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This sounds like a nightmare lmao. Can you imagine trying to debug a system like this? Backend work is trawling through thousands of lines of carefully thought
by bccdee 4y ago
This sounds like a nightmare lmao.
Can you imagine trying to debug a system like this? Backend work is trawling through thousands of lines of carefully thought-out code trying to figure out where the bug is—I can't fathom trying to work on a large system where the logic just makes itself up as it goes.
- Swizec 4y agoYou thought funny book magicians were just bad at their craft didn’t you? Not so! They’re software engineers from the future dealing with AI-based systems.
- PurpleRamen 4y agoAt least future software engineers can be legitimately called priests and wizards, when they wield their prompts/prayers and witchcraft. And like with magic, you also never 100% know what you will get, just let the magic do its thing.
- ProllyInfamous 4y agoGPT-like entities have already allowed my grandiosity to think of itself in Harry Potter's cosmoverse, and I am now a legitimate "Spell Crafter". I think that part of my abilities/impact is that I can ask existential questions of humanity [as an autistic(HF) person with knowledge but no code schooling], and have reasonable roll-playing experiences which help me IRL to accomplish / solve daily nuisances. A comment elsewhere begs "a solution in search of a problem" [and I chose not even to engage with that person because I already have such easy, inexpensive access to an entire teams-worth of research assistants... and it costs almost nothing to operate indefinitely]. Solutions are real, they are here, and exist. The scary thing now is that this is going to allow rapid exploration, that is only limited by human creativity (which is already rare enough among us biological meatbags).
- spelunker 4y agoI would watch this
- cmontella 4y ago> a large system where the logic just makes itself up as it goes. What you describe is known as a “bureaucracy”, and indeed, it’s one of the seven levels of hell, and a primary weapon of vogons, next to poetry. That we aspire to put these in our computers, I agree, is unfathomable.
- abc_lisper 4y agoGreat analogy!!
- jcadam 4y agoAre we the Vogons?
- em-bee 4y agoDouglas Adams Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
- evrydayhustling 4y agoAlways were.
- ProllyInfamous 4y agoSee also: Star Trek's Ferengi . If you are unfamiliar with Star Trek's "cosmoverse," just go to http://perplexity.AI http://perplexity.AI , and ask it to explain anything from that storyline, including the Ferengi, who existed solely to allow the writers of Star Trek to "mock" some of human's more ridiculous notions of "fair" and "what is." It be happenin' The world isn't fair, and GPT-like technologies will and are already making sweeping existential questions for what it is to even be creative — this is such a rare "human" attribute as to be laughable that only a human could be capable of generative, useful content. True creativity is unhuman, even for those human's among us that think so highly of ourselves. "Good artists copy, great artists steal." —P.Picasso
- bccdee 4y agoI think the questions raised about creativity by generative neural nets have pretty simple answers. Creativity requires a certain amount of thought put into it: A writer doesn't just mash other pieces of writing together into their own work—they think about how they want the audience to react and what kinds of things they could do to create those reactions. An LLM doesn't have a model of an audience, nor can it even account for the fact that its work creates reactions in any way. Instead, it just blindly reproduces the patterns evident in the material it's trained on. An LLM isn't any more creative than a Markov generator is; it just produces higher-quality output.
- flanbiscuit 4y agoDebugging in the future will be like Dave talking to HAL, asking the backend why it decided to email all of the customers a 100% off coupon. "You've prioritized customer retention over all else so what better way to keep them then to offer a free service... Dave"
- robswc 4y agoThis is already happening in this small community I made on reddit, lol https://robswc.substack.com/p/chatgpt-is-inadvertently-spamming https://robswc.substack.com/p/chatgpt-is-inadvertently-spamm... On a _much_ smaller scale though.
- afpx 4y agoWhat if it can fix itself?
- andai 4y agoChatGPT (and GPT-3) can criticize its own output, and then incorporate its own feedback into an improved version. This works for essays, for code... I'm waiting for a Copilot upgrade that puts red squigglies under "probably wrong" code, because GPT-3 can already detect and fix most of it.
- int_19h 4y agoChatGPT can write prompts for itself, and it can do so recursively (i.e. you can direct it to write a prompt that causes the new instance to write a prompt ... etc). It can be fun trying to make the shortest prompt that survives the most iterations, and introducing additional requirements that every iteration must do makes it more challenging.
- flir 4y agoAmong other things I've been asking ChatGPT to implement algorithms ("can you turn this pseudocode into a Processing script?"), then iterate ("ok, now take the last two functions we wrote, put them in a class, and pass the string as an object variable"). It reminds me of a conversation with SHRDLU, but with code not blocks. It's a powerful feeling - you get to explore a problem space, but a lot of the grunt work is done by a helpful elf. The closest example I've found in fiction is this scene (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaUuE582vq8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaUuE582vq8) from TNG (Geordi solves a problem on the holodeck). The future of recreational programming, at least, is going to be fun. I learned to program by the "type in the listing from the magazine, and modify it" method, and I worry that we've built our tower of abstractions way too high. LLM's might bring some of the fun and exploration back to learning to code.
- ProllyInfamous 4y ago>LLM's might bring some of the fun and exploration back to learning to code. Absolutely. I am an extremely technical, well-read, but NOT A PROGRAMMER... and I am having fun learning to code well enough for Wikipedia editing (I have a 20+ year account there which is cited by ChatGPT when asking certain technical questions) and creation of simple JSON databases and movie script writing. I love how on YouTube all these <10k subscriber Prompt Engineers are just playing and having fun on their videos, and retiring from their dead-end IT jobs that can never afford to fully appreciate them. One particularly adept quote that I am just-now relating to (after six weeks playing with GPT-like systems) is when David Shapiro (YouTuber Tech Guy) says: "I have been in IT for decades and decided recently to just turn my phone/email off, because nobody appreciates what I'm trying to explain to them, until they just start playing around with it themselves... and then they want to call me and get information from me that initial was "stupid" — and I just don't have time for this" (less than faithfully paraphrasing). His entire channel is worth spending a few hours to understand; I would suggest starting in his collection with [AIpocolypse] then his very recent topic on [Companionship], and then lastly get a well-rounded POV by taking in a woman's incredible understanding of this technology by watching David Shapiro's interview with [Anna Bernstein]. I have turned my own phone off and am instead just playing around internally with this incredible tool that let's you access limitless datasets in mere seconds for less than a penny. ¢¢
- xwdv 4y agoA human powered backend would be better for certain systems where the data source isn’t digitized. All you do is make an API call, then a human goes to look up the data, comes back, writes the response according to a spec, and delivers it back to you.
- jahewson 4y ago> carefully thought-out code Let’s be honest, it’s not.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]