3 ms·

I really like the argument about misinformation vs testing. I'm not totally sold on "you can just see it", but I do think something like TDD could suddenly be r

by boulos 3y ago

I really like the argument about misinformation vs testing. I'm not totally sold on "you can just see it", but I do think something like TDD could suddenly be really productive in this world. I've found autocomplete via these systems to be improving rapidly. For some work, it's already a big boost, and it's close to a difference in kind from the original IntelliSense. Amusingly though, I primarily write in an editor without any autocomplete, so I don't experience this often. But I do, precisely for the throwaway code and lower-value changes. Finally, it's not clear to me that the distinction is between systems programming and scripting. My sense is that Chat GPT and similar are (a) heavily influenced by the large corpus of Python, so it's better at it than C and (b) the examples here involved more clever bit manipulation than most software engineers ever interact with.

082349872349872 3y ago
> the examples here involved more clever bit manipulation than most software engineers ever interact with Perlis once quoth: > 18. A program without a loop and a structured variable isn't worth writing. After 5 minutes of thought, I'd update that, for my hacking, to: "A program without some convergence reasoning and a non-injective change of representation isn't worth writing." (iow, I'd be happy to let LLMs, or at least other people, wrangle glue and parsley code, according to the taxonomy of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32498382 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32498382 )
- boulos 3y ago
  I like the term parsley code! I do suspect though that both the hashing and 6-bit weight examples are just extremely rare in the corpus. It wasn't confused about loops, or hashing generally, but just didn't do as well as antirez would have liked. The description of the 6-bit to "why don't I just cast this to 8-bits" thing is definitely a problem. And worse, it's a problem a more junior engineer might not understand. But I suspect that a model trained on a corpus with lots more bit manipulation would have been fine, as it wasn't complex. Clearly we just need a fine tuned one :).

by boulos 3y ago

082349872349872 3y ago

> the examples here involved more clever bit manipulation than most software engineers ever interact with Perlis once quoth: > 18. A program without a loop and a structured variable isn't worth writing. After 5 minutes of thought, I'd update that, for my hacking, to: "A program without some convergence reasoning and a non-injective change of representation isn't worth writing." (iow, I'd be happy to let LLMs, or at least other people, wrangle glue and parsley code, according to the taxonomy of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32498382 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32498382 )

boulos 3y ago
I like the term parsley code! I do suspect though that both the hashing and 6-bit weight examples are just extremely rare in the corpus. It wasn't confused about loops, or hashing generally, but just didn't do as well as antirez would have liked. The description of the 6-bit to "why don't I just cast this to 8-bits" thing is definitely a problem. And worse, it's a problem a more junior engineer might not understand. But I suspect that a model trained on a corpus with lots more bit manipulation would have been fine, as it wasn't complex. Clearly we just need a fine tuned one :).