Helping someone debug something, said they asked chatgpt about what a series of bit shift operations were doing. He thought it was actually evaluating the code, yno like it presents itself as doing. Instead its example was a) not the code he put in, with b) incorrect annotations, and c) even more incorrect sample outputs. Has been doing this all day and had just started considering maybe chatGPT was wrong.

I was like first of all never do that again, and explained how chatGPT wasnt doing anything like what he thought it was doing. We spent 2 minutes isolating that code, printing out the bit string after each operation, and he immediately understood what was going on.

I fucking hate these LLMs. Empowerment is learning how to figure things out, how to make tools for yourself and how to debug problems. These things are worse than disempowering, teaching people to be dependent on something that teaches them bullshit.

Edit: too many ppl reading this as "this person bad at programming" - not what I meant. Criticism is of deceptive presentation of LLMs.

Ever since the LLM boom started, I've been saying that AI code generation's biggest impact will be to increase the burden on highly-skilled programmers to wade through the mountains of code created by less-skilled programmers.

The fact that I had to struggle mightily to write code when I was less skilled is how I gained the skill I have. Feels like AI code generation is stunting the development of the next generation of programmers. https://justin.searls.co/shots/2023-10-17-08h04m28s/

Satire in 2018. Reality in 2023.

https://youtu.be/ajGX7odA87k?t=2209

HT to James Mickens.

I spend several hours a week writing letters of recommendation for students and faculty. It's important.

But...today I learned that for the past 6 years, the NSF has been throwing away up to 40% of my graduate fellowship recommendations, unread.

It's an infuriating disregard of faculty time.

https://www.research.gov/research-web/content/rlsprocess

“Infinite growth with finite resources!”

– Cancer. Also, Marc Andreessen.

#a16z

“AGI Researchers Stop Quoting White Supremacists Challenge (Impossible)”

That the AGI crowd keeps citing white supremacists absolutely does tell us something about them. https://medium.com/@collegehill/agi-researchers-stop-quoting-white-supremacists-challenge-impossible-d1002469d572