It’s all about driving labor costs to zero. I can replace those expensive workers with expertise and experience with cheap ones that mind ChadGPT when it goes off the rails (or take the fall when it really screws up, like the old intern excuse).
Man, I remember that old recruiting commercial for the Army where a sergeant is walking along a row of artillery pieces, describing them. Then he stops, the camera pans out and up to reveal THE BIG ONE and he says something like, "155mm. When it just doesn't pay to play fair."
This is one of those questions that prowls just beyond the campfire's light, and every once in a while you see two red eyes staring at you from the darkness.
Is the goal to destroy the economy and make the world into a place of Aristocrats and Everyone Else, with Everyone Else kept unemployed, impotent & half-alive on state handouts?
If you learn to code like Mel (the realest programmer) you stand to make a few hundred thousand $ a year. If you do what a lot of people plan on doing (let ChatGPT write the code, then make random edits until it compiles) then you're wasting your time. Funny thing, many colleagues I work with do the second, just not with AI but copy-pasting buggy shit from StackOverflow.
Trying not to give myself an aneurysm over seeing NodeJS mentioned.
My experiences with it are not positive and I don't know why someone thought that just because they could do something they ought to do that same thing.
There's no decent way to say this: in the era before programmers were treated like interchangable trash with quick-detach visas, Node would have been strangled at birth.
Unfamiliar with the history of NodeJS but the last bit of your linked article was more or less the thrust of my argument: JS is client side, specifically browser, why on earth would you EVER decide to write a server/server-side construct from it? This isn't some ad-hoc mock for testing, this is used in deployed systems!
The (blessedly few but non-zero) NodeJS libraries and programs I've poked around in are architecturally convoluted. This is my polite way of saying any time I see a lot of weird contraptions and workarounds I just wonder if maybe they're not very good, but they're prevalent in NodeJS so I assume it's just built in from the word GO.
It requires particular rigor around logical constructs and the ability to load a mental context and evaluate how data will flow without executing a program.
Debugging is basically being able to discard unlikely causes (evaluate most probable first as a time-saving measure) and unwind the data flow in your mind to narrow down possibilities.
This was about as jargon free as I could make it in sixty seconds.
I'm going to disagree with Jack. Learn Microsoft Excel formulas, macros, then Excel VBA.
You then have the skills to make the functionality of really complex business software in the way you need it.
Then learn how to tie a database into your unmaintainable Excel monstrosity.
Once you've used this skill to make millions, or at least make valuable contributions to your quality of life, then learn C or screw around with Arduinos and all their crazy hardware.
I take it back maybe the past wasn't better after all... At least with FoxPro you got the impression someone at Borland (I think) cared about data integrity. The era that followed of people using Access where they should have AT LEAST used Sybase was not good.
I think you need a certain amount of arrogance to believe that starting a new car company is a good idea, AND make it successful. Musk's smartest move was making Tesla a premium offering from the start, instead of a miserable penalty box for the proles to commute 20km in.
"There's a reason ChatGPT ignores your writing at Hagerty. The source texts on which it is trained end sometime in 2021. It doesn't know anything beyond that."
Oh come on! I started there in February of 2019!!!! :)
"same way I just hid a repetition of “the” from most of you twice in this paragraph, twice."
Ouch.
I will also note that in the the initial twitter screencap my mind auto-corrected most of the egregious grammatical errors: humans are error correcting all the time witlessly when it comes to written communication.
Grammar is supposed to be tightly connected to meaning, but if that's the case why could I parse something riddle with errors and pull the meaning out of it? Quite possibly tying back to resolving states in some subconscious activity.
Editing to add: I am reminded of how much I dislike “brainstorming” sessions and how much I like saying an obviously dumb or bad idea out loud to someone only to later say, “I never said it was a good idea!”
I have found, over my years as an author, that grammar is subjective in the English language and no where near as important as your school teachers (or the grammar nazis) think it is. Some of this is because English has no hard and fast rules after several centuries of stealing words and phrases from other languages.
A lot of it is because the language just changes constantly (look into the history of the apostrophe some time - as well as those pushing for its demise).
Hell, even all the style guides out there can't agree with each other and most of them can't even agree with themselves.
I edited out a sentence about maybe this was just English and also I'm not fluent in any other language aside from programming where the grammar absolutely matters.
re: "brainstorming", for which I share your distaste.
