11 ms·

you're never going to convince people that are in an ideological battle against AI.

bigstrat2003 2y ago
And you're never going to convince anyone if you assume without evidence that they are ideologically opposed to AI. Lots of people have tried these tools with an open mind and found them to not be useful, you need to address those criticisms rather than using a dismissive insult.
- HaZeust 2y ago
  What evidence would you like? You're posting on a thread that hyperlinks to a list of code and Claude Artifacts for pet-projects that can make thousands a month with some low-effort PPC and an AdWords embed, and some mid-size projects that can be anything from grounds to a promotion at a programming role - to the MVP for a PMF-stage startup. What, specifically, would pivot your pre-conceived notions?
  - inexcf 2y ago
    Did you even look at the artifacts? Its a bunch of things a beginner would do on their first day programming. How do you make thousands a month from 1 library call to solve a qr code. A promotion for building an input field and calling a json to yaml converter library?
    - newswasboring 2y ago
      > Its a bunch of things a beginner would do on their first day programming. Is this an exaggeration? Because this is absolutely not true. I'm a beginner in JavaScript and other web stuff and I absolutely can't build it in many days.
      - inexcf 2y ago
        You better check the code, mate. The meat of what most of it does is a one liner calling jsQR or some other imported lib to do the real work. I am not exaggerating in the slightest.
        newswasboring 2y ago
        Dude. I don't judge my knowledge after the answer is given to me. If I was the junior programmer assigned to the author and they were having this chat with me I am telling you as a beginner I wouldn't be able to do it. Of course if you show me the answers I will think I can do it easy, because answers in programming are always easy (good answers anyways). It's the process of finding the answer that is hard. And I'm not a bad programmer either, I'm at least mediocre, I'm just unfamiliar with web technology.
        inexcf 2y ago
        I am of the firm believe that you can put "JavaScript scan qr code" in a search engine and arrive at your goal. The answers range from libraries to code snippets basically the same as those created by Claude. Using the same libraries. I feel like googling every step would be faster than trying to get it right with LLMs, but that is a different point. I've seen a complete no-code person install whisper x with a virtual Python environment and use it for realtime speech to text in their Japanese lessons, in less than 3 hours. You can do a simple library call in JavaScript.
        simonw 2y ago
        "I feel like googling every step would be faster than trying to get it right with LLMs" Why don't you give that a go? See if you can knock out a QR code reading UI in JavaScript in less than 3 minutes, complete with drag-and-drop file opening support. (I literally built this one in a separate browser tab while I was actively taking notes in a meeting) I say three minutes because my first message in https://gist.github.com/simonw/c2b0c42cd1541d6ed6bfe5c17d638039 https://gist.github.com/simonw/c2b0c42cd1541d6ed6bfe5c17d638... was at 2:45pm and the final reply from Claude was at 2:47pm.
    - HaZeust 2y ago
      Millions of laypersons a month search "convert (file type) to (file type) online" and just smack an AdWords embed on their site for it. Millions of people want a QR code's embedded link in their camera roll, without access to a camera that's pointing at it. You'd be surprised how big the "(simple task) online" search query market is, and how much they are usually multi-visit monthly customers, and how much their ad space is worth. I cannot stress this enough, just because it's simple does not mean it's not lucrative.
      - inexcf 2y ago
        You should do it then. Besides all of this is completely besides the point. This isnt useful for a programmer. These examples are barely useful for a layperson. And said layperson is paying money and time for this.
        farts_mckensy 2y ago
        The goal posts keep shifting. It's so obvious to anyone who's paid attention to this space for a few years.
        tharant 2y ago
        Goalposts shift; growth is critical to being (staying?) an intelligent species.
        inexcf 2y ago
        Except my goalposts never shifted. And my point stands, these are extremely trivial examples.
        HaZeust 2y ago
        I have, that's how I'm telling you the way you can, too.
        inexcf 2y ago
        Any way or intention to prove that? Wheres you "convert (filetype) project"? Not to attack you but from your profile it sounds more like your the typical marketing grifter talking big. Why is none of those projects in the list you mention there? Looking deeper you got lots of projects with parts of your websites just broken and seem to be peddling what looks like life insurance scams.
    - simonw 2y ago
      I'd like to see a beginner build this: https://tools.simonwillison.net/openai-audio https://tools.simonwillison.net/openai-audio
      - inexcf 2y ago
        It's definitely not as trivial as the json converter. But not anywhere even close to complex. Recording audio is very simple, calling a remote API is too. The complex part is encoding the WAV blob. But that is just knowledge about the format with the exact code snippet that claude uses found in the first stack overflow answer. And it is strange that Claude picked the AudioRecorder when the MediaRecorder exists. I'd wager a beginner would have used the latter(i don't use javascript and am not better than a beginner in any way, but i found that) since it outputs a straight wav file and doesn't need the encoding step. And since the data isn't streamed to OpenAI there's no need for the audio chunks that AudioRecorder provides. So Claude did it in an unnecessarily complex way, that doesn't make the problem complex.
  - achierius 2y ago
    Are you serious about "thousands a month"? I don't mean to be hostile, I'm just truly surprised -- if the bar were that low (not that these apps aren't impressive, but most engineers write useful apps from time to time) I would expect the market to be rather packed
    - HaZeust 2y ago
