This reminds me of something I saw online maybe 15-20 years ago now. Someone created a torrent with a name like “every IP address ever (hacking tool)” which ended up having thousands of people seeding it. It was just a text file with every IPv4 from 0.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255 😂
That file would be ungodly large. There are 2^128 possible addresses, each weighing in at 128 bits, 16 bytes. 16 bytes times 340 trillion trillion trillion. That puts us around 5.44 trillion Zettabytes. The estimates I’ve seen for worldwide data storage sit aroun 60-70 zettabytes.
I don’t think so. I just made a screenshot of one random convo he’s having about this, but there’s loads more in a similar fashion.
And all of his other posts besides this one seem legit on the surface.
So it would be pretty weird if he randomly has a very bad take, and then just claims “Lol this was a troll post, gotcha!”… That’s pretty much the 4chan defense when you get called out - “Haha guys, I’m actually not r-worded, I’m just trolling!”
I distinguish four types. There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage.
Probably unpopular opinion, but peer reviews are overrated. If coders are good AND know the project, the only thing you can do in a PR is nitpicking. They are more useful for open source collaborators because you want to double-check their code fits with the current architecture. But people here are reacting as if peer reviews could actually spot bugs that tests can’t catch. That happens rarely unless the contributor is junion/not good.
Peer reviews can catch bugs that tests can’t catch.
I won’t disagree that peer reviews are overrated, but they’re a great way to train and onboard less experienced devs (who are just more fun to work with, anyway). Like I’m a platform dev, so I don’t have a “home” project - if I had to know every project before I opened a PR for it, I’d get hardly any work done. Review help other knowledge experts weigh in on my changes.
I operate from the presumption that code’s first job is to be as easy for a human to understand as possible. It should clearly communicate what it’s attempting to do. If your code isn’t written so that your colleagues, or you 2 years from now, can read it and understand it, it’s bad even if it’s whip tight, fits all the AC and has 100% test coverage with a perfect mutation score. That’s what I focus on when I review code: does it communicate intent semantically. Code that can be understood is code that can be reused, optimized, altered when use cases change, generalized out into even more reusable code, and provide insights that technically perfect but incomprehensible code can’t. I, like you, assume that the coder knows what they were trying to do and how to test for it, so that only gets a cursory glance to spot common errors like missed nullables, inverted conditionals and shit like that. I look at it from the perspective of “If I had to add functionality to this, could I do so easily”. Because I’m gonna one of these days.
Nitpicking can be automated by a linter, then reviews can actually sit back and review more important things like high-level design and scalability
as if peer reviews could actually spot bugs that tests can’t catch
There can’t be bugs if there are no tests to catch them! Ofc you can also automate test coverage standards. But PRs are sometimes the only way to catch bugs, even and especially with senior devs in my experience bc they are lazy and will skip writing tests, or write useless or bare minimum tests just to check off code standards and merge on ahead
Code review can’t fix incompence though. I lost count of how many times my boss told me “review that PR well because X is not very good”. Also my point is that they are overrated, not that they are useless.
For the love of God, if you’re a junior programmer you’re overestimating your understanding if you keep relying on chatGPT thinking ‘of course I’ll spot the errors’. You will until you won’t and you end up dropping the company database or deleting everything in root.
All ChatGPT is doing is guessing the next word. And it’s trained on a bunch of bullshit coding blogs that litter the internet, half of which are now chatGPT written (without any validation of course).
If you can’t take 10 - 30 minutes to search for, read, and comprehend information on stack overflow or docs then programming (or problem solving) just isn’t for you. The junior end of this feel is really getting clogged with people who want to get rich quick without doing any of the legwork behind learning how to be good at this job, and ChatGPT is really exarcebating the problem.
If you can’t take 10 - 30 minutes to search for, read, and comprehend information on stack overflow or docs
A lot of the time this is just looking for syntax though; you know what you want to do, and it’s simple, but it is gated behind busywork. This is to me the most useful part about ChatGPT, it knows all the syntax and will write it out for you and answer clarifying questions so you can remain in a mental state of thinking about the actual problem instead of digging through piles of junk for a bit of information.
