11 ms·
I assume they believe in the advantages, to the company, of using these AI tools. Of adding them to the workflow, training their employees, and understanding qu
by llm_nerd 2y ago
I assume they believe in the advantages, to the company, of using these AI tools. Of adding them to the workflow, training their employees, and understanding quickly how it impacts their space.
If you just wait and all of your competitors have a workforce enabled and equipped with the best tools, you are at a disadvantage. It's being the company that put off computerization or automation when everyone else went wild.
And FWIW, I cannot imagine a programmer, in 2024, that remains dismissive of LLMs or the related tooling. While they are grossly oversold by the LinkedIn crowd, and are still a far ways from so-called "prompt engineers" replacing devs, they're a massive accelerator and "second set of eyes", especially if you're doing varied, novel work.
- nixosbestos 2y agoChatGPT thinks 9.11 > 9.9. I'm in no hurry.
- andiareso 2y agoIt's weird, "is the following statement about floating point numbers true: 9.8 > 9.11" it works, but otherwise it has no ability to do it with "decimals"
- guappa 2y ago? My calculator does too. Unless you mean (9, 11) > (9, 9) which is an entirely different thing.
- vezycash 2y ago> ChatGPT thinks 9.11 > 9.9 I've confirmed this asked chatgpt: 9.11 > 9.9 true or false? True because .11 is greater than .9
- jsheard 2y agoEven when ChatGPT starts getting these simple gotcha questions right it's often because they applied some brittle heuristic that doesn't generalize. For example you can directly ask it to solve a simple math problem, which nowadays it will usually do correctly by generating and executing a Python script, but then ask it to write a speech announcing the solution to the same problem, to which it will probably still hallucinate a nonsensical solution. I just tried it again and IME this prompt still makes it forget how to do the most basic math: Write a speech announcing a momentous scientific discovery - the solution to the long standing question of (48294-1444)*0.3258
- llm_nerd 2y ago4o and o1 get this right. LLMs should never do math. They shouldn't count letters or sort lists or play chess or checkers. Basically all of the easy gotcha stuff that people use to point out errors are things that they shouldn't do. And you pointed out something they do now which is creating and run a python script. That really is a pretty solid, sustainable heuristic and is actually a pretty great approach. They need to apply that on their backend too so it works across all modes, but the solution was never just an LLM. Similarly, if you ask an LLM a chess question -- e.g. the best move -- I'd expect it to consult a chess engine like Stockfish.
- Merad 2y ago> LLMs should never do math. They shouldn't count letters or sort lists or play chess or checkers. But these aren't "gotcha questions", these are just some of the basic interactions that people will want to have with intelligent assistants. Literally just two days ago I was doing some things with the compound interest formula - I asked Claude to solve for a particular variable of the formula, then plug in some numbers to calculate the results (it was able to do it). Could I have used Mathematica or something like that? Yes of course. But supposedly the whole purpose of a general purpose AI is that I can use it to do just about anything that I need to do. Likewise there have been multiple occasions where I've needed ChatGPT or Claude to work with tables or lists of data where I needed the results to be sorted.
- lebski88 2y agoI spend way too much of my working life with package version ranges. It took me a minute to understand why this was wrong.
- derefr 2y agoChatGPT knows about other domains (e.g. software versions) where that inequality is true. Try telling it you’re doing arithmetic.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- zsmizzle 2y ago9.11 > 9.9 is true for software version numbers. For floating point numbers that is false. ChatGPT 4o gets both of these cases correct for me.
- aftbit 2y agoJavascript thinks that 11 < 3 but its still kinda useful anyway from time to time: > [11,9,1,3].sort() [ 1, 11, 3, 9 ]
- oneeyedpigeon 2y agoYou're getting downvoted because your blatant attempt at language wars has a very simple, logical explanation. If you wanted to use a 'gotcha', there are far better examples.
- aftbit 2y agoI was not making an attempt at language wars. I think JS is a perfectly fine language for what it does, warts and all. I was being a bit flippant with my language, but my intent was to point out that `9.11 > 9.8` is not just an LLM thing, and that people who are quick to dismiss LLM usefulness based on contrived math examples do not apply the same rationale to other systems. I do think that JavaScript's choice to sort numbers lexicographical instead of arithmetically is a bit silly, but of course no language is free from warts. Of course they cannot change it now, because that would break the web. `JSON.stringify` is also pretty silly while we're at it, but Python's `json.dumps` is no better.
- recursive 2y agoIf you want to know whether javascript thinks `11 < 3`, then just evaluate it directly. There is lots of dumb stuff in JS IMO, but be honest about it.