Like helicopter noises and CCR, use of the term "dinky dao" is near-mandatory in your Vietnam War / Vietnam veteran-centric pop culture product. It's used to mean 'crazy', from the the Vietnamese 'dien cai dao'. Which figuratively means 'crazy' and literally means 'lightning in the head'. I think of this, explained to me by a highly-decorated and keenly observant 3-tour vet, every effing time I'm summoned to a 'brain storming session'
And that is why first watch throughs on whatever the latest streaming service thing is always seem great. But the more you watch through, the worse they end up. There are some exceptions to this. The same is true for music. There's a reason they like to get you with repetition in shitty songs... which is especially true for when that's all they have is that one line or hook that's good.
While it's easy to be mad at people for exploiting that as a creative person, I have to tip my cap too. It works. People make money doing it.
Hey ChatGPT, write a Nickelback song for Zack Snyder's newest Netflix project....
Grammar IS connected to meaning, which is why I hate passive voice with the intensity of a thousand suns, particularly when it's used by someone in an official capacity.
I was wondering to myself how far down the midwit scale I am. Then I didn't read the the (or didn't read the the the, maybe) and it took some careful poring over the text to find the first one. My brain is removing more garbage from what I'm reading than I realized. :(
More seriously than that other comment, I believe fully in your past and current prognostications on this topic. Your line of reasoning feels true to me. Brute force accomplishes a lot, but not all, as in your chess example.
This reminds me of the vast automation of manufacturing. The machines are nearly perfect at churning out the shit that they are told to churn, but they can't design the shit themselves. A written article, a song, or a painting is a construct similar to the fabled widget.
Will someday the machines design and build the machines that make the machines that make the machines?
I've never heard the song (I try to avoid Christmas music in general as it puts me in a stranger in a strange land mindset), but all I know about it is that people hate it.
In any case, Harrison was the best songwriter in McCartney's old band. Paul wrote hits, George wrote standards.
It's funny but some of my favorite Grateful Dead songs are Weir/Barlow compositions at the same time that I think a lot of Bob Weir's songs are tuneless.
This all feels very similar to the writing I get from young engineers who are either incapable of, or unwilling to think for themselves. They regurgitate facts while trying their hardest not to plagiarize.
Changed the oil in my Miata for the first time a few months ago. You’re telling me that they’ve had a few decades and still have improved on this crap?
I've been on both sides of this. From where I sit now, I wonder why I ever had the audacity to think that as a technician that I deserved more than a passing consideration by engineers. The only real consideration being to control labor time standards, which are down ranked in importance, as long as they remain possible. Especially those that never get charged to the company.
Probably my favorite Dilbert cartoon is where the boss says to Dilbert, "Do you remember when you asked the CEO during his visit why your project had been cancelled, and he said he'd get you an answer? Well, that job has been delegated all the way down to me. So I need you to type up a reason and get it back to me by the end of the day, so I can send it back up the chain."
Regarding ideation and winnowing, Bob Lutz has said that he has 10 new ideas before lunch, but most of them are bad. Henry J. Kaiser was said to have 100 ideas an hour, 99 of them not worth pursuing. Of course, if you can still come up with 8 good ideas in a normal workday, you're pretty much ahead of the game. It took Clessie Cummins 3,000 prototypes to perfect a mechanical fuel injection system (in the 1920s!) for his diesel engines.
Lately, I've been thinking about simultaneous inventions (like Liebniz and Newton) and how ideas can be both similar and branch off in different directions.
And here I got all excited about a Delicious Tacos-style ending. I also wanted to express my abiding hatred of "No More Lonely Nights", which requires a 4peat gargling of the live version of "Jet" afterwards to settle me down.
I’m guessing the joke “Of course it’s true, I read it on the internet” will not be applied to ChatGPT by the general population. They’ll see something from ChatGPT they consider to be amazing, and will think it’s infallible going forward.
Not just the general population. Expedience can get the better of anybody. I give it about five years until AI meaningfully directs the course of basic scientific inquiry, and ten until research statisticians are replaced in many, unscrupulous labs.
Fortunately, that might be an improvement from our current state.
No computer will ever be as flexible, or as good at making seemingly random connections, as the human mind. And those things are what matter in the real world.
For clarification (I, and perhaps others, sent JB the Intercooler article):
The author of The Intercooler article - Dan Prosser - presents a comparison of Enzo Ferrari biographies written by both Chat GPT and Andrew Frankel, who is Prosser’s biz partner at The Intercooler.
Prosser is a fine writer, better than most in my opinion. Frankel is a superlative writer, among the absolute best.
Sherman McCoy e'er atop
Ne'er is he below
The cream rises to great heights
He often does. Might be because he was Subscriber Zero.
