soiler (u/soiler) - Readit News

soiler commented on Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter futureoflife.org/open-let... · Posted by u/frankjr

worldsayshi · 2 years ago

> In my darker thoughts about this, this is why we see no aliens.

If AI would be a common great filter we'd expect at least one of them to expand outwards after being the filter?

soiler · 2 years ago

Reasonable, but not necessarily true.

1. We don't understand what the motivations of our own AI are, let alone "typical" alien AI

2. Expanding AI might be better at and/or more invested in hiding itself. It probably has no need for wasteful communications, for example.

soiler commented on I wanted a beautiful computer and couldn't find one, so I made my own mythic.computer/essays/or... · Posted by u/macnkeegs

amflare · 2 years ago

> Modern software engineering is rotten. I should know — it's been my livelihood since I graduated from college in late 2019.

I'm so sorry that one of the most lucrative entry-level jobs in the world didn't live up to your liberal arts hipster standards. Did they not have enough free lattes and kombuchas for you to drink while you idly wandered the gardens contemplating the beauty and spontaneity of a spiderweb? /s

God forbid I become one of those people that judges the next generation for growing up in a different environment, but this is one of the most entitled articles I've seen in awhile. The Computer isn't beautiful enough? Give it another 2100 years and perhaps a couple gaudy and ceremonial ones might end up in a museum.

This person either came from more money than they deserve, or else they have no concept how the real world works. Maybe even both. Go spend more than 2 years doing an honest day's work then get back to me. I'd have a lot more respect for this sort of project when it is born out of an honest labor, not a pretentious child's boredom.

soiler · 2 years ago

How the hell did this person start their SWE career at the same time as me and come to feel they have an authoritative view on the state of the industry? Maybe it's because they're a recent grad and I'm an older career changer, but I still feel quite new to the industry.

soiler commented on Command line functions around OpenAI kadekillary.work/posts/10... · Posted by u/beigebrucewayne

novaRom · 2 years ago

Unfortunately, LLMs are still prone to make facts up, and very persuasively. In fact, most of non-trivial topics I tried have required double-/triple- checking, so it's sometimes not really productive to use chatGPT.

You are correct that I made an error in my previous response.

I apologize for the confusion I may have caused in my previous response

I appreciate you bringing this to my attention.

I apologize, thank you for your attention to detail!

soiler · 2 years ago

I asked it to explain how to use a certain Vue feature the other day which wasn't working as I hoped. It explained incorrectly, and when I drilled down, it started using React syntax disguised with Vue keywords. I definitely could have tried harder to get it to figure out what was going on, but it kept repeating its mistakes even when I pointed them out explicitly.

soiler commented on Command line functions around OpenAI kadekillary.work/posts/10... · Posted by u/beigebrucewayne

brundolf · 2 years ago

I think code-generation is a red herring. I'm more interested in things like:

- Explanation/research ("how does this work?")

- Code analysis ("tell me if you think you see any bugs, refactoring suggestions, etc in this sprawling legacy codebase")

Things that feed into the developer's thought process instead of crudely trying to execute on what it wants

soiler · 2 years ago

Part of why I don't use ChatGPT very much for work is that I don't want to feed significant amounts of proprietary code into it. Could be the one thing that actually gets me in trouble at work, seems risky regardless. How is it you're comfortable with doing so? (Not asking in a judgmental way, just curious. I would like to have a LLM assistant that understood my whole codebase, because I'm stumped on a bug today.)

soiler commented on Show HN: Regex.ai – AI-powered regular expression generator regex.ai/... · Posted by u/regexLL

column · 2 years ago

Reality check : there are people like my colleague who aren't software engineers and still have to occasionally maintain/create a regex in some corporate software config.

soiler · 2 years ago

That's even worse. They might not have the knowledge to realize the regex an AI gives them is bunk, or to debug it when it fails.

I'd like to see some numbers on a tool like this. If a huge majority of people are seeing genuine improvements in their workflow with it, I won't be a luddite yelling at them. Rare, low-severity failures shouldn't hold us back.

