If this is true, then we should prepare to be shout at by chatgpt why we didnt knew already that simple error.
Hey ChatGPT, how can I …
“Locking as this is a duplicate of [unrelated question]”
And then links to a similar sounding but ultimately totally unrelated site.
Always love those answers, well if you read the 700 page white paper on this one command set in one module then you would understand… do you think I have the time to read 37000 pages of bland ass documentation yearly on top of doing my actual job? Come the fuck on.
I guess some of these guys have so many heads on their crews that they don’t have much work to do anymore but that’s not the case for most
You joke.
This would have been probably early last year? Had to look up how to do something in fortran (because fortran) and the answer was very much in the voice of that one dude on the Intel forums who has been answering every single question for decades(?) at this point. Which means it also refused to do anything with features newer than 1992 and was worthless.
Tried again while chatting with an old work buddy a few months back and it looks like they updated to acknowledging f99 and f03 exist. So assume that was all stack overflow.
I got an email ban.
1609 hours logged 431 solved threads
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Take all you want, it will only take a few hallucinations before no one trusts LLMs to write code or give advice
[…]will only take a few hallucinations before no one trusts LLMs to write code or give advice
Because none of us have ever blindly pasted some code we got off google and crossed our fingers ;-)
It’s way easier to figure that out than check ChatGPT hallucinations. There’s usually someone saying why a response in SO is wrong, either in another response or a comment. You can filter most of the garbage right at that point, without having to put it in your codebase and discover that the hard way. You get none of that information with ChatGPT. The data spat out is not equivalent.
That’s an important point, and and it ties into the way ChatGPT and other LLMs take advantage of a flaw in the human brain:
Because it impersonates a human, people are more inherently willing to trust it. To think it’s “smart”. It’s dangerous how people who don’t know any better (and many people that do know better) will defer to it, consciously or unconsciously, as an authority and never second guess it.
And the fact it’s a one on one conversation, no comment sections, no one else looking at the responses to call them out as bullshit, the user just won’t second guess it.
When you paste that code you do it in your private IDE, in a dev environment and you test it thoroughly before handing it off to the next person to test before it goes to production.
Hitting up ChatPPT for the answer to a question that you then vomit out in a meeting as if it’s knowledge is totally different.
We should already be at that point. We have already seen LLMs’ potential to inadvertently backdoor your code and to inadvertently help you violate copyright law (I guess we do need to wait to see what the courts rule, but I’ll be rooting for the open-source authors).
If you use LLMs in your professional work, you’re crazy. I would never be comfortably opening myself up to the legal and security liabilities of AI tools.
If you use LLMs in your professional work, you’re crazy
Eh, we use copilot at work and it can be pretty helpful. You should always check and understand any code you commit to any project, so if you just blindly paste flawed code (like with stack overflow,) that’s kind of on you for not understanding what you’re doing.
The issue on the copyright front is the same kind of professional standards and professional ethics that should stop you from just outright copying open-source code into your application. It may be very small portions of code, and you may never get caught, but you simply don’t do that. If you wouldn’t steal a function from a copyleft open-source project, you wouldn’t use that function when copilot suggests it. Idk if copilot has added license tracing yet (been a while since I used it), but absent that feature you are entirely blind to the extent which it’s output is infringing on licenses. That’s huge legal liability to your employer, and an ethical coinflip.
Regarding understanding of code, you’re right. You have to own what you submit into the codebase.
The drawback/risks of using LLMs or copilot are more to do with the fact it generates the likely code, which means it’s statistically biased to generate whatever common and unnoticeable bugged logic exists in the average github repo it trained on. It will at some point give you code you read and say “yep, looks right to me” and then actually has a subtle buffer overflow issue, or actually fails in an edge case, because in a way that is just unnoticeable enough.
And you can make the argument that it’s your responsibility to find that (it is). But I’ve seen some examples thrown around on twitter of just slightly bugged loops; I’ve seen examples of it replicated known vulnerabilities; and we have that package name fiasco in the that first article above.
If I ask myself would I definitely have caught that? the answer is only a maybe. If it replicates a vulnerability that existed in open-source code for years before it was noticed, do you really trust yourself to identify that the moment copilot suggests it to you?
