computer science is dead now that LLMs can do what people can’t: write trivial crossword apps - eviltoast

this article is incredibly long and rambly, but please enjoy as this asshole struggles to select random items from an array in presumably Javascript for what sounds like a basic crossword app:

At one point, we wanted a command that would print a hundred random lines from a dictionary file. I thought about the problem for a few minutes, and, when thinking failed, tried Googling. I made some false starts using what I could gather, and while I did my thing—programming—Ben told GPT-4 what he wanted and got code that ran perfectly.

Fine: commands like those are notoriously fussy, and everybody looks them up anyway.

ah, the NP-complete problem of just fucking pulling the file into memory (there’s no way this clown was burning a rainforest asking ChatGPT for a memory-optimized way to do this), selecting a random item between 0 and the areay’s length minus 1, and maybe storing that index in a second array if you want to guarantee uniqueness. there’s definitely not literally thousands of libraries for this if you seriously can’t figure it out yourself, hackerman

I returned to the crossword project. Our puzzle generator printed its output in an ugly text format, with lines like "s""c""a""r""*""k""u""n""i""s""*" "a""r""e""a". I wanted to turn output like that into a pretty Web page that allowed me to explore the words in the grid, showing scoring information at a glance. But I knew the task would be tricky: each letter had to be tagged with the words it belonged to, both the across and the down. This was a detailed problem, one that could easily consume the better part of an evening.

fuck it’s convenient that every example this chucklefuck gives of ChatGPT helping is for incredibly well-treaded toy and example code. wonder why that is? (check out the author’s other articles for a hint)

I thought that my brother was a hacker. Like many programmers, I dreamed of breaking into and controlling remote systems. The point wasn’t to cause mayhem—it was to find hidden places and learn hidden things. “My crime is that of curiosity,” goes “The Hacker’s Manifesto,” written in 1986 by Loyd Blankenship. My favorite scene from the 1995 movie “Hackers” is

most of this article is this type of fluffy cringe, almost like it’s written by a shitty advertiser trying and failing to pass themselves off as a relatable techy

  • self@awful.systemsOPEnglish
    7·
    1 year ago

    if the capitalists succeed in their omnipresent goal to vastly reduce the perceived value of your labor, you can always write terrible code that kills in one of the most tedious languages ever invented

    do these ideas give you comfort

      • self@awful.systemsOPEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        When ChatGPT landed a year ago, OpenAI had already finished training GPT-4 (which begun a long time prior). When they released that, it looked like they leapt from GPT-3 to GPT-4 in a few months. The image input capability that came out a few months ago were in the original GPT-4 model (according to their publication at the time); they just disabled it until recently. All of this has been very good at keeping the hype bubble inflated, which has both had the effect of getting investors (and other tech companies) to pour money into the project and making a lot of people really worried for their livelihoods.

        this is an excellent point I haven’t seen before, and it clarifies a lot of the oddness around how these things have been deployed. it’s marketing-oriented development, and it’s being used to paper over the severe limitations in these models

        I don’t know if my worries are reasonable. I’m the sort of person who often worries unreasonably, and I’ve never felt as uncertain about the future of my field as I do at the moment. The one thing I’m absolutely sure of is that there’s no future in which I write code for the US military, though.

        that’s mostly where I’m at too, though I feel like my anxiety has enough reason behind it that I want to actively do something about it — usually something to do with this instance, though a lot of my recent projects (learning a lot more about hardware design languages, planning a community for folks to share their open source work) are deeply influenced by that anxiety too

    • thesmokingman@programming.devEnglish
      12·
      1 year ago

      Do you have anything to else to offer or is your solution to roll over and do nothing? Some of us still have families and networks to support so we can’t just devote all our time to sniping labor on the internet in preparation for the glorious revolution. Given the discussions you have on your instance, I’m kinda disappointed this tepid response is the best you have.

      I should have seen this coming.