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I think my favorite thing is how people are out there reconsidering their programming careers and doing shit like quitting when you have a bunch of less than qu

I think my favorite thing is how people are out there reconsidering their programming careers and doing shit like quitting when you have a bunch of less than quality developers lazily deploying code they pulled out of the ass of an LLM which does no bounds checking, no input validation, none of that basic as can be security shit at all, they just end up deploying all that code to production systems facing the internet and then nobody notices because either the competent developers left for greener pastures or got laid off. I keep on telling people this is going to take like 5 or 10 years to untangle considering how hard it is in a lot of cases to fix code put into tons of stuff like embedded devices mounted up on a light pole or whatever that was considered good enough for a release, but I bet it'll be even more of a pain than that. These are after all security holes in devices that in many cases peoples day or life going well depends on. What it has done so far for me is put copywriters out of a job. I still find it mostly useful for writing drivel that gets used as page filler or product descriptions for my ecommerce side jobs. Lately the image recognition capabilities lets me generate the kind of stuff I'd never write, which is instagram posts with tons of emojis and other things I'd never have the gumption to do myself but increases engagement. I actually used to use markov chain generator for this going back to 2016 though so the big difference here is that at least it can form more coherent sentences.

hggigg 2y ago
Oh I'm right in the middle of your first point. I'm going to have on my grave stone: "Never underestimate the reputation and financial damage a competent but lazy software developer can do with an incompetent LLM" So what you're saying is that it's a good bullshit generator for marketing. That is fair :)
- jamal-kumar 2y ago
  It's really excellent for that. I can give it an image of a product I'm trying to sell, and then say 'describe this thing but use a ton of marketing fluff to increase engagement and conversions' and it does exactly that. There's tools out there to automatically do this with A/B testing and I think even stuff like shopify plugins, but I still do it relatively manually. I'll use it for code sparingly for stuff like data transformations (Take this ridiculously flat, two table database schema and normalize it to the third normal form) but for straight up generating code to be executed I'm way more careful to make sure it isn't giving me or the people who get to use that code garbage. It isn't that bad for basic security audits actually and I suggest any devs reading this re-run their code through it with security related prompting to see if they missed anything obvious. The huge problem is that at least half of devs with deadlines to meet are apparently not doing this, and I get to see it in the drop in quality of pull requests within the past 5 years.
  - hggigg 2y ago
    I find it a distraction on validation tasks. I prefer to know what the hell I am doing first and be able to qualify that as I work with test cases. With respect to other engineers I haven't found any of our ML tools actually pick up anything useful yet from a code review. On engagement, I saw a negative recently where someone started replacing banner images for events with AI generated content and their conversion to tickets plummeted. YMMV. People can spot it a mile off and they are getting better at it. I think the end game is soon.
    - jamal-kumar 2y ago
      Were they trying to generate images for marketing creatives like that? People can notice what that looks like right away and it's repulsive for sure unless they can't tell. Text on the other hand is another story
    - ben_w 2y ago
      > On engagement, I saw a negative recently where someone started replacing banner images for events with AI generated content and their conversion to tickets plummeted. YMMV. People can spot it a mile off and they are getting better at it. Indeed. I like this stuff, I have fun with it, I have no problem with others making and sharing pics they like just as I myself do… but when I notice it in the wild on packaging or advertising, it always makes me wonder: what other corners are getting cut? (20 years ago, similar deal but with product art that had 3mm pixels and noticeable jpeg artefacts) > I think the end game is soon. Dunno. The models are getting better as well as the consumers noticing more — I've not seen Cronenberg fingers in a while now — and I don't know who will max out first, or when.
620gelato 2y ago
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hggigg 2y ago

Oh I'm right in the middle of your first point. I'm going to have on my grave stone: "Never underestimate the reputation and financial damage a competent but lazy software developer can do with an incompetent LLM" So what you're saying is that it's a good bullshit generator for marketing. That is fair :)

jamal-kumar 2y ago
It's really excellent for that. I can give it an image of a product I'm trying to sell, and then say 'describe this thing but use a ton of marketing fluff to increase engagement and conversions' and it does exactly that. There's tools out there to automatically do this with A/B testing and I think even stuff like shopify plugins, but I still do it relatively manually. I'll use it for code sparingly for stuff like data transformations (Take this ridiculously flat, two table database schema and normalize it to the third normal form) but for straight up generating code to be executed I'm way more careful to make sure it isn't giving me or the people who get to use that code garbage. It isn't that bad for basic security audits actually and I suggest any devs reading this re-run their code through it with security related prompting to see if they missed anything obvious. The huge problem is that at least half of devs with deadlines to meet are apparently not doing this, and I get to see it in the drop in quality of pull requests within the past 5 years.
- hggigg 2y ago
  I find it a distraction on validation tasks. I prefer to know what the hell I am doing first and be able to qualify that as I work with test cases. With respect to other engineers I haven't found any of our ML tools actually pick up anything useful yet from a code review. On engagement, I saw a negative recently where someone started replacing banner images for events with AI generated content and their conversion to tickets plummeted. YMMV. People can spot it a mile off and they are getting better at it. I think the end game is soon.
  - jamal-kumar 2y ago
    Were they trying to generate images for marketing creatives like that? People can notice what that looks like right away and it's repulsive for sure unless they can't tell. Text on the other hand is another story
  - ben_w 2y ago
    > On engagement, I saw a negative recently where someone started replacing banner images for events with AI generated content and their conversion to tickets plummeted. YMMV. People can spot it a mile off and they are getting better at it. Indeed. I like this stuff, I have fun with it, I have no problem with others making and sharing pics they like just as I myself do… but when I notice it in the wild on packaging or advertising, it always makes me wonder: what other corners are getting cut? (20 years ago, similar deal but with product art that had 3mm pixels and noticeable jpeg artefacts) > I think the end game is soon. Dunno. The models are getting better as well as the consumers noticing more — I've not seen Cronenberg fingers in a while now — and I don't know who will max out first, or when.

620gelato 2y ago

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