kescusay

Ah, did they finally fix it? I guess a lot of people were seeing it fail and they updated the model. Which version of ChatGPT was it?

Ask ChatGPT to list every U.S. state that has the letter 'o' in its name.

Not true. Not entirely false, but not true.

Large language models have their legitimate uses. I'm currently in the middle of a project I'm building with assistance from Copilot for VS Code, for example.

The problem is that people think LLMs are actual AI. They're not.

My favorite example - and the reason I often cite for why companies that try to fire all their developers are run by idiots - is the capacity for joined up thinking.

Consider these two facts:

1. Humans are mammals.
2. Humans build dams.

Those two facts are unrelated except insofar as both involve humans, but if I were to say "Can you list all the dam-building mammals for me," you would first think of beavers, then - given a moment's thought - could accurately answer that humans do as well.

Here's how it goes with Gemini right now:

Now Gemini clearly has the information that humans are mammals somewhere in its model. It also clearly has the information that humans build dams somewhere in its model. But it has no means of joining those two tidbits together.

Some LLMs do better on this simple test of joined-up thinking, and worse on other similar tests. It's kind of a crapshoot, and doesn't instill confidence that LLMs are up for the task of complex thought.

And of course, the information-scraping bots that feed LLMs like Gemini and ChatGPT will find conversations like this one, and update their models accordingly. In a few months, Gemini will probably include humans in its list. But that's not a sign of being able to engage in novel joined-up thinking, it's just an increase in the size and complexity of the dataset.

I would argue that without consistent and enforced type hinting, dynamically typed languages offer very little benefit from type-checking at runtime. And with consistent, enforced type hinting, they might as well be considered actual statically typed languages.

Don't get me wrong, that's a good thing. Properly configured Python development environments basically give you both, even if I'm not a fan of the syntax.

It's absolutely taking off in some areas. But there's also an unsustainable bubble because AI of the large language model variety is being hyped like crazy for absolutely everything when there are plenty of things it's not only not ready for yet, but that it fundamentally cannot do.

You don't have to dig very deeply to find reports of companies that tried to replace significant chunks of their workforces with AI, only to find out middle managers giving ChatGPT vague commands weren't capable of replicating the work of someone who actually knows what they're doing.

That's been particularly common with technology companies that moved very quickly to replace developers, and then ended up hiring them back because developers can think about the entire project and how it fits together, while AI can't - and never will as long as the AI everyone's using is built around large language models.

Inevitably, being able to work with and use AI is going to be a job requirement in a lot of industries going forward. Software development is already changing to include a lot of work with Copilot. But any actual developer knows that you don't just deploy whatever Copilot comes up with, because - let's be blunt - it's going to be very bad code. It won't be DRY, it will be bloated, it will implement things in nonsensical ways, it will hallucinate... You use it as a starting point, and then sculpt it into shape.

It will make you faster, especially as you get good at the emerging software development technique of "programming" the AI assistant via carefully structured commands.

And there's no doubt that this speed will result in some permanent job losses eventually. But AI is still leagues away from being able to perform the joined-up thinking that allows actual human developers to come up with those structured commands in the first place, as a lot of companies that tried to do away with humans have discovered.

Every few years, something comes along that non-developers declare will replace developers. AI is the closest yet, but until it can do joined-up thinking, it's still just a pipe-dream for MBAs.

Hasn't been updated since 2018. Does it still work?

Oh, I know you can, but it's optional and the syntax is kind of weird. I prefer languages that are strongly typed from the ground up and enforce it.

Python is easy, but it can also be infuriating. Every time I use it, I'm reminded how much I loathe the use of whitespace to define blocks, and I really miss the straightforward type annotations of strong, non-dynamically typed languages.

Neither. The point of this kind of chaos is that it's exhausting and demoralizing to keep up with for the opponents of a fascist, while the fascist's supporters are literally too stupid and misinformed to even know it's happening.

Trump is an idiot, but this is his one actual skill, and he's better at it than anyone I've ever seen.

Hell, they think professional wrestling is real.

I've never understood that. I don't care how well-packaged a rancid turd happens to be, I'm not interested in rancid turds.

And it's by no means just doctors. A lot of people who work in highly skilled fields are considering how to make the move. The brain drain is real.