I guess it all depends on stakes too. If you’re generating buggy JavaScript who cares.
Maybe for people who have no clue how to work with an LLM. They don’t have to be perfect to still be incredibly valuable, I make use of them all the time and hallucinations aren’t a problem if you use the right tools for the job in the right way.
The last time I saw someone talk about using the right LLM tool for the job, they were describing turning two minutes of writing a simple map/reduce into one minute of reading enough to confirm the generated one worked. I think I’ll pass on that.
confirm the generated one worked. I think I’ll pass on tha
LLM wasn’t the right tool for the job, so search engine companies made their search engines suck so bad that it was an acceptable replacement.
That’s a 50% time reduction for the same output which sounds great to me.
I’d much rather let an LLM do the menial shit with my validation while I focus on larger problems such as system and API design, or creating rollback plans for major upgrades instead of expending mental energy writing something that has been written a thousand times. They’re not gonna rewrite your entire codebase, but they’re incredibly useful for the small stuff.
I’m not even particularly into LLMs, and they’re definitely not gonna change the world in the way big tech would like you to believe. However, to deny their usefulness is silly.
This. I use LLM for work, primarily to help create extremely complex nested functions.
I don’t count on LLM’s to create anything new for me, or to provide any data points. I provide the logic, and explain exactly what I want in the end.
I take a process which normally takes 45 minutes daily, test it once, and now I have reclaimed 43 extra minutes of my time each day.
It’s easy and safe to test before I apply it to real data.
It’s missed the mark a few times as I learned how to properly work with it, but now I’m consistently getting good results.
Other use cases are up for debate, but I agree when used properly hallucinations are not much of a problem. When I see people complain about them, that tells me they’re using the tool to generate data, which of course is stupid.
Yeah, it’s an obvious sign they’re either not coders at all or don’t understand the tech at all.
Asking it direct questions or to construct functions with given inputs and outputs can save hours, especially with things that disrupt the main flow of coding - I don’t want to empty the structure of what I’m working on from my head just so I can remember everything needed to do something somewhat trivial like calculate the overlapping volume of two tetrahedrons. Of course I could solve it myself but just reading through the suggestion it offers and getting back to solving the real task is so much nicer.
The quality really doesn’t matter.
If they manage to strip any concept of authenticity, ownership or obligation from the entirety of human output and stick it behind a paywall, that’s pretty much the whole ball game.
If we decide later that this is actually a really bullshit deal – that they get everything for free and then sell it back to us – then they’ll surely get some sort of grandfather clause because “Whoops, we already did it!”
People keep saying this but it’s just wrong.
Maybe I haven’t tried the language you have but it’s pretty damn good at code.
Granted, whatever it puts out needs to be tested and possibly edited but that’s the same thing we had to do with Stack Overflow answers.
I’ve tried a lot of scenarios and languages with various LLMs. The biggest takeaway I have is that AI can get you started on something or help you solve some issues. I’ve generally found that anything beyond a block or two of code becomes useless. The more it generates the more weirdness starts popping up, or it outright hallucinates.
For example, today I used an LLM to help me tighten up an incredibly verbose bit of code. Today was just not my day and I knew there was a cleaner way of doing it, but it just wasn’t coming to me. A quick “make this cleaner: <code>” and I was back to the rest of the code.
This is what LLMs are currently good for. They are just another tool like tab completion or code linting
I use it all the time and it’s brilliant when you put in the basic effort to learn how to use it effectively.
It’s allowing me and other open source devs to increase the scope and speed of our contributions, just talking through problems is invaluable. Greedy selfish people wanting to destroy things that help so many is exactly the rolling coal mentality - fuck everyone else I don’t want the world to change around me! Makes me so despondent about the future of humanity.
We already have those near constantly. And we still keep asking queries.
People assume that LLMs need to be ready to replace a principle engineer or a doctor or lawyer with decades of experience.
This is already at the point where we can replace an intern or one of the less good junior engineers. Because anyone who has done code review or has had to do rounds with medical interns know… they are idiots who need people to check their work constantly. An LLM making up some functions because they saw it in stack overflow but never tested is not at all different than a hotshot intern who copied some code from stack overflow and never tested it.
