14 ms·

I completely disagree. I'm building a business, and this business will be based on excellent software and excellent support for that software. I will refuse t

• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• lolsowrong 4y ago
  You’re an inspiration. I’m going to open an accounting firm and refuse to use calculators.
  • lezojeda 4y ago
    [dead]
  • tricksforfree 4y ago
    How often are calculators confidently wrong?
    • lolsowrong 4y ago
      Depends on the calculator. Floating point imprecision is well documented.
      • tricksforfree 4y ago
        That's true. But we know exactly why it can't do it.
        • ben_w 4y ago
          How important is the "knowing why" if the mistakes are still there? And in reverse, we "know" GPT doesn't use a calculator unless specially pointed at one. Floating point errors creeping in is why we have to use quaternions instead of matrixes for 3D games. Apparently. I'd already given up on doing my own true-3D game engine by that point. In some sense we "know why" humans make mistakes too — and in many fields from advertising to political zeitgeist we manipulate using knowledge of common human flaws. On this basis I think the application of pedagogical and psychological studies to AI will be increasingly important.
      • kgwxd 4y ago
        Well documented is the key difference.
    • alex_sf 4y ago
      How often are people?
      • SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
        I think the difference, right now at least, is that people will go, "well, I'm not sure about this so I think we should look it up, but this is what I think" - the AI doesn't do that. It lies in the same exact way it tells truths. How are you supposed to make decisions based off of that information?
        • marcusjt 4y ago
          Does it lie? Or just get things wrong sometimes? Lying requires knowledge that what you are saying is not the truth, and usually there's a motive for doing so. I don't think ChatGPT is there yet... or is it?
          • SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
            Sure, it's not lying, you're right, there's no will there, I'm anthropomorphism. It is producing entirely wrong facts / pseudo-opinions (as it can't actually have an opinion).
            • ben_w 4y ago
              I was about to suggest "pathologically dishonest", but then I looked up the term and that seems to require being biased in favour of the speaker and knowing that you're saying falsehoods. "Confabulate" however, appears to be a good description. Confabulation is, I'm told, associated with Alzheimer's, and GPT's output does sometimes remind me of a few things my mum said while she was ill.
          • giaour 4y ago
            Technically, what ChatGPT is doing is bullshitting because it doesn't have any knowledge of or concern for truthfulness. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit
    • japhyr 4y ago
      As a math teacher, this is such a funny comparison to keep reading. Yes, there's a difference between a deterministic outcome and a non-deterministic one. But throw humans into the loop, and it becomes more interesting. I can't count the number of times I've listened to someone argue their answer must be right because they got it from the calculator. And it's not just students; as a teacher I've always paid attention to how adults use math. With calculators or GPT tools, or any other automated assistant, judgement and validation continues to matter.
      • Wowfunhappy 4y ago
        > I can't count the number of times I've listened to someone argue their answer must be right because they got it from the calculator. Answers from calculators are always right! But the human may have asked the wrong question.
        • lolsowrong 4y ago
          Go type .1*.2 into any JavaScript console. Edit: slapping a few more in here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/excel/floating-point-arithmetic-inaccurate-result https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/excel/... https://daviddeley.com/pentbug/index.htm https://daviddeley.com/pentbug/index.htm
          • tricksforfree 4y ago
            One deck is made of wood. One deck is made made of steel. They will behave differently after years of weathering. Just because they are both both decks doesn't mean they are the same.
            • lolsowrong 4y ago
              Are both useful in some context?
              • whynaut 4y ago
    • fnordpiglet 4y ago
      Every time the human supervising it makes a mistake in their role in the relationship between user and tool.
    • Veen 4y ago
      There's a lot of work happening at the moment around self-reflection and getting LLMs to identify and correct their own hallucinations and mistakes. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.11366.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.11366.pdf
      • lanstin 4y ago
        I suspect some temporality will need to be added. There are times when writing the code you have a question because the code exposes an unexpressed choice in the requirements. When you are coding in linear time, you then know to go ask the question. I am not sure that just generating the most likely or most rewarded response will do that easily. It seems to just arbitrarily pick the most likely requirement.
    • ipaddr 4y ago
      As often as people put in incorrect values. As often as someone goes beyond the range. Always when someone tries to add yellow to blue. Often when the wrong formula is used. And in this case you don't get to put in the formula.
    • wkat4242 4y ago
      This is the thing. ChatGPT shouldn't be that confident in its wording IMO.. If it just said "according to me" instead of stating things as fact, people would have much less problems with it. We know this wording is just show but people still get swayed by it and believe it must be true.
      • AlecSchueler 4y ago
        Yeah and it can actually reflect on itself and its mistakes when prompted, so I can see a fix like this coming soon. Sometimes just asking, Are you sure? is enough for it to apologize and say a part of its answer wasn't based in known fact. Also another point while I'm here: Many many humans I've met are often confident when incorrect as well and can and will bullshit an answer when it suits their comfort.
        • lanstin 4y ago
          But no one asserts the existence of those people will forever change society.
    • hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
      People keep saying this, pointing out the "mistakes with confidence" aspect of LLMs, but as someone who is continually amazed by ChatGPT and finds it very useful in my day-to-day, it's hard for me to take this objection seriously if presented as a reason not to use AI. That is, for me, the output of ChatGPT or other AI tools is the starting point of my investigation, not the end output. Yes, if you just blindly paste the output from an AI tool you're going to have a bad time, but we also standardize code reviews into the human code-writing process - this isn't that different. Just giving one specific example, I find ChatGPT to my an incredibly efficient "documentation lookup tool". E.g. it's great if I'm working with a new technology or API and I want to know "what my options are", but I don't know what keywords to search for, it can help give me a really good "lay of the land", and from there I can read on my own to get more specifics.
      • the_doctah 4y ago
        Maybe you haven't used it enough. ChatGPT is wrong all the time for me, sometimes insultingly wrong. The confidence in it's incorrect answers just makes it that much worse. I can't buy any of this hype for a "word-putting-together" algorithm. It's not real intelligence.
        • hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
          Please give some examples then. I've found the GPT-4 version to be remarkably accurate, and when it makes mistakes it's not hard to spot them. For example, I commented last week that I've found ChatGPT to be a great tool for managing my task list, and for whatever reason the "verbal" back-and-forth works much better for my brain than a simple checklist-based todo app: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35390644 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35390644 . But, I also pointed out how it will get the sums for my "task estimate totals by group" wrong. But it's so easy to see this mistake, and after using it for a while I have a good understanding for when it's likely to occur, that it doesn't lessen the value I get from using the tool.
          • timr 4y ago
    • pwinnski 4y ago
      There are three types of lies, as the saying goes: lies, damned lies, and statistics. But why are statistics considered lies? Because of how they're used. If you think of AI as a source of truth, obviously you're going to run into trouble: it "lies"! But if instead of thinking of it in isolation, you think of the person+AI producing results, then you should trust that person exactly as much as you would whether or not they use AI.
    • RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
      Calculators use floating point and can have catastrophic errors if not used correctly. So yes, calculators can be confidently wrong.
    • onion2k 4y ago
      AI is confidently wrong about a lot of things, but that doesn't mean it's useless. It means you need to verify what it generates. Doing that for code is much easier than prose. AI that produces wrong code is immediately and obviously wrong. It can't really fool you. It's easy to test. You can even ask AI to write tests for the code it produces to demonstrate it's correct.
      • weatherlite 4y ago
        Tests help but tests can be wrong as well, if this was all so easy we wouldn't have any bugs.
      • lanstin 4y ago
        Just because it is making obvious errors doesn’t mean it isn’t also making subtle errors.
    • sharemywin 4y ago
      People are confidently wrong all the time and yet we still seem to get stuff done. A tool is a tool. it has good uses and not good uses. as the human you figure out where it works and where it doesn't.
    • carlosjobim 4y ago
      Every time they are wrong, which is every time the user slips on a key.
  • mvdl 4y ago
    Accounting firms don't use calculators that often. They mostly use "What number do you need from us to give you fantasized credit ratings to fool the taxpayers". Accounting firms would benefit greatly from biased AI.
  • phkahler 4y ago
    The equivalent is more like having your accountants tell chatGPT what to have the software you already have do. You're adding an extra thing in the mix, and while the person will ostensibly be checking the AIs work, they will eventually become dependent on it. When something goes wrong nobody will know how to fix it. You'll miss payroll or something and be absolutely fucked. As a software engineer, I'm not concerned about people using AI to write simple functions. That's not where my value is - it absolutely incidental to me.
  • gavinhoward 4y ago
    Username checks out because you missed the point. Yes, I know calculators can encourage people to not think; I should know because I wrote one. [1] But the current "AI" tech is so much worse on that front. It's a difference of degree, and that degree does matter. By the way, when I was learning to fly helicopters [2], I used my calculator to calculate weight and balances, but I also did it by hand! [1]: https://git.gavinhoward.com/gavin/bc https://git.gavinhoward.com/gavin/bc [2]: https://gavinhoward.com/2022/09/grounded-for-life-losing-the-dream-of-flight/ https://gavinhoward.com/2022/09/grounded-for-life-losing-the...
    • throwaway5371 4y ago
      thats a weird flex
    • fnovd 4y ago
      I'm sure that all was very rewarding for you. I'm not sure how it translates into a business. We don't want to teach accountants to deploy their own calculator from the command line and we don't want pilots to do math while they're flying. You act like encouraging people not to think is a problem. Thing is, you'd be wrong. We want people not just to think, but to focus. If I'm a pilot and I have to worry about the runtime environment of the command-line calculator I use to hand-calculate my route and cockpit configuration, is that a good use of my focus? I think most people would say no. We definitely want to discourage the pilot from actively thinking about that kind of stuff. Should they have a grasp of the basics in case of emergency? Sure. Do we have a sustainable and efficient system of transportation if that's how our pilots spend their time? No.
      • jacquesm 4y ago
        It is the ability to do the calculations that matters, not that you would do so in actual practice. He very explicitly mentioned 'while I was learning'.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • gavinhoward 4y ago
  • jacquesm 4y ago
    This comment is not useful. Calculators are not a replacement for human intelligence and creativity.
  • m463 4y ago
    I'm going to open a law firm, and instead of using AI to generate volumes of documents, I will write them all, in cursive.