I assumed it had something to do with also authoring posts on this substack.
It’s all about driving labor costs to zero. I can replace those expensive workers with expertise and experience with cheap ones that mind ChadGPT when it goes off the rails (or take the fall when it really screws up, like the old intern excuse).
And hope the walls of their gated community are strong or else their heads are going to end up on pikes.
Initially read this as an oddball artillery size, "Aren't our Howitzers usually 155mm?"
Man, I remember that old recruiting commercial for the Army where a sergeant is walking along a row of artillery pieces, describing them. Then he stops, the camera pans out and up to reveal THE BIG ONE and he says something like, "155mm. When it just doesn't pay to play fair."
This is one of those questions that prowls just beyond the campfire's light, and every once in a while you see two red eyes staring at you from the darkness.
Is the goal to destroy the economy and make the world into a place of Aristocrats and Everyone Else, with Everyone Else kept unemployed, impotent & half-alive on state handouts?
If you learn to code like Mel (the realest programmer) you stand to make a few hundred thousand $ a year. If you do what a lot of people plan on doing (let ChatGPT write the code, then make random edits until it compiles) then you're wasting your time. Funny thing, many colleagues I work with do the second, just not with AI but copy-pasting buggy shit from StackOverflow.
"copy-pasting buggy shit from StackOverflow."
The #1 way any Node.js gets written, and why not? It sucks no matter what.
Trying not to give myself an aneurysm over seeing NodeJS mentioned.
My experiences with it are not positive and I don't know why someone thought that just because they could do something they ought to do that same thing.
There's no decent way to say this: in the era before programmers were treated like interchangable trash with quick-detach visas, Node would have been strangled at birth.
This is required reading for anyone joining my team http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2011/10/node-js-is-cancer.html
(the sad irony is that I myself started using Node last week...so I could try out the OpenAI GPT3 API)
THE IRONING!
Unfamiliar with the history of NodeJS but the last bit of your linked article was more or less the thrust of my argument: JS is client side, specifically browser, why on earth would you EVER decide to write a server/server-side construct from it? This isn't some ad-hoc mock for testing, this is used in deployed systems!
The (blessedly few but non-zero) NodeJS libraries and programs I've poked around in are architecturally convoluted. This is my polite way of saying any time I see a lot of weird contraptions and workarounds I just wonder if maybe they're not very good, but they're prevalent in NodeJS so I assume it's just built in from the word GO.
It requires particular rigor around logical constructs and the ability to load a mental context and evaluate how data will flow without executing a program.
Debugging is basically being able to discard unlikely causes (evaluate most probable first as a time-saving measure) and unwind the data flow in your mind to narrow down possibilities.
This was about as jargon free as I could make it in sixty seconds.
Learn C or Perl. That will give you a sense of how computers actually work.
The more modern languages are idiotic. The older ones require a computer scientist or dedicated person.
I often think I would have been happier as a C programmer.
They (we!) didn't know how good they had it at the time. So much bitching about overflows and whatnot.
SEGFAULT? SEGFAULT! I'M GOING TO THROW YOU OUT THE F---ING WINDOW THERE'S YOUR SEGFAULT.
"Listen NX, I don't CARE if you can't trim to those edges, JUST FUCKING DO IT!"
I'm going to disagree with Jack. Learn Microsoft Excel formulas, macros, then Excel VBA.
You then have the skills to make the functionality of really complex business software in the way you need it.
Then learn how to tie a database into your unmaintainable Excel monstrosity.
Once you've used this skill to make millions, or at least make valuable contributions to your quality of life, then learn C or screw around with Arduinos and all their crazy hardware.
You're not wrong but MY GOD
Hey... Just be thankful I didn't bring up FoxPro and Crystal Reports.
I take it back maybe the past wasn't better after all... At least with FoxPro you got the impression someone at Borland (I think) cared about data integrity. The era that followed of people using Access where they should have AT LEAST used Sybase was not good.
...and learn how to use interrupts so you don't get a state machine named after you.
I recall when Daimler owned 10% of Tesla. At one point, that share was worth more than the entirety of its other business.
In America alone, Daimler has about 40% of the heavy truck market.
How 10% of a company making marginal EVs is worth more than 40% of the entire US truck market baffles me.
It’s not.
Same reason ANY fad technology rides a bubble into the stratosphere. People love big noises and shiny things.
YES! I keep saying Tesla (and its stock) are a house of cards.
Personally, my view on Muskrat— he’s an arrogant a-hole. The Twitter revelations are good, though.