      Nah, most are hundreds a month - a few golden geese can break the thousand barrier, though. But, regardless, have a few of those sites up, and you're making good side income.
  - tharant 2y ago
    > What, specifically, would pivot your pre-conceived notions? A live or unedited demonstration of how a non-trivial (doesn’t have to be complex, but should be significantly more interesting than the “getting started” tutorials that litter the web) pet-project was implemented using these models.
    - simonw 2y ago
      The point of my post here was to provide 14 of those. Some of them are trivial but I'd argue that a couple of them - the OpenAI Audio one and the LLM pricing calculator - go a bit beyond "getting started". If you want details of more complex projects I've written using Claude here are a few - in each case I provide the full chat transcript: - https://simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/8/django-http-debug/ https://simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/8/django-http-debug/ - https://simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/27/gemini-chat-app/ https://simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/27/gemini-chat-app/ - https://simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/26/gemini-bounding-box-visualization/ https://simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/26/gemini-bounding-box-vi... - https://simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/16/datasette-checkbox/ https://simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/16/datasette-checkbox/ - https://simonwillison.net/2024/Oct/6/svg-to-jpg-png/ https://simonwillison.net/2024/Oct/6/svg-to-jpg-png/
      - tharant 2y ago
        Thank you! I have an ugly JS/content filter running that mogrifies some websites such that I miss the formatting completely; I didn’t recognize you had chat session content included on the page. That said, after looking at a couple of your sessions, I don’t see anything you’re doing that I’m not—at least in terms of prompting. Your prompts are a bit more terse than mine (I can be long-winded so I’ll give brevity a try with my next project) but the structure and design descriptions are still there. That would suggest the differences in our experience boils down to the languages with which we choose or are required to work; maybe there’s a stylistic or cultural difference in how one should prompt a model in order to generate a Python project and how one should prompt for a Haskel or Scala/Java project; surely not though, right? I’m not giving up and I’ll keep playing with these models but for now, given my use-case at least, they still seem to be far more capable at rubber-ducking with me than they are as a pair programming partner.
- epolanski 2y ago
  Issue is, it takes time to learn how to interact with these tools and get the best out of them. And they get better quite fast.
  - unit149 2y ago
    claude-to-sql parser is particularly useful in LLM implementation
- sergiotapia 2y ago
  you are replying to a submission with a dozen or more examples of real tangible stuff, and you still argue? pointless.
- farts_mckensy 2y ago
  No need to address the criticisms. Just have chat gpt do it.
versteegen 2y ago
Humans have a massive pro-human bias. Don't ask one whether AI can replace humans and expect a fair answer.
- n0id34 2y ago
  Well, obviously. The only ones happy about all of our potential replacements would be those that have the power to do the replacing and save themselves a shitload of money. It's hardly like everyone is going to rejoice at the rapid advancement of AI that can potentially make most of us jobless....unless, as I said, you're the one in charge, then it's wonderful.
Workaccount2 2y ago
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair.
fhdsgbbcaA 2y ago
There’s no ideological battle here. The first self-driving DARPA grand challenge was passed in 2005, everybody thought we’d have self driving on the road within a decade. 20 years later that’s still not the case, because it turns out NN/ML can do some very impressive things at the 99% correct level. The other 1% ranges in severity from “weird lane change” to “a person riding a bicycle gets killed”. GPT-3.5 was the DARPA grand challenge moment, we’re still years away from LLM being reliable - and they may never be fully trustworthy.
- josephg 2y ago
  > they may never be fully trustworthy. So? Neither are humans. Neither is google search. Chatgpt doesn't write bug free code, but neither do I. The question isn't "when will it be perfect". The question is "when will it be useful?". Or, "When is it useful enough that you're not employable?" I don't think its so far away. Everyone I know with a spark in their eye has found weird and wonderful ways to make use of chatgpt & claude. I've used it to do system design, help with cooking, practice improv, write project proposals, teach me history, translate code, ... all sorts of things. Yeah, the quality is lower than that of an expert human. But I don't need a 5 star chef to tell me how long to put potatoes in the oven, make suggestions for characters to play, or listen to me talk about encryption systems and make suggestions. Its wildly useful today. Seriously, anyone who says otherwise hasn't tried it or doesn't understand how to make proper use of it. Between my GF and I, we average about 1-2 conversations with chatgpt per day. That number will only go up.
  - fhdsgbbcaA 2y ago
    I find it very interesting the primary rebuttals to people criticizing LLM from the “converted” tends to result in implicit suggestions the critique is rooted in old fashioned thinking. That’s not remotely true. I am an expert, and it’s incredibly clear to me how bad LLM are. I still use them heavily, but I don’t trust any output that doesn’t conform to my prior expert knowledge and they are constantly wrong. I think what is likely happening is many people aren’t an expert in anything, but the LLM makes them feel like they are and they don’t want that feeling to go away and get irrationally defensive at cogent criticism of the technology. And that’s all it is, a new technology with a lot of hype and a lot of promise, but it’s not proven, it’s not reliable, and I do think it is messing with people’s heads in a way that worries me greatly.