Except one costs a lot less…
This is already at the point where we can replace an intern or one of the less good junior engineers.
This is a bad thing.
Not just because it will put the people you’re talking about out of work in the short term, but because it will prevent the next generation of developers from getting that low-level experience. They’re not “idiots”, they’re inexperienced. They need to get experience. They won’t if they’re replaced by automation.
First a nearly unprecedented world-wide pandemic followed almost immediately by record-breaking layoffs then AI taking over the world, man it is really not a good time to start out as a newer developer. I feel so fortunate that I started working full-time as a developer nearly a decade ago.
So, the whole point of learning is to ask questions from people who know more than you, so that you can gain the knowledge you need to succeed…
So… if you try to use these LLMs to replace parts of sectors, where there need to be people that can work their way to the next tier as they learn more and get better at their respective sectors, you do realize that eventually there will no longer be people that can move up their respective tier/position, because people like you said “Fuck ‘em, all in on this stupid LLM bullshit!” So now there are no more doctors, or real programmers, because people like you thought it would just be the GREATEST idea to replace humans with fucking LLMs.
You do see that, right?
Calling people fucking stupid, because they are learning, is actually pretty fucking stupid.
Where did I say “Fuck 'em, all in on this stupid LLM bullshit!”?
But yes, there is a massive labor issue coming. That is why I am such a proponent of Universal Basic Income because there are not going to be enough jobs out there.
But as for training up the interns: Back in the day, do you know what “interns” did? And by “interns” I mean women because sexism but roll with me. Printing out and sorting punch cards. Compilers and general technical advances got rid of those jobs and pushed up where the “charlie work” goes.
These days? There are good internships/junior positions and bad ones. A good one actually teaches skills and encourages the worker to contribute. A bad one has them do the mindless grunt work that nobody else wants to. LLMs get rid of the latter.
And… I actually think that is good for the overall health of workers, if not the number (again, UBI). Because if someone can’t be trusted to write meaningful code without copying it off the internet and not even updating variable names? I don’t want to work with them. I spend too much of my workday babysitting those morons who are just here there to get some work experience so they can con their way into a different role and be someone else’s problem.
And experience will be gained the way it is increasingly being gained. Working on (generally open source) projects and interviewing for competitive internships where the idea is to take relatively low cost workers and have them work on a low ROI task that is actually interesting. It is better for the intern because they learn actual development and collaboration skills. And it is better for the staff because it is a way to let people work on the stuff they actually want to do without the massive investment of a few hundred hours of a Senior Engineer’s time.
And… there will be a lot fewer of those roles. Just like there were a lot fewer roles for artists as animation tools stopped requiring every single cell of animation to be hand drawn. And that is why we need to decouple life from work through UBI.
But also? If we have less internships that consist of “okay. good job. thanks for that. Next time can you at least try and compile your code? or pay attention to the squiggly red lines in your IDE? or listen to the person telling you that is wrong?”? Then we have better workers and better junior developers who can actually do more meaningful work. And we’ll actually need to update the interviewing system to not just be “did you memorize this book of questions from Amazon?” and we’ll have fewer “hot hires” who surprise everyone by being able to breath unassisted but have a very high salary because they worked for facebook.
Because, and here is the thing: LLMs are already as good, if not better than, an intern or junior engineer. And the companies that spend money on training up interns aren’t going to be rewarded. Under capitalism, there is no reason to “take one for the team” so that your competition can benefit.
This is already at the point where we can replace an intern or one of the less good junior engineers. Because anyone who has done code review or has had to do rounds with medical interns know… they are idiots who need people to check their work constantly.
Do so at your own peril. Because the thing is, a person will learn from their mistakes and grow in knowledge and experience over time. An LLM is unlikely to do the same in a professional environment for two big reasons:
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The company using the LLM would have to send data back to the creator of the LLM. This means their proprietary work could be at risk. The AI company could scoop them, or a data leak would be disastrous.
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Alternatively, the LLM could self-learn and be solely in house without any external data connections. A company with an LLM will never go for this, because it would mean their model is improving and developing out of their control. Their customized version may end up being better than their the LLM company’s future releases. Or, something might go terribly wrong with the model while it learns and adapts. If the LLM company isn’t held legally liable, they’re still going to lose that business going forward.
