• 27 Posts
  • 110 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 13th, 2023

help-circle


  • My (red) state is one of those that changed the law to make it illegal for pornographic websites to be seen by children. To view them, you’d have to have some kind of central ID to prove that you are over 18. This is absolutely a precursor to having to have an ID to use the internet at all. Every bad thing that has ever happened on the internet will be used to convince legislators to enact a law like this. It’s only a matter of time.




  • In 2005 or so, I got a tip about an application called LaunchBar, which would later be copied by Apple to replace the Sherlock search tool, and later by Microsoft in its PowerToys suite. The machine learning LaunchBar used to tailor its responses based on my previous behavior was life-changing. Instead of configuring an application, I just had to use it to change how it behaved.

    This is how language models and AI are going to improve your products. Subtly. Behind the scenes. Slightly improving a thousand different use cases, only a fraction of which your regular usage patterns are going to intersect with.







  • I am so torn on this. On the one hand, this is sorely needed. Not everyone in an organization is aware that information they feed to an LLM is often fed back into the LLM to train it, or that the LLM reflects bias in its training material, or even that an LLM might return false information. A strong policy is important to help communicate these things.

    On the other hand, LLMs have had the biggest impact on my productivity, well, ever. The speed with which I can write complex documents, write code, or help someone else solve a problem has been increased by an order of magnitude. My organization recently enacted something similar to this executive order, prohibiting the use of LLMs. Now I can’t get those advantages at work anymore. I’m afraid a heavy-handed policy would effectively strip government workers of the same capabilities.






  • I’ve just spent a few weeks continually enhancing a script in a language I’m not all that familiar with, exclusively using ChatGPT 4. The experience leaves a LOT to be desired.

    The first few prompts are nothing short of amazing. You go from blank page to something that mostly works in a few seconds. Inevitably, though, something needs to change. That’s where things start to go awry.

    You’ll get a few changes in, and things will be going well. Then you’ll ask for another change, and the resulting code will eliminate one of your earlier changes. For example, I asked ChatGPT to write a quick python script that does fuzzy matching. I wanted to feed it a list of filenames from a file and have it find the closest match on my hard drive. I asked for a progress bar, which it added. By the time I was done having it generate code, the progress bar had been removed a couple of times, and changed out for a different progress bar at least three times. (On the bright side, I now know of multiple progress bar solutions in Python!)

    If you continue on long enough, the “memory” of ChatGPT isn’t sufficient to remember everything you’ve been doing. You get to a point where you need to feed it your script very frequently to give it the context it needs to answer a question or implement a change.

    And on top of all that, it doesn’t often implement the best change. In one instance, I wanted it to write a function that would parse a CSV, count up duplicate values in a particular field, and add that value to each row of the CSV. I could tell right away that the first solution was not an efficient way to accomplish the task. I had to question ChatGPT in another prompt about whether it was efficient. (I was soundly impressed that it recognized the problem after I brought it up and gave me something that ended up being quite fast and efficient.)

    Moral of the story: you can’t do this effectively without an understanding of computer science.