• londons_explore 4y ago
  > becoming more like the AI... Current AI systems have a wide variety of outputs. They can totally be asked to complete a task in a 'wildly unusual' way, and will come up with all kinds of non-bland answers, just as you hope to do manually... If answers being 'non-bland' is your differentiator, then someone will come along and specifically ask an AI for that.
  • gavinhoward 4y ago
    And the AI, not being any different from the AI used by anyone else, will not give an answer that isn't bland. It's still the same weights used by everyone else.
• pixl97 4y ago
  "Instead of using a motor vehicle, I will deliver all packages by hand" I mean, yea, in places it would succeed as a boutique business, but you're not building the next Amazon that way either.
  • rolfea 4y ago
    Promise?
  • Retric 4y ago
    Meanwhile Amazon actually operates by people walking to pickup and deliver most packages by hand to be boxed up. People can actually get a lot of work done in an hour to the point where many things that don’t seem like they should scale end up being trivial expenses.
    • hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
      > Meanwhile Amazon actually operates by people walking to pickup and deliver most packages by hand to be boxed up Given how much Amazon invests in automation that's a pretty gross mischaracterization of what they do.
      • Retric 4y ago
        They have been increasing automation, but over the lifetime of the company it’s a reasonable description for how the majority of all packages where handled. What’s eye opening is the kiva robots only increase the items picked per worker per hour from ~100 to ~300 even though they drastically reduce the amount of walking.
        • hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
          "only"? You just pointed out that they result in 300% increased worker productivity and that's "only"??? Especially when this discussion is based around someone saying they won't use technological productivity enhancers because they want to go the "bespoke" route.
• simonw 4y ago
  Will you use a spellchecker when you send out emails about your company? How about doing research with a regular search engine? "Refusing to use AI" doesn't make sense to me as a blanket policy. If you're going to make that commitment - to yourself or to anyone else - you'll need to be a lot more precise in what you actually mean by that.
  • hiccuphippo 4y ago
    It's like being a vegan knowing farms still use bees for pollination and "organic" fertilizers from animal farms, or a human rights activist who uses a smartphone. Sometimes people just want to feel good about themselves and ignore the cognitive dissonance.
    • davisoneee 4y ago
      This seems willfully antagonistic and simplistic. There are degrees of effort in any lifestyle. Degrees of 'veganism', or 'anti-AI' use. Is there _really_ cognitive dissonance of someone doing some action to reduce their impact on animal welfare? Doing _more than most people_ to reduce their impact on animals? I say this as a regular meat eater, not a vegan. Your point comes across as bait-y for the sake of being bait-y, rather than contributing anything meaningful to the conversation.
    • fnovd 4y ago
      Someone worried about the exploitation of bees is still going to be a vegan, since it takes more acres of crops to grow a pound of beef than a nutritionally-equivalent basket of produce. The idyllic picture of cows grazing in an open field might be accurate as far as the number of farms on the planet, but pound-for-pound our meat comes from factory farms where they grow massive amounts of corn and soy to feed the animals.
  • gavinhoward 4y ago
    It's a difference of degree. I still check the output of the spell checker. I still check the output of the search engine. The problem with these "AI" tools is that they are magnitudes more likely to encourage you to not check the output because checking the output takes orders of magnitude longer than it does to check the output of a spell checker or search engine. Do people refer to spell checkers as AI? No, so I don't include that. But I also don't use spell checkers, actually, including on my blog. [1] [1]: https://gavinhoward.com/ https://gavinhoward.com/
• ghaff 4y ago
  The human touch is (often) an advantage. Often, because I don't actually want to go into a bank branch and interact with a teller for the most part. However, I expect that quality human touch will increasingly be a premium service for those willing to pay more. Which is of course a valid business model of which there are many examples.
  • gavinhoward 4y ago
    I agree. Funny you mention banks and tellers. I just recently switched to a bank that has no phone tree; a human always picks up the phone. I also go in-person to do a lot of the stuff I need for security. It's a wonderful thing to me. Maybe most people don't want it, but I sure do.
• seydor 4y ago
  > Having the human touch will be an advantage, not a disadvantage. Maybe if you re selling high-end coffee or leather bags for status. That's the fashion industry
• m348e912 4y ago
  AI driven business will be cheaper, and faster. The "better" factor will be a case by case situation. One could argue that your competitor combined with their skills, expertise, AND AI would have a market advantage over you.
  • gavinhoward 4y ago
    And my bet is that they will not, long term. If you use "AI" to increase productivity, you're doing it by reviewing the code from the "AI" less than you would your own. That lack of review, and testing, will slow down velocity over time as the software becomes untenable, unmanageable, and too complicated to understand. Meanwhile, my slow velocity at first will result in great design and little technical debt. Eventually, my velocity will increase, and I'll beat my competitors. "A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept." [1] [1]: https://gist.github.com/gtallen1187/e83ed02eac6cc8d7e185 https://gist.github.com/gtallen1187/e83ed02eac6cc8d7e185
    • m348e912 4y ago
      I think you're describing the difference of AI creating code vs developing _with_ AI which firmly keeps humans in charge but enabling them to be many times more efficient.
