• 10 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • I realise the dumbass here is the guy saying programmers are ‘cooked’, but there’s something kind of funny how the programmer talks about how people misunderstand the complexities of their job and how LLMs easily make mistakes because of an inability to understand the nuances of what he does everyday and understands deeply. They rightly point out how without their specialist oversight, AI agents would fail in ridiculous and spectacular ways, yet happily and vaguely adds as a throw away statement at the end “replacing other industries, sure.” with the exact same blitheness and lack of personal understanding with which ‘Ace’ proclaims all programmers cooked.


  • That’s got to be the key to all this, specificity, it’s great that it’s got natural language processing to simplify things but sometimes that’s what’s actually getting in the way. What they should really do is have a special version of chatGPT for programming where users can interact with it in a very special form of structured English. It’s still natural language, this is the future after all, none of that zeroes and ones crap like the stone age, but just highly specific words with carefully defined meanings particular to making repeatable and executable steps in a pattern that does the same thing every time in response to inputs to produce outputs. You could then “speak” to one of these LLM things using this carefully structured English to automate specific tasks. The real kicker would be that you could tell it to chain together a bunch of these tasks you’ve had it automate for you to build up in to something much more complex. This would really harness the power of AI because at each step it’s made it for you, with minimal input from yourself because you’re just ‘talking’ to it in a very specific way. Admittedly this approach would be a little bit less obvious for new users than a standard LLM, but if an average person kept doing this for like a year or two they’d get pretty adept at this manner of speech, it’d be kind of like learning another language and people have been doing that for as long as there’s been people, I speak in a language everyday, I’m doing it right now. We could make it easier too, we could have courses and schools to help people get better at it faster.



  • I don’t have kids and I don’t know anything about sports. If you continue reading after those disclosures, I’ll offer a perspective anyway, since you put this out to the internet for comment.

    There isn’t really a way you could have put this to your son that would be taken well, it’s evidently sensitive for him and despite your intentions it’ll feel like a tragic monent. It’s just hard news. Whether it’s right to break that to him, well I’m not sure but I think maybe you’re putting too much emphasis on this one interaction like it was your one shot and there was a definitive right it wrong way to do it. What will matter most is more likely to be what you do generally moving forward. You may have your doubts about his ability in his chosen path and perhaps they’re well founded but you can still encourage him and be rooting for him whilst gently suggesting having backup options in times when he appears uncertain. If you consistently do all you can to help in whatever way you can with whatever choices he makes, then if they don’t work out and he has to abandon that dream, he’ll at least know you supported him all throughout despite your concern and that should count for a lot. If somehow he ends up unexpectedly rocketing to success in football he’ll also remember you’d been there all along encouraging and assisting. It’s ok to counsel against putting his eggs all in one basket, but just don’t push it, you must respect his choice whatever it ends up being and he there to help pick up the pieces if those choices don’t make him happy.

    Much like with football fans, you support your team by just showing up to every match and cheering on. Perhaps he didn’t like the uncomfortable dose of reality today but so long as you are consistently a positive and helpful force he’ll hopefully come to appreciate what you’ve been trying to do for him.








  • Yeh, arguably and to a limited extent, the problems he’s having now aren’t the result of the decision to use AI to make his product so much as the decision to tell people about that and people deliberately attempting to sabotage it. I’m careful to qualify that though because the self evident flaw in his plan even if it only surfaced in a rather extreme scenario, is that he lacks the domain specific knowledge to actually make his product work as soon as anything becomes more complicated than just collecting the money. Evidently there was more to this venture than just the building of the software, that was necessary to for it to be a viable service. Much like if you consider yourself the ideas man and paid a programmer to engineer the product for you and then fired them straight after without hiring anyone to maintain it or keep the infrastructure going or provide support for your clients and then claimed you ‘built’ the product, you’d be in a similar scenario not long after your first paying customer finds out the hard way that you don’t actually know anything about your own service that you willingly took money for. He’s discovering he can’t actually provide the service part of the Software as a Service he’s selling.