On top of that, you need your inexperienced noobs to one day become the ones checking the output of an LLM. They can’t do that unless they get experience doing the work. Companies already have proprietary models that just require the right inputs and pressing a button. Engineers are still hired though to interpret the results, know what inputs are the right ones, and understand how the model works.
A company that tries replacing them with LLMs is going to lose in the long run to competitors.
Actually, nvidia recently announced RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation). Basically the idea is that you take an “off the shelf” LLM and then feed your local instance sensitive corporate data. It can then use that information in its responses.
So you really are “teaching” it every time you do a code review of the AI’s merge request and say “Well… that function doesn’t exist” or “you didn’t use useful variable names” and so forth. Which… is a lot more than I can say about a lot of even senior or principle engineers I have worked with over the years who are very much making mistakes that would get an intern assigned to sorting crayons.
Which, again, gets back to the idea of having less busywork. Less grunt work. Less charlie work. Instead, focus on developers who can actually contribute to a team and design meetings.
And the model I learned early in my career that I bring to every firm is to have interns be a reward for talented engineers and not a punishment for people who weren’t paying attention in Nose Goes. Teaching a kid to write a bunch of utility functions does nothing they didn’t learn (or not learn) in undergrad but it is a necessary evil… that an AI can do.
Instead, the people who are good at their jobs and contributing to the overall product? They probably have ideas they want to work on but don’t have the cycles to flesh out. That is where interns come into play. They work with those devs and other staff and learn what it means to actually be part of a team. They get to work on really cool projects and their mentors get to ALSO work on really cool projects but maybe focus more on the REALLY interesting parts and less on the specific implementation.
And result is that your interns are now actually developers who are worth a damn.
Also: One of the most important things to teach a kid is that they owe the company nothing. If they aren’t getting the raise they feel they deserve then they need to be updating their linkedin and interviewing elsewhere. That is good for the worker. And that also means that the companies that spend a lot of money training up grunts? They will lose them to the companies who are desperate for people who can lead projects and contribute to designs but haven’t been wasting money on writing unit tests.
See, this is why we can’t have nice things. Money fucks it up, every time. Fuck money, it’s a shitty backwards idea. We can do better than this.
You can be killed with steel, which has a lot of other implications on what you do in order to avoid getting killed with steel.
Does steel fuck it all up?
Centralization is a shitty backwards idea. But you have to be very conscious of yourself and your instincts to neuter the part that tells you that it’s not to understand it.
Distributivism minus Catholicism is just so good. I always return to it when I give up on trying to find future in some other political ideology.
This has nothing to do with centralization. AI companies are already scraping the web for everything useful. If you took the content from SO and split it into 1000 federated sites, it would still end up in a AI model. Decentralization would only help if we ever manage to hold the AI companies accountable for the en masse copyright violations they base their industry on.
Can you explain how reddit comments or stack overflow answers are “copyright infringement”?
Doesn’t seem relevant to the specific problem this post is about.
The irony is that folks complain about stuff like Discord partly because it cannot be scraped by search engines but that would also protect it from being scraped by AI tools.
This has everything to do with centralization, just not with the one small context for it which you picked.
With real decentralization in place market mechanisms work.
List of Distributist parties in the UK:
- National Distributist Party
- British National Party
- National Front
Hmmm, maybe the Catholic part isn’t the only part worth reviewing.
Also worth noting that the Conservative Party’s ‘Big Society’ schtick in 2010 was wrapped in the trappings of distributism.
Not that all this diminishes it entirely but it does seem to be an entry drug for exploitation by the right.
I gotta hold my hand up and state that I am not read up on it at all, so happy to be corrected. But my impression is that Pope Leo XIII’s conception was to reduce secular power so as to leave a void for the church to fill. And it’s the potential exploitation of that void that attracts the far right too.
So they pulled a “reddit”?
These companies don’t realise their most engaged users generate a disproportionate amount of their content.
They will just go to their own spaces.
I think this a good thing in the long run, the internet will become decentralised again.