      • gavinhoward 4y ago
        They'll only be more efficient if they don't review the code. Otherwise, these tools are just typing helpers, and typing is a small part of the job.
        • m348e912 4y ago
          Not sure I agree, but to be fair my perspective is informed by this talk I watched not too long ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmJ4xLC1ObU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmJ4xLC1ObU
          • 4y ago
• maxilevi 4y ago
  Maybe it will be true for niche creative work, but I really doubt people care if your k8s custom resource definition yaml files have the “human touch” or not
  • marginalia_nu 4y ago
    To be fair, you probably don't need k8s either. In fact, steering clear of it will free up a lot of time and effort to actually being productive.
  • falcolas 4y ago
    Ironically, people being confidently incorrect - people copying and pasting yaml files without taking the time to understand the boilerplate - have probably cost companies billions of dollars in resource overallocation and downtime. The files compile, but boy is it wrong.
• partiallypro 4y ago
  This may work for creative roles, but it won't work for data entry, number crunching, task automation, etc. No one cares if a human is doing a mundane task. The thing is...creative roles are limited.
• lambic2 4y ago
  That sounds similar to companies in the 1960's refusing to use "soulless" computing machines aka computers. Not sure it worked out well for them...
• jmfldn 4y ago
  I think the zero sum, "use AI everywhere" vs "don't use it at all" are both to be avoided. The wise path is somewhere in the middle. On avoiding it, if your competitors are getting massive productivity gains from AI tools, your hand-crafted, artisanal code is going to be expensive and your customers will vote with their wallets.
  • rf15 4y ago
    Exactly. I am absolutely no fan of the new AI products, and the only question you have to answer for yourself is: can you leverage this technology for what you are trying to do? For me the answer was "yes", and I now enjoy having copilot around to dynamically type boilerplate I'd need much longer to type and fill out myself.
    • goldfeld 4y ago
      Why would you be absolutely no fan of a sure technological improvement? Is it because of the personal threat to professionals? Not commenting personally on you here, but I am very surprised at programmers' lack of nose for opportunities and how, after realizing GPT could do coding even before replacing retail and industry jobs, coders are completely on the defense. Is it a threat to job availability and security? Yes, but programmers have long been to other professionals (doctors even?) what AI is now to them (I was a coder too). Well, tough luck, the world changes and fast, better to try to create and carve out a new job or business idea for yourself than stand on denial of something that, good or bad, could either make or break humanity, but humanity has no say on the inexorable progress of ideas. This actually is science right here, don't tech people embrace science, or only when the collateral damage is elsewhere and not on them?
      • rf15 4y ago
        The technology's hype precedes it whenever you try to engage with it. On the surface, it looks a lot like the bitcoin hype, and if you remember IBM Watson you might get the idea that nothing much will come of it. So for me, I will keep using it, but I have nothing but disdain for the people worrying about AI overtaking the world, claiming this will revolutionise everything/etc.. Especially since this technology is almost good enough to tempt lay people to believe the statistically related words to your query would mean anything. In fact, iirc this has already happened and e.g. caused a suicide.
• ajmurmann 4y ago
  Not sure how this all will play out. It's interesting though that many of the Luddites also kept calling out the unacceptably low quality of the textile products made using automation.
• nemo44x 4y ago
  There's this really good story called "John Henry".
• jodacola 4y ago
  I like this perspective, despite being incredibly excited about the advancements and potential of AI. While it kind of feels like reading tea leaves right now, I can see a time where AI-driven products prosper, lowering the bar for good ideas to come to market that may have otherwise not. Some of those good ideas will take off; those AI-built products may not be able to keep up. Where those AI-built products can't keep up is where non-AI or post-AI (or whatever we want to term it) businesses like yours, or experts, or consultancies, can come in and help those AI-built businesses grow beyond their original constraints. I'm personally excited by it all. It suddenly feels to me like the Wild West (positive and negative connotations included) and we're all on an adventure together.
• shadowgovt 4y ago
  Possibly. This is certainly a pattern that works in other industries. I am aware of a local glass company with about 50 years of operation under its belt. They have tooling, but the process is heavily manual; no aspect of it is end-to-end automated. Their primary customers are those requiring high precision for industrial applications (electrical, aeronautics). They are forever capacity-capped because their model doesn't scale; the benefits of adding labor are sub-linear, so there's a "healthy size" for them and they leave money on the table if they scale in either direction from it. But they have their niche, they fit it nicely, and they continue to operate.
  • deebosong 4y ago
    This might be a bad comparison. But I feel like Marvel movies (and TV shows) tried to scale, and lost it. And that there was a sweet-spot, where less was more. It's way to oversimplified, but I think they tried to churn out hits from a factory after a build-up in some home runs, but then took on too much and have diluted their films & shows, where it's all a bit flat and underdelivering what audiences expected. I like this glass company, though. Seems like they know what's up.
    • shadowgovt 4y ago
      There is one thing that's killing them, where they could stand to automate. Their sales and purchase-order process is also still manual; people answering emails by hand and filling out (literal carbon paper) triplicate work orders. But their aerospace customers have gone to zero-inventory kanban-style resource management, and that's a system that assumes a certain level of automation. We're talking companies placing orders by machine that then auto-generates the emails, where an email at 9AM says they need 400 of a widget by next month, an order update at 1PM says to cancel 200 of those, another update at 3PM says add an additional 500, and a final update at 6PM says cancel-whole-order, some planes just got delayed, we'll pay the $100 cancellation penalty. None of that scales. It just runs the sales team ragged (literally; they're literally running out to the factory floor to find the third carbon copy and yank it from the production queue by thumbing through the queue).