But the potential cost of failure with (any) regex is very high, so I personally wouldn't want to trust any remotely mission-critical to a person who doesn't understand regex well enough to write it themself, and if they can write it on their own that's often faster than debugging AI-generated regex.

soiler commented on Show HN: Regex.ai – AI-powered regular expression generator regex.ai/... · Posted by u/regexLL

barbariangrunge · 2 years ago

I’d you don’t understand regexes well enough to write them yourself, you should not get some ai to generate them for you. You won’t be able to verify whether they do what you want and the bugs can be subtle and destructive

soiler · 2 years ago

I read a few weeks ago here on HN about one large SAAS grinding to a halt because of a greedy selector in one line of regex. Not sure how people find old stories, it's lost to me now. But it was an excellent example of why regex is dangerous and requires a lot of care to write. I wouldn't trust an AI to write my regex unless I saw that people were finding it to be consistently better than they were are writing what they need.

soiler commented on Show HN: Regex.ai – AI-powered regular expression generator regex.ai/... · Posted by u/regexLL

Kiro · 2 years ago

Your experience is no less anecdotal than the millions of people who successfully use Copilot and ChatGPT to write code on a daily basis. I am one of those and can't imagine coding without Copilot or an equivalent ever again.

soiler · 2 years ago

I'm (genuinely) curious what kind of code you write. I haven't tried Copilot and I haven't used ChatGPT very much, but I feel I would be pretty surprised if either of them made significant improvements to my workflow.

Copilot I could see, since I already use Intellisense, autocomplete, and snippets to great effect. I'd be annoyed if I had to work without them. But in general, knowing what I want the code to do is >90% of the work of writing new code.

I feel there are a few possibilities for why I'm confused:

1. I'm not a very good software engineer, at least in certain respects. Maybe I should have a better understanding of architecture patterns or something I might have learned in a CS degree. Maybe I am hacking everything together and maybe I am already a slow coder.

2. I'm not [being] creative enough as a prompt engineer. I typically can't think of any way that ChatGPT could help me without ingesting my entire repo and figuring out the correct patterns. It could be, however, that there are ways to get the answers I need with better questions.

3. We do completely different kinds of work, and some kinds of coding are better suited for AI assistance than others.

soiler commented on OpenAI tech gives Microsoft's Bing a boost in search battle with Google reuters.com/technology/op... · Posted by u/carlycue

koyote · 2 years ago

Which clock change are you referring to? I don't think I've ever heard anything about this.

soiler · 2 years ago

android changed the lock screen clock from HH:MM to

HH

MM

it's a little stupid to be angry about but it's also pretty stupid to do in the first place.

soiler commented on Sam Altman didn’t take any equity in OpenAI, report says cnbc.com/2023/03/24/opena... · Posted by u/SirLJ

takinola · 2 years ago

Is there an example of a solely "for the good of humanity" thing that has come out of SV? Seems like a strange thing to expect from the technology sector. I think tech companies are (very) net positive for society but don't have to be designed as solely for the good of humanity to achieve this goal.

soiler · 2 years ago

> I think tech companies are (very) net positive for society

There are certainly huge positives, but do you really feel something like Facebook is a net positive? Facebook, which intentionally stoke(d/s) genocide? Genocides have existed before Facebook, yes, but so did communication and racist relatives.

soiler commented on OpenAI tech gives Microsoft's Bing a boost in search battle with Google reuters.com/technology/op... · Posted by u/carlycue

super256 · 2 years ago

> Is Sundar a bad CEO or merely a mediocre one though?

I don't know, but I'm really sad to see how Android is currently performing in rich countries. Not stagnating, but losing.

Here, in Germany, Android had a market share of over 70%(!). But over the last three years alone, Apple started eating Android's lunch and iOS' market share has increased from 28% to 38%, while Android's has decreased by the same amount (from 69% to 60%) [1].

Personally, I'd say that at least Google's Android department is currently headless and has no idea what the users want.

Of course this has nothing to do with revenue of YT Premium, GCP and whatever else Google is offering, but it's making me sad regardless.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/693829/market-share-mobi...

soiler · 2 years ago

> Personally, I'd say that at least Google's Android department is currently headless and has no idea what the users want.

The clock change, while minor, really put the nail in the coffin for me. I have very little optimism for Android. Luckily, it still allows me to use an app to revert the clock display to an readable clock display. I don't particularly want to switch to iOS and I am happy about GrapheneOS, but it's still going to suffer from bad decisions coming from Android.