bigstrat2003 2y ago

And you're never going to convince anyone if you assume without evidence that they are ideologically opposed to AI. Lots of people have tried these tools with an open mind and found them to not be useful, you need to address those criticisms rather than using a dismissive insult.

HaZeust 2y ago
What evidence would you like? You're posting on a thread that hyperlinks to a list of code and Claude Artifacts for pet-projects that can make thousands a month with some low-effort PPC and an AdWords embed, and some mid-size projects that can be anything from grounds to a promotion at a programming role - to the MVP for a PMF-stage startup. What, specifically, would pivot your pre-conceived notions?
- inexcf 2y ago
  Did you even look at the artifacts? Its a bunch of things a beginner would do on their first day programming. How do you make thousands a month from 1 library call to solve a qr code. A promotion for building an input field and calling a json to yaml converter library?
  - newswasboring 2y ago
    > Its a bunch of things a beginner would do on their first day programming. Is this an exaggeration? Because this is absolutely not true. I'm a beginner in JavaScript and other web stuff and I absolutely can't build it in many days.
    - inexcf 2y ago
      You better check the code, mate. The meat of what most of it does is a one liner calling jsQR or some other imported lib to do the real work. I am not exaggerating in the slightest.
      - newswasboring 2y ago
        Dude. I don't judge my knowledge after the answer is given to me. If I was the junior programmer assigned to the author and they were having this chat with me I am telling you as a beginner I wouldn't be able to do it. Of course if you show me the answers I will think I can do it easy, because answers in programming are always easy (good answers anyways). It's the process of finding the answer that is hard. And I'm not a bad programmer either, I'm at least mediocre, I'm just unfamiliar with web technology.
        inexcf 2y ago
        I am of the firm believe that you can put "JavaScript scan qr code" in a search engine and arrive at your goal. The answers range from libraries to code snippets basically the same as those created by Claude. Using the same libraries. I feel like googling every step would be faster than trying to get it right with LLMs, but that is a different point. I've seen a complete no-code person install whisper x with a virtual Python environment and use it for realtime speech to text in their Japanese lessons, in less than 3 hours. You can do a simple library call in JavaScript.
        simonw 2y ago
        "I feel like googling every step would be faster than trying to get it right with LLMs" Why don't you give that a go? See if you can knock out a QR code reading UI in JavaScript in less than 3 minutes, complete with drag-and-drop file opening support. (I literally built this one in a separate browser tab while I was actively taking notes in a meeting) I say three minutes because my first message in https://gist.github.com/simonw/c2b0c42cd1541d6ed6bfe5c17d638039 https://gist.github.com/simonw/c2b0c42cd1541d6ed6bfe5c17d638... was at 2:45pm and the final reply from Claude was at 2:47pm.
  - HaZeust 2y ago
    Millions of laypersons a month search "convert (file type) to (file type) online" and just smack an AdWords embed on their site for it. Millions of people want a QR code's embedded link in their camera roll, without access to a camera that's pointing at it. You'd be surprised how big the "(simple task) online" search query market is, and how much they are usually multi-visit monthly customers, and how much their ad space is worth. I cannot stress this enough, just because it's simple does not mean it's not lucrative.
    - inexcf 2y ago
      You should do it then. Besides all of this is completely besides the point. This isnt useful for a programmer. These examples are barely useful for a layperson. And said layperson is paying money and time for this.
      - farts_mckensy 2y ago
        The goal posts keep shifting. It's so obvious to anyone who's paid attention to this space for a few years.
        tharant 2y ago
        Goalposts shift; growth is critical to being (staying?) an intelligent species.
        inexcf 2y ago
        Except my goalposts never shifted. And my point stands, these are extremely trivial examples.
      - HaZeust 2y ago
        I have, that's how I'm telling you the way you can, too.
        inexcf 2y ago