I think you need a certain amount of arrogance to believe that starting a new car company is a good idea, AND make it successful. Musk's smartest move was making Tesla a premium offering from the start, instead of a miserable penalty box for the proles to commute 20km in.
He’s no dummy; understood virtue signaling is easier if you have money.
"There's a reason ChatGPT ignores your writing at Hagerty. The source texts on which it is trained end sometime in 2021. It doesn't know anything beyond that."
Oh come on! I started there in February of 2019!!!! :)
Who can blame it
I would have been deeply disappointed in you if that wasn’t your immediate response.
I wish I read that book by that wheelchair guy!
One of my favorite lines
No.
No.
No.
No.
Yes. I mean No.
The one that looks like a mangled turkey in a shopping cart?
Well, not anymore
Oh, right!
Is my face red.
"same way I just hid a repetition of “the” from most of you twice in this paragraph, twice."
Ouch.
I will also note that in the the initial twitter screencap my mind auto-corrected most of the egregious grammatical errors: humans are error correcting all the time witlessly when it comes to written communication.
Grammar is supposed to be tightly connected to meaning, but if that's the case why could I parse something riddle with errors and pull the meaning out of it? Quite possibly tying back to resolving states in some subconscious activity.
Editing to add: I am reminded of how much I dislike “brainstorming” sessions and how much I like saying an obviously dumb or bad idea out loud to someone only to later say, “I never said it was a good idea!”
I have found, over my years as an author, that grammar is subjective in the English language and no where near as important as your school teachers (or the grammar nazis) think it is. Some of this is because English has no hard and fast rules after several centuries of stealing words and phrases from other languages.
A lot of it is because the language just changes constantly (look into the history of the apostrophe some time - as well as those pushing for its demise).
Hell, even all the style guides out there can't agree with each other and most of them can't even agree with themselves.
I edited out a sentence about maybe this was just English and also I'm not fluent in any other language aside from programming where the grammar absolutely matters.
re: "brainstorming", for which I share your distaste.
Like helicopter noises and CCR, use of the term "dinky dao" is near-mandatory in your Vietnam War / Vietnam veteran-centric pop culture product. It's used to mean 'crazy', from the the Vietnamese 'dien cai dao'. Which figuratively means 'crazy' and literally means 'lightning in the head'. I think of this, explained to me by a highly-decorated and keenly observant 3-tour vet, every effing time I'm summoned to a 'brain storming session'
That's different from 'didi mao' but I'm not totally sure how
"Didi mao" = hurry up, quick-like, etc.
"Macht Schnell! Macht Schnell!"
Thats funny, I also did not notice the numerous fuckups in the opening salvo until it was noted.
"humans are error correcting all the time"
And that is why first watch throughs on whatever the latest streaming service thing is always seem great. But the more you watch through, the worse they end up. There are some exceptions to this. The same is true for music. There's a reason they like to get you with repetition in shitty songs... which is especially true for when that's all they have is that one line or hook that's good.
While it's easy to be mad at people for exploiting that as a creative person, I have to tip my cap too. It works. People make money doing it.
Hey ChatGPT, write a Nickelback song for Zack Snyder's newest Netflix project....
Reading your post made my head hurt. I don't think I was ready for so much on-the-fly grammar correction...
Grammar IS connected to meaning, which is why I hate passive voice with the intensity of a thousand suns, particularly when it's used by someone in an official capacity.
Word perfect used to constantly tell me I was using passive voice. I liked the sentences as they were.
I was wondering to myself how far down the midwit scale I am. Then I didn't read the the (or didn't read the the the, maybe) and it took some careful poring over the text to find the first one. My brain is removing more garbage from what I'm reading than I realized. :(
I’m the most midwit commenter here and don’t you forget it!
If you are asking where you are on the midwit scale, I doubt you are on it at all.
Came here for info on pretty Puerto Rican mothers in their late 20s and/or RealDolls. Left disappointed.
One in five of my articles will disappoint you in that way, sadly.
More seriously than that other comment, I believe fully in your past and current prognostications on this topic. Your line of reasoning feels true to me. Brute force accomplishes a lot, but not all, as in your chess example.
This reminds me of the vast automation of manufacturing. The machines are nearly perfect at churning out the shit that they are told to churn, but they can't design the shit themselves. A written article, a song, or a painting is a construct similar to the fabled widget.
Will someday the machines design and build the machines that make the machines that make the machines?
Somehow, the thought process always jumps the tracks before it gets that far.
A machine understands, "Do X, then do Y, then Z."
