spoiler
Context: The decline started way before AI.
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See also “the Linux community”.
ducks for cover
the .world autist community has gotten a couple linux questions and you know what happens. people answered the question, in the info dumpy yet polite and helpful way possible. maybe we just need to spin up an ‘ask an autist about linux’ community somewhere. “we’ll answer your question along with 12 others you didn’t even know you had” kinda thing.
OMG yes. I left the Linux community a couple of months ago and my mental health improved almost immediately. I still use Linux; just left the community.
How does ‘the Linux community’ affect your mental health? Because you can’t read a manpage? LMFAO.
No, I just don’t enjoy watching people be toxic to other people, then ending their comments with “LMFAO” to top it off.
I say this with no due respect whatsoever:
Shut the fuck up.
Alright I’m just gonna spell it out to you:
You’re the problem
What a self-own
RTFM
Literally why I don’t use arch anymore. When I google something and that’s the only response to someone with my exact question I just get pissed off.
PEBKAC RTFM
It’s getting better! There are now distros for normies who don’t want to have to do anything besides press the power button.
I just installed Fedora and if I hadn’t been a coder I would have given up at least twice (the ISO writer app requires Visual C++ SDK to be installed, and tells you this by complaining about missing dlls).
Every other post in the Usenet days used to be RTFM. Eventually, enough ExpertsEx/StackEx/Reddit posts (or youtube videos) answered it well enough to drown that out, but you still need a level of proficiency to know what to ask, and there are precious few newb forums.
I think the worst of it now is ethos problems. People are coming in from Windows, wanting to do it the Windows way, and they catch a lot of shit for it. How do I do A without the terminal, Linux is shit because you have to use the terminal. Linux is too hard. The second worst is infighting over distros like they are sports teams. Next up is the all or nothings, You can’t game on linus vs you can absolutely play anything worth a damn on linux.
Already answered, closed
POV you’ve just clicked on the only relevant-looking search result:
“Duplicate question, use search.”
There are so many times I’ve tried to look up an answer to a technical problem I had. And I click the top result and it’s a forum post. Someone asked the exact question I was looking for, and every reply is: “already answered,” “learn to use the search box,” and “wow your’e dubm for not already knowing this you n00b.”
Search engine doesn’t know, it just sees a thread with the search terms and lots of engagement so it becomes the top search result. I wish everyone who acted that way on forums a very pleasant long walk down a very short pier.
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That’s actually how it works.
So what’s lacking it’s any ability for someone familiar with the problem to point out that it’s not actually the same
The linked and solved question: does not actually answer my question, or the answer is for an outdated version of the software I’m using
L + skill issue + just Google it + downvoted to oblivion
Is ChatGPT already able to mimic SO behaviour by answering “please research before asking dumb questions”, “this should be obvious” and “closing, already answered somewhere else”?
posts a link to something completely unrelated
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Not sure about GPT, but copilot is starting to give you less depth in answers. If I asked it something a year ago about a config entry, It would give me what I needed and a sample of it in use. It’s now pretty minimal in it’s answer, which is ok, but it was kind of nice to get more context. If you ask it to add debug statements, it’ll often just list a few lines without context of where they go. It’s kinda nice to ask something to create debug statements in a couple hundred lines of code rather than manually going back through a bunch of nested loops.
I just wonder what the LLMs will be trained on once they put everything else out of business.
We’ve polluted the water. One active area that LLMs are being deployed is in reading scanned text, so my best guess is that the next few models are going to be trained on a new corpus of previously unscanned written text.
I’m talking legal documents from the 80s, company documents that were never digitized, and anythibg else google books hasnt fully OCR’d.
I mean… the same data they use now? And presumably other LLM output based on that, which is something that may or may not affect things a lot, nobody really knows.
Even if AIs consumed data when they trained on it so it couldn’t be used for training again, which they do not, it’s not like code stops being created, stored and datamined by the people who own the creation and storage.
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Bit of a tautology, that. Presumably for AI to “replace programmers wholesale” it would need to produce human-quality code. Presumably human-quality code would not degrade anything because it’d be… you know, human-quality.
From what I can tell the degradation you’re talking about relates to natural language data. Stuff like physics simulations seems to be working fine to train models for other tasks, and presumably functional code is functional code. I don’t know if there is any specific analysis about code, though, I’ve only seen a couple of studies and then only as amplified by press.
I haven’t looked into it specifically because it really seems like a bit of a pointless hypothetical. Either AI can get better from the training data available or it can’t and then it is as good as it’s going to get unless the training methods themselves improve. At the moment it sure seems that there is a ton of research claiming both paths for growth and growth stalling that are both getting disproven by implementation almost faster than the analysis can be produced.
This argument mostly matters to investors itching to get ahead of a trend where they can fully automate a bunch of jobs and services and I’m more than happy to see them miss that mark and learn what the tech can do the hard way.
To be absolutely clear, AI is not “going to put everything else out of business”. Certainly LLMs won’t. Not even in programming.