        Any way or intention to prove that? Wheres you "convert (filetype) project"? Not to attack you but from your profile it sounds more like your the typical marketing grifter talking big. Why is none of those projects in the list you mention there? Looking deeper you got lots of projects with parts of your websites just broken and seem to be peddling what looks like life insurance scams.
  - simonw 2y ago
    I'd like to see a beginner build this: https://tools.simonwillison.net/openai-audio https://tools.simonwillison.net/openai-audio
    - inexcf 2y ago
      It's definitely not as trivial as the json converter. But not anywhere even close to complex. Recording audio is very simple, calling a remote API is too. The complex part is encoding the WAV blob. But that is just knowledge about the format with the exact code snippet that claude uses found in the first stack overflow answer. And it is strange that Claude picked the AudioRecorder when the MediaRecorder exists. I'd wager a beginner would have used the latter(i don't use javascript and am not better than a beginner in any way, but i found that) since it outputs a straight wav file and doesn't need the encoding step. And since the data isn't streamed to OpenAI there's no need for the audio chunks that AudioRecorder provides. So Claude did it in an unnecessarily complex way, that doesn't make the problem complex.
- achierius 2y ago
  Are you serious about "thousands a month"? I don't mean to be hostile, I'm just truly surprised -- if the bar were that low (not that these apps aren't impressive, but most engineers write useful apps from time to time) I would expect the market to be rather packed
  - HaZeust 2y ago
    Nah, most are hundreds a month - a few golden geese can break the thousand barrier, though. But, regardless, have a few of those sites up, and you're making good side income.
- tharant 2y ago
  > What, specifically, would pivot your pre-conceived notions? A live or unedited demonstration of how a non-trivial (doesn’t have to be complex, but should be significantly more interesting than the “getting started” tutorials that litter the web) pet-project was implemented using these models.
  - simonw 2y ago
    The point of my post here was to provide 14 of those. Some of them are trivial but I'd argue that a couple of them - the OpenAI Audio one and the LLM pricing calculator - go a bit beyond "getting started". If you want details of more complex projects I've written using Claude here are a few - in each case I provide the full chat transcript: - https://simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/8/django-http-debug/ https://simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/8/django-http-debug/ - https://simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/27/gemini-chat-app/ https://simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/27/gemini-chat-app/ - https://simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/26/gemini-bounding-box-visualization/ https://simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/26/gemini-bounding-box-vi... - https://simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/16/datasette-checkbox/ https://simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/16/datasette-checkbox/ - https://simonwillison.net/2024/Oct/6/svg-to-jpg-png/ https://simonwillison.net/2024/Oct/6/svg-to-jpg-png/
    - tharant 2y ago
      Thank you! I have an ugly JS/content filter running that mogrifies some websites such that I miss the formatting completely; I didn’t recognize you had chat session content included on the page. That said, after looking at a couple of your sessions, I don’t see anything you’re doing that I’m not—at least in terms of prompting. Your prompts are a bit more terse than mine (I can be long-winded so I’ll give brevity a try with my next project) but the structure and design descriptions are still there. That would suggest the differences in our experience boils down to the languages with which we choose or are required to work; maybe there’s a stylistic or cultural difference in how one should prompt a model in order to generate a Python project and how one should prompt for a Haskel or Scala/Java project; surely not though, right? I’m not giving up and I’ll keep playing with these models but for now, given my use-case at least, they still seem to be far more capable at rubber-ducking with me than they are as a pair programming partner.
epolanski 2y ago
Issue is, it takes time to learn how to interact with these tools and get the best out of them. And they get better quite fast.
- unit149 2y ago
  claude-to-sql parser is particularly useful in LLM implementation
sergiotapia 2y ago
you are replying to a submission with a dozen or more examples of real tangible stuff, and you still argue? pointless.
farts_mckensy 2y ago
No need to address the criticisms. Just have chat gpt do it.