Never ask ChatGPT to write code that you plan to actually use, and never take it as a source of truth. I use it to put me on a possible right path when I’m totally lost and lack the vocabulary to accurately describe what I need. Sometimes I’ll ask it for an example of how sometimes works so that I can learn it myself. It’s an incredibly useful tool, but you’re out of your damn mind if you’re just regularly copying code it spits out. You need to error check everything it does, and if you don’t know the syntax well enough to write it yourself, how the hell do you plan to reliably error check it?
You absolutely can ask it for code you plan to use as long as you treat chatgpt like a beginner dev. Give it a small, very simple, self contained task and test it thoroughly.
Also, you can write unit tests while being quite unfamiliar with the syntax. For example, you could write a unit test for a function which utilizes a switch statement, without using a switch statement to test it. There’s a whole sect of “test driven development” where this kind of development would probably work pretty well.
I’ll agree that if you can’t test a piece of code, you have no business writing in the language in a professional capacity.
The more you grow in experience the more you’re going to realize that syntax and organization is the majority of programming work.
When you first start out, it feels like the hardest part is figuring out how to get from a to b on a conceptual level. Eventually that will become far easier.
You break the big problem down into discrete steps, then figure out the besy way to do each step. It takes little skill to say “the computer just needs to do this”. The trick is knowing how to speak to the computer in a way that can make sense to the computer, to you, and to the others who will eventually have to work with your code.
You’re doing the equivalent of a painter saying “I’ve done the hard part of envisioning it in my head! I’m just going to pay some guy on fiver to move the brush for me”
This is difficult to put into words, as it’s also not about memorization of every language specific syntax pattern. But there’s a difference between looking up documentation or at previous code for syntax, and trying to have chatGPT turn your psiedocode notes into working code.
I’m a pretty senior dev and have chat gpt open for quick searches. It’s great for helping me figure out what to Google in the cases where I can’t think of the name of a pattern or type I’m looking for. It also helps quite a bit with learning about obscure functions and keywords in SQL that I can do more research on
Hell, I use Copilot daily. Its auto complete is top-tier
Copilot is good for tedious stuff like writing enums. But otherwise I more often than not need to only accept tne suggested line or particular words, since in multiline snippets it can do stupid things, like exiting outside of main() or skipping error checks.
I’ve been programming for decades, I’m not actually a beginner. A mistake I made early on was thinking that everything I learn will be worth the time to learn it, and will always increase my overall skill level. But (particularly as relates to syntax) it’s not and it doesn’t; something I only use once or rarely, something that isn’t closely connected with the rest of what I often do, I’ll just forget it after a while. I greatly prefer being broadly capable of making things happen to having a finely honed specialization, so I run into that sort of thing a lot, there is an ocean of information out there and many very different things a programmer can be doing.
I think it is an important and valuable lesson to know when to get over yourself and take shortcuts. There are situations where you absolutely should never do that, but they are rare. There are many situations where not taking shortcuts is a huge mistake and will result in piles of abandoned code and not finishing what you set out to do. AI is an incredibly powerful source of shortcuts.
You’re doing the equivalent of a painter saying “I’ve done the hard part of envisioning it in my head! I’m just going to pay some guy on fiver to move the brush for me”
More like you’ve coded the functionality for a webapp, have a visual mockup, and pay some guy on fiver to write the CSS for you, because doing it yourself is an inefficient use of your time and you don’t specialize in CSS.
As for the issue of a new programmer ending up with problems because they rely too much on AI and somehow fail to learn how to model the structure of programs in their head, that’s probably real, but I can’t imagine how that will go because all I had to go on when I was learning was google and IRC and it’s totally different. Hope it works out for them.
TBF that’s how many master artists worked in the past. The big art producers had one master painter guiding a bunch of apprentices who did the actual legwork.