• fnordpiglet 4y ago
  John Henry beat the steam powered drill after all!
  • gavinhoward 4y ago
    Yes, he did. But working machines vs thinking machines is still a different ball game. I won't give details of why I believe the way I do (I might someday; I have a blog post draft), but I'm extremely confident that thinking machines will never surpass humans.
    • fnordpiglet 4y ago
      Here’s the thing - John Henry died beating a machine designed only to dig a hole. But JH was capable of almost any task but chose to die to best a machine at one thing. Thinking machines already blow away humans at most single tasks if they’re designed towards that tasks. There are a few that LLM are assaulting that humans are undeniably better at, some more that aren’t currently being assaulted. As some point it will be possible to assemble these single task machines into an ensemble. They will collaborate in human superior ways to accomplish most human tasks in a superior way. But there may still be areas we can’t cover with our machines. More importantly I think for the same reason we don’t build steam drills that also weave cloth we won’t build machines that are better than humans at all things. What’s the point? Other than novelty the only reason I can see to make a machine that’s superior to humans at all things is interplanetary terraforming or other such space operations requiring extreme intelligence and adaptability and capability while surviving a hostile environment. Even then, the act of hardening the complex electronics required might make it easier to just make a nice terrarium for humans. I don’t believe there’s any argument possible that we are prohibited by physics from creating an intelligence like our own. This would imply a few things. There could be no other intelligence like ours, because we are unique - but already we know of many animals with approaching intelligence, we evolved from animals less intelligent, and it would preclude alien intelligence because somehow we are exceptions. Or, intelligence requires some “spark” from the divine - there’s been nothing that provides any evidence of such a thing and as we whittle top down and bottoms up, it appears more likely that while extraordinarily rare, it’s a naturally emergent phenomenon- and if there is a divine spark it’s the spark of life and evolution that leads human level intelligence. Or, there’s some complex process we haven’t understood that leads to human intelligence (quantum, whatever). Even if true it can be understood and replicated, that’s what science does. Even if any one of these is right the last one holds true. The amazing thing about intelligence combined with the process of science is if there is any mechanism by which intelligence arises, it must be observable, and if it’s observable, it can be replicated, and it must be possible to be created by humans.
• kolinko 4y ago
  Is your home furniture from an artisan craftsman, or from Ikea?
  • ipaddr 4y ago
    Craftsman. Who buys garbage from Ikea? This is a site where people make faang money not min wage. Do you eat at McD everyday or pay more for quality
• wkat4242 4y ago
  I think this is like people in the 90s saying they'll never use a mobile phone. Or that they didn't want this newfangled 'internet', because their desk phone, written letters and books are fine. Sure there's some people still living like that in modern society but they are really rare. Yet in those days hearing this sentiment was really common.
• mromanuk 4y ago
  I understand your stance on the use of artificial intelligence and how you hope to differentiate yourself from AI users by focusing on excellent software and support. However, AI has the potential to enhance efficiency and accuracy in many cases, which can be beneficial for both the company and the customer. Being able to adapt to emerging technologies is a key component of business success, and completely rejecting AI may limit your ability to compete in the future. Of course, the implementation of AI should be strategic and balanced with the need for personalized human touch
• packetlost 4y ago
  This is a more extreme take than I would make, but I largely agree. I think the real-world capabilities of current AI are vastly overestimated. Are there areas where it will create new possibilities? Absolutely. Will it make some workflows faster? Yeah, probably. Will it make software development faster? Maybe the really common stuff that "generic". I think in reality we'll see small marginal gains in a slightly better autocorrect for all but the most basic of CRUD and web dev. I just haven't seen the level of correctness and higher order understanding that's necessary for real software engineering. I keep seeing people saying they use it to generate tests, but are they also using it to generate the code under test? I'd be highly concerned with people relying on a tool that is inherently unreliable to do the majority of work. Human brains are bad interpreters, but AI is an even worse one. Maybe it will get there eventually, but I don't think GPT3/4 is it.
• moonchrome 4y ago
  As AI perfects mimicking human output, the line between human and AI-generated content becomes irrelevant. Once "organic" content is trendy, the market will flood with cheap fakes. Good luck with your "differentiator" in a sea of indistinguishable content.
  • Herval_freire 4y ago
    It could one day be possible for AI content to be so superior to human content that it becomes distinguishable. We may actually be identifying human content by how inferior it is to AI generated content. It could be happening already.
    • kingboss 4y ago
      Why would I choose the inferior product?
      • moonchrome 4y ago
        Have you met hipsters ?
      • Herval_freire 4y ago
        Who said you would? You'd choose the superior product.
