Perhaps someone like OpenAI has both the expertise and incentive to do so, but not many others.

u/noogle

KarmaCake day126May 8, 2021View Original