That the exact opposite problem for most people though. Syntax is hard at first because you are unfamiliar and gets more natural to you overtime. Algorithms are easier to think about conceptually as a person with no programming experience as they are not programming specific. If you are an experienced developer struggling over syntax yet breezing through difficult data structure and algorithm problems (Eg. Thinking about the most efficient way to upload constantly updating vertex data to the gpu) you are definitely the anomaly.
There's a 5 hour interview with John Carmack on YouTube where he talks about transitioning from really caring deeply about algorithms and the like to deeply caring about how to make a sustainable and maintainable codebase you can have an entire team work on.
Often, a solution that is completely correct if all you're doing is solving that problem is completely incorrect in the greater context of the codebase you're working within, like if you wanted to add a dog to the Mona Lisa, you can't just draw a detailed line art dog or a cartoon dog and expect it to work -- you'd need to find someone who can paint a dog similar to the art style of the piece and properly get it to mesh with the painting.
Somehow you hit an unpopular opinion landmine with the greybeard devs.
For the greybeard devs: Try asking ChatGPT to write you some Arduino code to do a specific task. Even if you don’t know how to write code for an Arduino, ChatGPT will get you 95% of the way there with the proper libraries and syntax.
No way in hell I’m digging through forums and code repos for hours to blink an led and send out a notification through a web hook when a sensor gets triggered if AI can do it for me in 30 seconds. AI obviously can’t do everything for you if you’ve never coded anything before, but it can do a damn good job of translating your knowledge of one programming language into every other programming language available.
It’s great for jumping into something you’re very unfamiliar with. Unfortunately, if you often find yourself very unfamiliar with day to day tasks, you’re probably incompetent. (Or maybe a butterfly who gets paid to learn new things every day.)
Did ChatGPT just hallucinate it? Does it exist but it isn't used like ChatGPT says? Does it exist but it doesn't do what ChatGPT thinks it does?
I use ChatGPT sometimes to help out with stuff at home (I've tried it for work stuff but the stuff I work on is niche enough that it purely hallucinates), and I've ended up running in circles for hours because the answer I got ended up in this uncanny valley: Correct enough that it isn't immediately obviously wrong, but incorrect enough that it won't work, it can't work, and you're going to really have to put a lot of work in to figure that out.
I write a lot of bash and I still have to check syntax every day, but the answer to that is not chatGPT but a proper linter like shell check that you can trust because it’s based on a rigid set of rules, not the black box of a LLM.
I can understand the syntax justification for obscure languages that don’t have a well written linter, but if anything that gives me less confidence about CHATGPT because it’s training material for an obscure language is likely smaller.
Less checking syntax and more like “what was this function name again ?”
“Which library has that ?”
“Do I need to instance this or is it static ?”
All of theses can be answered by documentation, but who want to read the docs when you can ask chatgpt. (Copilot is better in my experience btw)
you can remain in a mental state of thinking about the actual problem
more like you’ll end up wasting a significant amount of time debugging not only the problem, but also chatGPT, trying to correct the bullshit it spews out, often ignoring parts of your prompt
It might be wrong even if you provide extensive context to make it more accurate in it’s heuristics. And providing extensive context is pretty time consuming at times.
I mean it might be good at helping you when you’re stuck, but sometimes it misses simple issues such as typos and for one issue resolved, it might introduce another if you’re not careful.
ChatGPT cannot explain, because it doesn’t understand. It will simply string together a likely sequence of characters. I’ve tried to use it multiple times for programming tasks and found each time that it doesn’t save much time, compared to an IDE. ChatGPT regularly makes up methods or entire libraries. I do like it for creating longer texts that I then manually polish, but any LLM is awful for factual information.
ChatGPT regularly makes up methods or entire libraries
I think that when it is doing that, it is normally a sign that what you are asking for does not exist and you are on the wrong track.
ChatGPT cannot explain, because it doesn’t understand
I often get good explanations that seem to reflect understanding, which often would be difficult to look up otherwise. For example when I asked about the code generated, {myVariable} , and how it could be a valid function parameter in javascript, it responded that it is the equivalent of {“myVariable”:myVariable}, and “When using object literal property value shorthand, if you’re setting a property value to a variable of the same name, you can simply use the variable name.”