• goldfeld 4y ago
  On the other hand, I think semi-business productivity will skyrocket. Just think what the landscape for open source will look like in even a year. There will be lots of cool motives that are not for profit greatly enhanced by AI, and I think it could point to brighter and more intellectual futures (of course, where intellect activities will be even more elitized than today, sort of a regress to the previous centuries, but with vast more output and better), albeit after a crunch period. For instance, I review all that the AI writes for my newsletter[0], but the kind of content I put out now wasn't easily done (teaching Chinese through relatively obscure rock songs, and also programming in Chinese) without lots more work and knowledge, and that means I wouldn't have done it without the magic AI employee. 0: https://chinesememe.substack.com/i/103754530/chinesepython https://chinesememe.substack.com/i/103754530/chinesepython
• vitehozonage 4y ago
  AI is not well-defined and what has that label will change quickly. So I suppose you just have to stay a bit behind the times.
• Herval_freire 4y ago
  Given the progress, current trendline point to a possible future where AI content is indistinguishable from the "human touch". AI content may even be preferable and better than human produces content. People are reacting to AI as it is right now without projecting where this technology is going in the future. Given the rate of progress in the past year, the scenario I describe is a possibility that is insane not to consider.
  • JohnFen 4y ago
    > Given the rate of progress in the past year, the scenario I describe is a possibility that is insane not to consider. Personally speaking, there's no point to me considering that. If what you are projecting turns out to be true, all it means is that there no place for me anymore.
    • Herval_freire 4y ago
      Why? What should affect whether something is considered is it's likelihood of happening. If AI has a 99% chance of replacing you, then you'd rather consider the 1% alternative simply because there's no place for you anymore? If AI will replace you there are steps that can be taken to prevent it from replacing you. This involves things like Resistance or changing what you do into something that can't be as easily replaced.
      • JohnFen 4y ago
        > What should affect whether something is considered is it's likelihood of happening. Right, which is why I don't spend a lot of time considering a future where "AI content may even be preferable and better than human produces content." In part because I don't think this is likely at all. But also in part because if it does happen, then there's literally no way to compete with that. My career will be over, and it's unclear that there would be any other careers to switch to. > If AI will replace you there are steps that can be taken to prevent it from replacing you I'm having a very hard time seeing what could be done (in the possible future we're talking about). > changing what you do into something that can't be as easily replaced. But the possible future we're discussing is one where there isn't anything that I can't be easily replaced at. All that would be left is menial labor.
• chewz 4y ago
  > The economic value of mediocre and derivative work is plummeting. But the value of truly excellent and original work will become even more unique, more highly prized. > A chasm between the third best and fourth best script writer, graphic designer, lawyer, etc. is just starting to open. ChatGPT might write the next Marvel movie but will never write the next Everything Everywhere All at Once. Not my words. By Eric Peters CIO of One River Asset Management
  • nightski 4y ago
    So a race to the bottom. I wouldn't rely on the "truly excellent and original work" crutch for very long.
  • Al-Khwarizmi 4y ago
    I think it may turn out to be like that but I don't see it as guaranteed. How can we be so sure that GPT-8 will not write things that we consider to be really original and unique? I know, it's trained with human data and its output is based on that. The same can be said of human authors, though. Arguably we never create an idea from scratch, originality is just putting ideas together in really non-standard ways.
    • lanstin 4y ago
      Useful non standard ways. I think trying to make a context free intelligent system is making it excessively hard for the AGI folks. Our brain definitely figures out what to do for pre-sentient reasons, or using pre-sentient hardware.
  • Retric 4y ago
    Except they can’t actually write the next Marvel movie today. I suspect AI getting good enough to create a Marvel movie is basically indistinguishable from it being able to create a good movie. The problem is LLM’s are basically just creating gibberish which mimics meaningful text well enough you don’t notice it’s meaningless as long as it’s a short enough sample. Modern AI techniques are approaching human level capacity by combining a lifetime worth of information in their training sets with nearly human levels of computation. It’s not at the level of professionals, but being roughly as good as a teenager means crossing that threshold could happen well before people are ready for it.
• danogentili 4y ago
  Heartily agree with this worldview: as I argued in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34277750 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34277750, I believe this is how creatives will be able to make a living in a post-AI world, by continuing to hand-craft art, stories and software that will stand out from the bland AI-generated landscape, and will be enjoyed by other humans, bored by and/or not willing to consume an endless flood of AI-generated content.
  • Herval_freire 4y ago
    You're failing to account for the trajectory of this technology where AI easily produces content indistinguishable and superior to human content. When such A I content becomes cheap and pervasive then AI will suddenly turn into a mirror to humanity. It will show us that "hand crafted" content is itself part of a bland and mechanical content generation algorithm.
    • danogentili 4y ago
      Two things: 1) That is a horribly denigrative view of human creativity, one that simply does not reflect reality. 2) I kind of don't care: creativity always was and always will be about humans wanting to create something, the satisfaction and excitement of writing down a fanfic you've been thinking about for the last 3 weeks, the emotion of bringing your thoughts to life. Even with endless AI-generated content, I will never stop using my imagination (regardless of whether there will or won't be a market for it, and regardless of whether it may be worse than, say, dostoevskij's works), and the same holds true for every other creative individual on this planet, and I feel sorry for the people that never felt the feeling of creative excitement, and would rather waste years of their life consuming soulless content.
