Everybody who takes climate change and environmental protection seriously uses vi or - if they have to - emacs. Every time a VScode session is started the average global temperature goes up by %NaN degrees. Every time a new version is launched the smoldering heaps of electronic waste on faraway beaches rise by a few metres.
People die, people are suffering. Whole ecosystems are collapsing and you're using VScode...
There's an old UNIX hacker trope of Vim vs Emacs "editor wars", where Vim users complain about RSImacs and Emacs users complain about Vimscript. It's a meme that goes very deep (Church of Emacs anyone?), and I'm sure that the Vim bindings for Emacs being called "evil-mode" was done at least partially on purpose. In Spacemacs, the setup option for which keybindings you want even makes it sound like you're choosing a side in a video game:
- Among the stars aboard the Evil flagship (vim)
- On the planet Emacs in the Holy control tower (emacs)
Peter Gabriel is fucking courageous. I love it. I'm a 50+ programmer. I can absolutely feel this shit pressing on me. Good. Are people right that there are ethical concerns, absolutely. We need to get busy realizing the potential and dealing with the issues.
I’m in your same demographic. However I see these technologies as career extenders, not career threats. I can learn things faster than ever and adapt to changes more easily.
As someone much younger (mid 20's), I have absolutely no idea what to do. I don't even think there _is_ anything I can do, aside from waiting to see what happens. What happens when programmers are no longer needed? That certainly (I hope) won't happen in 5 years, but given the exponential rate of improvement, I can see programming as a profession being gone in 20-30 years.
> What happens when programmers are no longer needed?
I can't imagine a situation like this. Who is doing all the actual programming work ? Who is receiving the products of the work ? Who is competing with the previous two groups ?
Writing code might be no longer needed at some point but programmers don't spend majority of their time writing code.
I also got middling results. I gave it a novel NASA picture of the moon passing in front of the earth, taken by the Deep Space Climate Observatory Satellite, so an unusual vantage point. First it was just wrong, and said that it was a picture of a crescent moon taken from a mountain top, or something like that. Not terrible at least it recognized the moon, but wrong. I tried to give it a chance and corrected it with the additional info that the picture was taken from space. It then did better, but on the last line it threw in that it was not a photograph, but a rendering of some sort, which again, is just wrong.
More and more I get the impression that people are so taken with the chat interface that they are grading these models more favorably than is warranted.
And after pointing out all the mistakes in the description, it took a very ... interesting approach to address my remarks:
> I apologize for the confusion. The image shows a block diagram of a basic amplifier circuit with a power supply, but it does not show any input stages, output stages, or load resistors. [...] The input stage is made up of an operational amplifier, which is used to amplify the input signal. The output of the input stage is then connected to the power supply, which provides the necessary voltage to operate the amplifier. The amplifier is designed to amplify the input signal to a higher level, which is then sent to the load resistor to power the load.
So it acknowledges the remarks, describes everything that is _not_ in the image and then puts the stuff back into the description anyway :)
Yea it's not. Sorry to contradict, but it's not like that. In any kind of tutoring arrangement you're time with them is limited, and if they're any good, they don't just regurgitate limitless example code. Two of the most important decisions that an instructor has to make are, how much access to give you, and how much example material to give you, because the actual learning begins when you have to think for yourself, and you are forced to confront a black screen with a flashing cursor, and fill it with your own ideas. So interacting with ChatGPT may be a great experience, but it's not that. Maybe someday it will be.
Tutoring assumes the skill is valuable to learn, that there is a need for more people who know how to do it.
We don't really tutor people how to write too much assembly anymore, or hand-compile code. So if you're arguing that ChatGPT meets the definition of a tool, or a servant, better than a tutor, fair, but if you're further arguing that that makes it somehow less valuable than a tutor (in this case), I'm not sure I can come along there.
Yea, I definitely wasn't trying to quantify it's value. ChatGPT definitely appears to be proving valuable to people. I was just challenging the idea that so far it's acting in a tutor/instructor/mentor type of role. While it seems like an interesting direction to take these LLMs, so far I haven't observed them doing that.
I'm an artist myself, absolutely love Midjourney, and have absolutely no problem with it being trained on any and all art -- just like human artists have been doing for millenia.
Long term, if Adobe is clearly worse than the competition as a result of being legally/ethically conservative they will lose users. They will get a lot of likes on twitter but companies will not pay for a firefly subscription if it's worse than Stable Diffusion.