If ChatGPT gives you correct information you’re either lucky or just didn’t realize it was making shit up. That’s a simple fact. LLMs absolutely have their uses, but facts ain’t one of them.
You are saying that as if it’s a small feat. Accurately guessing the next word requires understanding of what the words and sentences mean in a specific context.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s incredible. But it’s still a variation of the Chinese room experiment, it’s not a real intelligence, but really good at pretending to be one. I might trust it more if there were variants based on strictly controlled datasets.
So theoretically could you program an AI using strictly verified programming textbooks/research etc, is it currently possible to make an AI that would do far better at programming? I love the concepts around AI but I know fuckall about ML and the actual intricacies of it. So sorry if it’s a dumb question.
Yeah, this is the approach people are trying to take more now, the problem is generally amount of that data needed and verifying it’s high quality in the first place, but these systems are positive feedback loops both in training and in use. If you train on higher quality code, it will write higher quality code, but be less able to handle edge cases or potentially complete code in a salient way that wasn’t at the same quality bar or style as the training code.
On the use side, if you provide higher quality code as input when prompting, it is more likely to predict higher quality code because it’s continuing what was written. Using standard approaches, documenting, just generally following good practice with code before sending it to the LLM will majorly improve results.
I have read more than is probably healthy about the Chinese room and variants since it was first published. I’ve gone back and forth on several ideas:
There is no understanding
The person in the room doesn’t understand, but the system does
We are all just Chinese rooms without knowing it (where either of the first 2 points might apply)
Since the advent of ChatGPT, or, more properly, my awareness of it, the confusion has only increased. My current thinking, which is by no means robust, is that humans may be little more than “meatGPT” systems. Admittedly, that is probably a cynical reaction to my sense that a lot of people seem to be running on automatic a lot of the time combined with an awareness that nearly everything new is built on top of or a variation on what came before.
I don’t use ChatGPT for anything (yet) for the same reasons I don’t depend too heavily on advice from others:
I suspect that most people know a whole lot less than they think they do
I very likely know little enough myself
I definitely don’t know enough to reliably distinguish between someone truly knowledgeable and a bullshitter.
I’ve not yet seen anything to suggest that ChatGPT is reliably any better than a bullshitter. Which is not nothing, I guess, but is at least a little dangerous.
The Chinese room thought experiment doesn’t prove anything and probably confuses the discussion more than it clarifies.
In order for the Chinese room to convince an outside observer of knowing Chinese like a person the room as a whole basically needs to be sentient and understand Chinese. The person in the room doesn’t need to understand Chinese. “The room” understands Chinese.
The confounding part is the book, pen and paper. It suggests that the room is “dumb”. But to behave like a person the person-not-knowing-Chinese plus book and paper needs to be able to memorize and reason about very complex concepts. You can do that with pen and paper and not-understanding-Chinese person it just takes an awful amount of time and complex set of continuously changing rules in said book.
The best thing that’s come out of this ChatGPT bullshit is making me feel like I’m actually good at my job. To be clear, I’m not - but at the very least I can reverse engineer functional code and logically map out what I think is supposed to be happening. The bare minimum that should be required, and yet here we are, with me being able to lord my wizardry over the ChatGPT peasantry.
ETA: specifically lording myself over people who use ChatGPT to do the whole thing, not people who just use it to cut down on busywork
Imagine if you will: You have a red button and a green button. You are allowed 10 seconds to review the code before rejecting or accepting & merging. Think fast.
That’s not actual code though, it looks like some kind of trace. Notice the filenames at the end of each line.
The actual solution the issue opener there might be looking for is to disable C++ parsing, since it’s not actually C++ code, it’s just some text they pasted into VSCode and they’re wondering why their editor can’t handle it.
Without thinking about it much, my understanding was that each line of the stack trace referred to a real line, even though the block as a whole wasn’t a program.
But! because of this comment I went and checked the lines of those stack traces. And in fact, they’re not real lines, just the C++ type expansion.
That said I’ve got a another half as bad example that is real so Ive edited the comment to point to that example instead.
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