      • Herval_freire 4y ago
        >1) That is a horribly denigrative view of human creativity, one that simply does not reflect reality. No it's not. It's a realistic view. Do not discount a view just because it's not inline with positivity. Only the realism of the view should be considered. And unfortunately it does reflect reality. There's a huge amount of data supporting my viewpoint. Most of the content right now on the internet in books and in movies are generic human generated content. The very existence of this content is indisputable evidence for this. Also you can't discount the trajectory of AI technology. The progress of the last decade is indicative of progress for the next decade. It the trend continues, logically, the only outcome is that the AI surpasses us. >2) I kind of don't care: creativity always was and always will be about humans wanting to create something, the satisfaction and excitement of writing down a fanfic you've been thinking about for the last 3 weeks, the emotion of bringing your thoughts to life. Even with endless AI-generated content, I will never stop using my imagination (regardless of whether there will or won't be a market for it, and regardless of whether it may be worse than, say, dostoevskij's works), and the same holds true for every other creative individual on this planet, and I feel sorry for the people that never felt the feeling of creative excitement, and would rather waste years of their life consuming soulless content. Good for you. It's good to exercise your creative brain and be excited about it. My comment isn't about this at all. It's simply about how your and other peoples content could become indistinguishable and inferior to AI. You can be creative all you want, it doesn't mean other people will care or want to consume the creative products you produce.
• labrador 4y ago
  I hate to break it to you, but a for loop is a for loop is a for loop is a for loop...
  • lanstin 4y ago
    Here, I have this short program; can you please tell me if it will terminate or loop forever?
    • Closi 4y ago
      Humans can’t solve this either :)
      • lanstin 4y ago
        My point is code is very very complex, contrary to the for loop is a for loop is a for loop is a for loop.
• yieldcrv 4y ago
  I started a business over the last week and I Rapidly iterated domain names with chatgpt Did logo mockups in midjourney AI Did website list mockups in midjourney AI Rapidly iterated copy and cool sounding text with ChatGPT Got font faces and style guides with ChatGPT Got landing page code in React with ChatGPT I can code. I would have been distracted by juggling all of the designers that I hired, so distracted that I probably would have hired a developer. Slowed down by 2-3 weeks waiting for acceptable output from the hired professionals, or discouraged and forgotten about this business idea. I didnt lay off anybody, I also didnt hire anybody. I looked up “prompt engineer” on fiverr just to see if that looked viable, its already oversaturated and nobody has orders in queue. I think the “take our jobs” will start and be more pronounced with a silent lack of open positions.
  • tricksforfree 4y ago
    Why did you use React for landing page?
    • lezojeda 4y ago
      [dead]
    • yieldcrv 4y ago
      Because I want the option of putting it on my github and showing potential employers who also use React that this is what I do in my spare time, because they like to believe that Hedging bets by simply being consistent and staying relevant. There aren't many open source opportunities that also feel like a good a use of my time I also like it. Specifically, I use Next.js with Typescript. A lot of components I use and will use leverage this paradigm.
    • the_lonely_road 4y ago
      Not the OP but I use React for all my small projects. I do it because it’s the right tool for the job. Why is it the right tool? Because I seems 40 hours a week working with mammoth React projects and therefore its the tool I can “just be productive” in. When working in side projects it’s critical for me to maximize time spent working on the business logic rather than reading documentation on some new tool and googling new error messages to figure out what I didn’t glue together correctly.
• mvdl 4y ago
  Absolutely! Laziness is the reason so many bright minds waste their talent in optimizing ads, maximizing nudging and producing clickbait because "it pays me such an awesome salary" and this same laziness is slowly causing the decline of big tech. Stay human, it is what we are.
• dkjaudyeqooe 4y ago
  > Human laziness will drive them to accept more and more of what the AI says with less and less review of it. People do this with evil marketing, the unscrupulous, personality cults, etc. Humans will always be human. What is particularly stupid about the current AI panic is that the credulous are quickly extrapolating this to the dawn of general AI instead of seeing it for what it is: a potentially useful tool in a much larger toolbox. Inexact tools have been around forever (see mathematics) and they can be useful when, say, paired with another tool (like a human) that is effective at interpreting, evaluating and adapting results. These are the sort of applications people should be thinking about. Instead people are dreaming about how ChatGPT is going to write the next killer app for them, anthropologizing it (it's not 'wrong', it's 'hallucinating') and generally letting their imagination running away with them. More thoughtful people will see the strengths and weaknesses of the technology and move it a step forward, making it a more useful tool. This isn't new, it's been happening since humans started using rocks and fire. One day people will laugh about how people in 2023 got taken by a chat bot.
• Al-Khwarizmi 4y ago
  > Having the human touch will be an advantage, not a disadvantage. My guess is that having the human touch could be like being a tailor in the age of big textile corporations. Sure, a minority of people use them (and larger numbers use them for really special occasions, e.g. wedding dresses) but it's a tiny portion of the market. Which of course doesn't mean that you can't be one of the actors of that small market, good luck!
  • gavinhoward 4y ago
    Thank you! And I think you're right, except that I am also betting that that tiny portion of the market will grow as the market becomes flooded with cheap, wrong stuff.
• Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  Over the weekend, I was trying to add a feature to a largely unfamiliar codebase. ChatGPT appeared to have knowledge of this codebase, so I asked it many questions as I worked, in order to understand the big picture. In hindsight, I'm pretty sure almost every answer ChatGPT gave me was wrong. However, even with this outcome—I've had cases where ChatGPT was significantly more accurate—I think ChatGPT was helpful on net. The ability to propose ideas and talk through problems with a robot was really helpful when I got stuck, in a socratic dialog sort of way. Perhaps I could have gotten the same result from some sort of question-formulation exercise—all of the useful insights ultimately came from me—but I think ChatGPT's responses helped me follow my own reasoning, if that makes sense.
  • mateo411 4y ago
    It sounds like you used ChatGPT as a rubber duck. Although this rubber duck can talk back to you.
• JohnFen 4y ago
  This is 100% what I've been thinking, too.
• gautamdivgi 4y ago
  Everyone uses AI today directly or indirectly. All search engines and possibly stackoverflow and Reddit will start supporting LLMs. Unless you never use these in your business you will be using AI.
  • gavinhoward 4y ago
    I doubt marginalia_ru's search engine will, but even if it does, I'll make my own. Yeah, I am that sure of my position.
• eloff 4y ago
  You’re going to develop this software in house and not allow your engineers to use AI in that process? That’s not only unenforceable, it’s business suicide.
  • gavinhoward 4y ago
    I don't have employees, never will. Pretty easy to enforce if it's just me.
    • eloff 4y ago
      I guess if you never grow that much. I don’t know why you would purposefully handicap yourself by not taking advantage of the tools available. Why make yourself less competitive?
      • gavinhoward 4y ago
        Because I think "AI" is the handicap. "AI" will help at first, sure, but as it is used more and more, the code will become less and less well-designed and built. My code, on the other hand, will retain full quality, and my long-term velocity will out-pace anyone using those tools. "A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept." [1] [1]: https://gist.github.com/gtallen1187/e83ed02eac6cc8d7e185 https://gist.github.com/gtallen1187/e83ed02eac6cc8d7e185
        • eloff 4y ago
          I’ve been using GitHub copilot and ChatGPT at work for a year now. I think you’re wrong. You don’t just wily nilly accept code from the AI anymore than you would from stackoverflow. But it would also be silly to ban yourself from copying code from stackoverflow. Don’t trust any code, regardless of the source, and don’t stop using your brain.
          • gavinhoward 4y ago
            With how bad SO has gotten, I actually don't copy code from there anymore.
• falcolas 4y ago
  It's funny to me how many people want to skip writing boilerplate and view AI as their salvation from boilerplate. Yet boilerplate is probably one of the most automated-away tasks in existence today. Templates and templating engines have been in our languages (C pre-processor, Lisp macros, etc) and IDEs since forever, and every reasonably sized company I've worked for has had repository and git and k8s and spring boot and django templates available for use. And let's not even mention Googling for boilerplate on Stack Overflow. But, more subtly, the number of people who want to ignore boilerplate entirely is a bit scary too. That boilerplate is where security issues worm their way in. Where efficiencies can be won or lost. Where sev0 incidents are born. Boilerplate isn't there to frustrate you, it's usually there to configure your program. And if you don't understand it - if you simply delegate its generation to the least smart entity in the room - you're in for some nice 3am phone calls.
• jacquesm 4y ago
  This is roughly how I look at it. Human certified product will command a premium in a world where AI will lose its ability to differentiate. And if at some point we really can't tell the difference any more then we should re-think our societies and what makes us human, because then we might as well roll over and give computers voting rights.
• asdfman123 4y ago
  Counterpoint: one thing I think AI will be able to do really well early on is refactoring. Code is often ugly because humans just don't have the time to make it look nice. But if I had a good AI tool, I could make my code beautiful. This is hardly the first time humans have invented a tool to make complicated tasks easy. The sweet spot has always been knowing how to use the tools to maximize your productivity, but also knowing how to do it the hard way too in case something breaks.
  • gavinhoward 4y ago
    Countercounterpoint: I doubt that AI will do as well in refactoring as me. I refactor religiously. I hate code that is subpar, so I'll refactor and refactor. In my current project, I have 180 commits that mention refactoring in the log message, and some of those are huge redesign commits. And I haven't even released it yet!
    • asdfman123 4y ago
      I would do that if I could, but at my brand name tech company (and a lot of others) they seem to treat refactoring as completely wasted time.
      • gavinhoward 4y ago
        That sucks. I'm sorry.
        • asdfman123 4y ago
          I manage to slip it in out of principle, but my whole career I've been cleaning up other people's messes and getting pushback. I think the original "10x engineer" study showed that engineers that wrote clean code maximize everyone else's productivity. (It's debatable, but certainly a good argument in favor of writing good code.) But most people seem to think that the most productive engineers are the ones who can create features as rapidly as possible.
• teawrecks 4y ago
  "Sure, robot assembly units have a much higher throughput with a much lower error rate and virtually zero risk for injury, but they lack a 'human touch'. That will be our differentiating factor." Even if one manufacturer gets away with this argument, it fundamentally hinges on them being the minority. The question then becomes who will be the lucky few to get away with this argument? And what will the vast majority choose to do instead?
  • gavinhoward 4y ago
    Working machines are different from thinking machines.