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My “credibility on this topic” is of zero interest to me. I am not here to appeal to authority. I know you didn’t mean it like that, but man, it’s such a social media argument point to make it jumped right at me. For the record, it’s not that I haven’t heard about problems with training on AI-generated content (and on filtering out that content). It’s that I don’t need to flaunt my e-dick and will openly admit when I haven’t gone deep into an issue. I have not read the papers I’ve heard of and I have not specifically searched for more of them, so I’ll get back to you on that one if and when I do.
Anyway, that aside, you are presenting a bizarre scenario. You’re arguing that corporations will be demonstrably worse off by moving all coding to be machine-generated but they will do it anyway. Ad infinitum. Until there are no human coders left. At which point they will somehow keep doing it despite the fact that AI training would have entirely unraveled as a process by then.
Think you may have extrapolated a bit too far on that one? I think you may have extrapolated a bit too far on that one. Corpos can do a lot of dumb shit, but they tend to be very sensitive about stuff that costs them money. And even if that wasn’t the case, the insane volume of cheap skilled labor that would generate pretty much guarantees some competing upstart would replace them with the, in your sci-fi scenario, massively superior alternative.
FWIW, no, that’s not the same as outsourcing. Outsourcing hasn’t “often been a bad idea”. Having been on both sides of that conversation, it’s “a bad idea” when you have a home base with no incentive to help their outsourced peers and a superiority complex. There’s nothing inherently worse about an outsourced worker/developer. The thing that closes the gap on outsourcing cost/performance is, if anything, that over time outsourced workers get good and expect to get paid to match. I am pretty much okay with every part of that loop. Different pet peeve, though, we may want to avoid that rabbit hole.
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You are saying a lot of things that sound good to you without much grounding. You claiming this is a “widespread and significant issue” is going to need some backing up, because I may be cautious about not claiming more knowledge than I have, but I know enough to tell you it’s not particularly well understood, nobody is in a position to predict the workarounds and it’s by no means the only major issue. The social media answer would be to go look it up, but it’s the weekend and I refuse to let you give me homework. I have better things to do today.
That’s the problem with being cautious about things. Not everybody has to. Not everybody knows they should or when. I don’t know if you’re dunning kruger incarnate or an expert talking down to me (pretty sure it’s not the second, though).
And I’m pretty sure of that because yeah, it is an infinite doomsday slippery slope scenario. That I happen to know well enough to not have to be cautious about not having done all the reading.
I mean, your original scenario is that. You’re sort of walking it back here where it’s just some effect, not the endgame. And because now you’re not saying “if AI actually replaces programmers wholesale” anymore the entire calculation is different. It goes back to my original point: What data will AI use to train? The same data they have now. Because it will NOT in fact replace programmers wholesale and the data is not fungible, so there still will be human-generated code to train on (and whatever the equivalent high enough quality hybrid or machine-generated code is that clears the bar).
AI has a problem with running out of (good) data to train on, but that only tells you there is a hard limit to the current processes, which we already knew. Whether current AI is as good as it’s going to get or there is a new major breaktrough in training or model design left to be discovered is anybody’s guess.
If there is one, then the counter gets reset and we will see how far that can take the technology, I suppose. If there is not, then we know how far we’ve taken it and we can see how far it’s growing and how quickly it’s plateauing. There is no reason to believe it will get worse, though.
Will companies leap into it too quickly? They already have. We’re talking about a thing that’s in the past. But the current iteration of the tech is incapable of removing programmers from the equation. At most it’s a more practical reference tool and a way to blast past trivial tasks. There is no doomsday loop to be had unless the landscape shifts signfiicantly, despite what AI shills have been trying to sell people. This is what pisses me off the most about this conversation, the critics are buying into the narrative of the shills aggressively in ways that don’t really hold up to scrutiny for either camp.
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LLM companies hire people to create information. They already hire math majors to work on high quality math data, for example.
This is a fair point. Although it’d be fun in the absolutely extreme scenario people are presenting here where all the coders would lose their coding job but get coding jobs generating random AI training data instead.
Some of the ways both critics and shills present the future of this technology are kinda nuts.
I actually work on generating and evaluating this data.
The more I see, the less I fear real coding jobs going away. The amount of work required to get good quality training data that can keep up with evolving technology is enormous.
I’ve been really worried about this. You can re-train a smarter model on old data, but what happens when our software changes and those old answers are obsolete? Then the AIs won’t be accurate, and we’ve killed our tried-and-true tool to address the issue.
Since the AIs would be used to gather that information, they would learn from their previous prompts.
So if any AI user had that issue before, the AI would know how they solved it since they helped them solve it.
So I wouldn’t worry about it too much.
This is just so fucking nice to see.
I felt like a little kid in high school there, and the users were the kind important-acting assholes who took out their insecurities on those with less than 500 points. As StackOverflow dies, it is I who shall rest in peace.
“Read The Fucking FAQ!”
The FAQ: " "
why it so many peeps here swearing?.. >~<
Because they don’t understand how SO works and had their feelings hurt by curation
whads
so?Stack Overflow
That’s enough Internet for today, grandma