versteegen 2y ago

Humans have a massive pro-human bias. Don't ask one whether AI can replace humans and expect a fair answer.

n0id34 2y ago
Well, obviously. The only ones happy about all of our potential replacements would be those that have the power to do the replacing and save themselves a shitload of money. It's hardly like everyone is going to rejoice at the rapid advancement of AI that can potentially make most of us jobless....unless, as I said, you're the one in charge, then it's wonderful.

Workaccount2 2y ago

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair.

fhdsgbbcaA 2y ago

There’s no ideological battle here. The first self-driving DARPA grand challenge was passed in 2005, everybody thought we’d have self driving on the road within a decade. 20 years later that’s still not the case, because it turns out NN/ML can do some very impressive things at the 99% correct level. The other 1% ranges in severity from “weird lane change” to “a person riding a bicycle gets killed”. GPT-3.5 was the DARPA grand challenge moment, we’re still years away from LLM being reliable - and they may never be fully trustworthy.

josephg 2y ago
> they may never be fully trustworthy. So? Neither are humans. Neither is google search. Chatgpt doesn't write bug free code, but neither do I. The question isn't "when will it be perfect". The question is "when will it be useful?". Or, "When is it useful enough that you're not employable?" I don't think its so far away. Everyone I know with a spark in their eye has found weird and wonderful ways to make use of chatgpt & claude. I've used it to do system design, help with cooking, practice improv, write project proposals, teach me history, translate code, ... all sorts of things. Yeah, the quality is lower than that of an expert human. But I don't need a 5 star chef to tell me how long to put potatoes in the oven, make suggestions for characters to play, or listen to me talk about encryption systems and make suggestions. Its wildly useful today. Seriously, anyone who says otherwise hasn't tried it or doesn't understand how to make proper use of it. Between my GF and I, we average about 1-2 conversations with chatgpt per day. That number will only go up.
- fhdsgbbcaA 2y ago
  I find it very interesting the primary rebuttals to people criticizing LLM from the “converted” tends to result in implicit suggestions the critique is rooted in old fashioned thinking. That’s not remotely true. I am an expert, and it’s incredibly clear to me how bad LLM are. I still use them heavily, but I don’t trust any output that doesn’t conform to my prior expert knowledge and they are constantly wrong. I think what is likely happening is many people aren’t an expert in anything, but the LLM makes them feel like they are and they don’t want that feeling to go away and get irrationally defensive at cogent criticism of the technology. And that’s all it is, a new technology with a lot of hype and a lot of promise, but it’s not proven, it’s not reliable, and I do think it is messing with people’s heads in a way that worries me greatly.