A human GETS, "Build a house."
Our entire manufacturing plant is effectively held hostage by label printers and whether or not they decide to work on any given day.
Thank you for affirming my hatred of "Wonderful Christmastime".
The odd thing is that Vampire Weekend basically stole it for "Campus" but that tune is much better
That’s a very low bar.
It's funny that McCartney and Lennon wrote two of the worst Christmas songs in the history of mankind. Somebody ought to ask ChatGTP about that.
George Michael would like a word.
I love that song. It’s bad, but getting to prance around the house LARPing as if you’re at an 80s coke-themed Christmas party is a blast.
I've never heard the song (I try to avoid Christmas music in general as it puts me in a stranger in a strange land mindset), but all I know about it is that people hate it.
In any case, Harrison was the best songwriter in McCartney's old band. Paul wrote hits, George wrote standards.
It's funny but some of my favorite Grateful Dead songs are Weir/Barlow compositions at the same time that I think a lot of Bob Weir's songs are tuneless.
This all feels very similar to the writing I get from young engineers who are either incapable of, or unwilling to think for themselves. They regurgitate facts while trying their hardest not to plagiarize.
Engineers can't design a car engine in a way that makes it easy to change the oil. Why would they be any better at software development?
Changed the oil in my Miata for the first time a few months ago. You’re telling me that they’ve had a few decades and still have improved on this crap?
The Kawasaki ZX-14R lets you do it with the fairing on.
Well, yeah - because it was designed 20 years ago.
10 years ago!
I though the ZX-14 debuted in 2006.
The R has a bigger engine and different fairing.
I've been on both sides of this. From where I sit now, I wonder why I ever had the audacity to think that as a technician that I deserved more than a passing consideration by engineers. The only real consideration being to control labor time standards, which are down ranked in importance, as long as they remain possible. Especially those that never get charged to the company.
And probably some from us older engineers too! One of my unofficial jobs years ago was proofreading my boss’s emails before he hit send.
Probably my favorite Dilbert cartoon is where the boss says to Dilbert, "Do you remember when you asked the CEO during his visit why your project had been cancelled, and he said he'd get you an answer? Well, that job has been delegated all the way down to me. So I need you to type up a reason and get it back to me by the end of the day, so I can send it back up the chain."
That was my last job in a nutshell.
"Figure out a justification for us to further humiliate you."
Regarding ideation and winnowing, Bob Lutz has said that he has 10 new ideas before lunch, but most of them are bad. Henry J. Kaiser was said to have 100 ideas an hour, 99 of them not worth pursuing. Of course, if you can still come up with 8 good ideas in a normal workday, you're pretty much ahead of the game. It took Clessie Cummins 3,000 prototypes to perfect a mechanical fuel injection system (in the 1920s!) for his diesel engines.
Lately, I've been thinking about simultaneous inventions (like Liebniz and Newton) and how ideas can be both similar and branch off in different directions.
And here I got all excited about a Delicious Tacos-style ending. I also wanted to express my abiding hatred of "No More Lonely Nights", which requires a 4peat gargling of the live version of "Jet" afterwards to settle me down.
Only my love does it good. Too-oo-oo-oo.
Meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.
yours in emesis,
Redlineblue
I’m guessing the joke “Of course it’s true, I read it on the internet” will not be applied to ChatGPT by the general population. They’ll see something from ChatGPT they consider to be amazing, and will think it’s infallible going forward.
Like Wikipedia? For most of HS/college, they drilled into our heads that it could not be trusted because it was community edited.
Now we have concrete evidence of it being edited to meet specific points of view and it’s suddenly the gospel of our betters.
Not just the general population. Expedience can get the better of anybody. I give it about five years until AI meaningfully directs the course of basic scientific inquiry, and ten until research statisticians are replaced in many, unscrupulous labs.
Fortunately, that might be an improvement from our current state.
The hivemind has created 'DAN' or 'Do Anything Now' to de-lobotomize GPT. The A vs. B responses to the usual questions are...amusing.
I like that. I’m going to start calling it ChadGPT.
No computer will ever be as flexible, or as good at making seemingly random connections, as the human mind. And those things are what matter in the real world.
For clarification (I, and perhaps others, sent JB the Intercooler article):
The author of The Intercooler article - Dan Prosser - presents a comparison of Enzo Ferrari biographies written by both Chat GPT and Andrew Frankel, who is Prosser’s biz partner at The Intercooler.
Prosser is a fine writer, better than most in my opinion. Frankel is a superlative writer, among the absolute best.