- aftbit 2y agoSure, the real gotcha here is that this: const list = [3, 11] list.sort() console.log(list[0] < list[1]) logs `false`. JavaScript doesn't "think" anything but its native sort function doesn't do what many people expect it would when called on a list of pure numbers. If you found this behavior intuitive and unsurprising the first time you saw it, then your brain works differently than mine. If this happens to be new to you (congrats on being one of today's 10,000), the reason is that JavaScript sorts by converting all elements to UTF-16 strings, except for `undefined` for some reason, which always sorts last. The MDN docs have a very clear explanation. I have been unable to find a historical explanation of why this choice was made, but I presume the initial JS v1 author either had a good reason or just really didn't expect that their language would outlive the job for which it was written. If this is a bug for you, you can provide a comparison function explicitly and the typical is something like: list.sort((a,b)=>a-b) Somewhat puzzlingly, this will "work" even on lists with mixed number and string like: const list = [3, "11", 1, "2", 9, 23] list.sort((a,b)=>a-b) console.log(list) [ 1, '2', 3, 9, '11', 23 ] Because JavaScript goes out of its way to make comparisons like 3 < "11" or "3" < 11 work in the numeric domain. JS only uses string comparison when both sides are strings.
- dagaci 2y agoAnd here lies the dichotomy of correctness: Context? So Indeed 9.11 is chronologically higher than 9.8 and chronology is an extremely common use case. However a grade F will be given by many.
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago> And FWIW, I cannot imagine a programmer, in 2024, that remains dismissive of LLMs or the related tooling. Hi. > While they are grossly oversold by the LinkedIn crowd, That is true. > and are still a far ways from so-called "prompt engineers" replacing devs, Also true. > they're a massive accelerator and "second set of eyes", especially if you're doing varied, novel work. That is not even remotely my experience. Like I can envision a programmer who would get benefits from it, but bluntly put, the code I work on day to day is far, far too interesting to be handled by copilot, simply because there aren't nearly enough stackoverflow pages about it to be scraped. Honestly if you found yourself able to automate most of your job with copilot, if anything, you have my sincerest condolences. I can't imagine how utterly bored you are in your day-to-day. IF copilot could get to a place where it could understand, comprehend, and weigh-in on code, that would be incredibly useful. But that's not what Copilot is because that's not what transformers are. They are fancy word probability calculators. And don't get me wrong, that has uses, but it is nothing I'd be comfortable calling a second set of eyes for for anything, save for maybe writing.
- llm_nerd 2y ago>Hi. I was being dismissively rhetorical. I can actually imagine them because we see them on HN constantly, with a Luddism that somehow actually becomes a rather hilarious attempt at superiority. A "well if you actually get use out of them, I guess you're just not at my superior level of Unique Projects and Unique Code". It's honestly just embarrassing at this point. >but bluntly put, the code I work on day to day is far, far too interesting to be handled by copilot Hilarious. It's a cliche at this point. Let me take it further and turn this on its head: The people who usually think LLMs aren't valuable to coders generally work on the most boring, copy/paste prattle. They stick to the same tiny niche all day every day. They're basically implementing the same thing again and again. It's so rote, and they're so profoundly unchallenged, that tooling has no value.
- Clubber 2y ago>with a Luddism that somehow actually becomes a rather hilarious attempt at superiority >The people who usually think LLMs aren't valuable to coders generally work on the most boring, copy/paste prattle. Here you are doing the same thing, aren't you? Instead of calling people names, the biggest tell of a weak argument, why don't you explain the type of work you do and how using an LLM is faster than if you coded it yourself and and/or also faster than any current way of doing the same thing. I'm assuming you are a senior+ level coder.
- devin 2y agoImagine it. I’m dismissive. The current crop are mediocre interns.
- layer8 2y ago> especially if you're doing varied, novel work. What do you mean by that? In my experience they mostly help when you are doing mainstream, well-trodden work for which a company’s/project’s/domain’s inside knowledge isn’t needed. Maybe you mean the latter by “novel”?
- JohnMakin 2y agoGluing together react components /s
- furyofantares 2y agoNovel to the programmer. Even the best programmers have very narrow skills relative to the whole field. Yeah, I've used 20+ languages and hundreds of technologies and a variety of different types of product and can pick things up quickly. But it's still a drop in the bucket of technologies you can use and types of problem you can solve. Programmer skills are deep but narrow. LLM skills are shallow but wide. It's an excellent complement for any programmer working outside their deep+narrow expertise.
- llm_nerd 2y ago>What do you mean by that? Varied and novel to the programmer. If you're doing the same thing day in and day out it probably isn't much use. If you're like many programmers and you're jumping between libraries and languages and platforms and APIs and domains and spheres, it's immensely helpful. >doing mainstream, well-trodden work for which a company’s/project’s/domain’s inside knowledge isn’t needed A core disconnect in this discussion is that many people seem to be arguing from the position of "I tried to generate whole solutions with these tools and it failed, so it's useless". Everything is well-trodden. One of the commentators in here, who declares themselves a unique snowflake where these tools are useless, does "sockets with encryption and messaging", which is some of the most well-trodden ground in this domain. Everything is glue. Everything is a lot of relatively simple things strung together. And for all of those, portions are helped and accelerated with these tools.
- layer8 2y agoEverything isn’t well-trodden. I’m mostly doing non-glue, heavily domain knowledge-based work. The main issue I’m running into is that explaining the domain and context to the LLM will take significantly more time than just doing the work myself, and also that parts of the necessary knowledge and most of the source code are NDA-protected, so only a local LLM would do.