These experts on AI are here to help us understand important things about AI.
Who are these generous, helpful experts that the CBC found, you ask?
“Dr. Muhammad Mamdani, vice-president of data science and advanced analytics at Unity Health Toronto”, per LinkedIn a PharmD, who also serves in various AI-associated centres and institutes.
“(Jeff) Macpherson is a director and co-founder at Xagency.AI”, a tech startup which does, uh, lots of stuff with AI (see their wild services page) that appears to have been announced on LinkedIn two months ago. The founders section lists other details apart from J.M.'s “over 7 years in the tech sector” which are interesting to read in light of J.M.'s own LinkedIn page.
Other people making points in this article:
C. L. Polk, award-winning author (of Witchmark).
“Illustrator Martin Deschatelets” whose employment prospects are dimming this year (and who knows a bunch of people in this situation), who per LinkedIn has worked on some nifty things.
“Ottawa economist Armine Yalnizyan”, per LinkedIn a fellow at the Atkinson Foundation who used to work at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
Could the CBC actually seriously not find anybody willing to discuss the actual technology and how it gets its results? This is archetypal hood-welded-shut sort of stuff.
Things I picked out, from article and round table (before the video stopped playing):
Does that Unity Health doctor go back later and check these emergency room intake predictions against actual cases appearing there?
Who is the “we” who have to adapt here?
AI is apparently “something that can tell you how many cows are in the world” (J.M.). Detecting a lack of results validation here again.
“At the end of the day that’s what it’s all for. The efficiency, the productivity, to put profit in all of our pockets”, from J.M.
“You now have the opportunity to become a Prompt Engineer”, from J.M. to the author and illustrator. (It’s worth watching the video to listen to this person.)
Me about the article:
I’m feeling that same underwhelming “is this it” bewilderment again.
Me about the video:
Critical thinking and ethics and “how software products work in practice” classes for everybody in this industry please.
It’s not that uncommon when filling an array with data or populating a YAML/JSON by hand. It can even be helpful when populating something like a Docker Compose config, which I use occasionally to spin up local services while debugging like DBs and such.
@TehPers um, do you have an example?
Copilot helped me a lot when filling in
legendaryII.jsonbased on data fromlegendary.jsonin this directory. The data between the two files is similar, but there are slight differences in the item names and flag names. Most of it was copy/paste, but filling in theWhensections was much easier for me with copilot + verify, for example.Edit: It also helped me with filling in the entries at the top of this C# file based on context I provided in a different format above (temporarily) in comments.
@TehPers there are tools for doing this sor… you know what, never mind
I know, I used one.
@TehPers “I used Github Copilot to help me hand-edit a massive JSON file which was *very slightly different* from another JSON file that I also maintain for some reason, therefor AI is good” is quite a take, but go off, I guess
it’s over a decade since eevee wrote the php clawhammer post and there’s a whole new generation still learning old mistakes
best don’t waste your keys, it doesn’t sound like this person wants to hear any different to what they already know/think
@froztbyte just reinforcing my hypothesis that, as with crypto, everybody involved in this is either a cynical grifter or a wide-eyed first-day-on-the-computer 12-year-old
I genuinely don’t get what point you’re trying to make. I found the tool useful and it saved me time. Are you trying to say the tool did not in fact do what I needed it to, when my other usual approaches were not flexible enough to do what I needed? Did it not do its job and save me time writing my code?
Seriously, you don’t see me making fun of people for using vim or notepad++, or whatever editors and tools you use.
You were asked to give a use-case for LLMs, and with this comes the implicit assumption that it’s not something that can be easily done with a tool that costs about seven orders of magnitude less to produce and operate.
A bunch of junior devs writing repetitive code because it’s easier or people refusing to learn proper tools because “AI can write my JSON” aren’t exactly good reasons tor the rest of the industry to learn how LLMs work. Don’t get me wrong, there are good reasons, but you’ve not listed any.
inb4 “but copilot is freeeee” in 3…2…
No, I was asked to give a situation where Copilot was useful. For LLMs, go look at how popular ChatGPT-like tools are for people who aren’t developers, especially RAG-based ones like Bing chat, and tell me they aren’t finding use out of them when companies are literally providing guidance for using them to employees who barely know how to use Excel.
It saved me time in more than one instance. I don’t particularly care what the industry does and never asked the industry to change, but the industry is changing without my input anyway. Clearly I’m not the only one who finds that it increases productivity, and no, sed and vim scripts aren’t going to do the kind of predictive completions that Copilot can do.
Also, junior devs are going to junior dev regardless of the presence of LLMs. It has always been the responsibility of more senior devs to help them write code correctly. Blaming more junior devs for relying too much on LLMs is just an admission that as a senior dev, you are failing to guide them in the right direction and help them improve.
@TehPers found an optimisation for you, without resorting to Copilot https://github.com/TehPers/StardewValleyMods/pull/37
Feel free to merge once your tests pass. What’s that? There are no tests? Ah well…
what was the point of this
Feel free to add a PR for tests too. You’re going to need a legal copy of Stardew Valley for the CI machine.
Edit: or don’t actually, since I know you wouldn’t dare do something productive after reading your PR. If anyone else wants to though, PRs are welcome. This has actually been a pretty big pain considering mods won’t even compile without a copy of the game.