Nvidia has trained an LLM on their codebase to save senior designers having to answer junior's questions about what some code does.
I don't know how many times i have to say this, but these are not search engines. They are not inference engines. Their answers are 100% "what would be a plausible sounding string of words to respond to that input?" that's it. That's all they do.
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@savedr@m i mean, copilot already gives you that. And i have to admit, it’s surprisingly goid. Not perfect, definitely needs checking but frequently writes almost exactly what i was about to for small things.
@savedr@m not just boilerplate… i gave it a try because the company was paying for it. I fully expected to start posting about how terrible it was. However, every single week it impresses me with some suggestion that involved things I would have never expected it to be able to “understand”. Now that I am not at that job anymore. I will start paying for it myself. It is ridiculously good, and way better than the AI haters like myself would ever expect.
@savedr@m to be clear, it is in no way even remotely close to being able to replace developers. However, it honestly can help expedite the work you were already going to do because it just saves you from typing a lot of boring crap. Occasionally it even suggests an alternate way of doing things that you probably wouldn’t have gotten yourself because of habits.
@masukomi That's probably the only legitimate use I've seen for an LLM since the whole point of Ouija boards is to make up random stuff that sounds like something someone might say.
@StarkRG i have found another thing it's legitimately great at: creating lists of random things for role playing games. Like "give me 30 magical potions you might find in a fantasy Role Playing Game" The results are not bad and frequently repeat, BUT it's still way easier to edit / enhance those than come up with long lists like that from scratch.
@masukomi Yeah, that can be good. It's probably fine for nearly anything where you're just trying to come up with random crap, though you've gotta look out for potential plagiarism if you use it for anything more than personal use.
@j2kun because training, devs doesn’t help deliver features now. It builds people who ask for more money and it “slows down” the senior they are explaining
The fact that you are enabling someone to be more productive in the future is irrelevant. That’s not money NOW.
@masukomi "What would be a plausible sounding string of words to respond to that input" is basically the MO of everyone in business and politics for the last thirty years, and it's not like that hasn't worked out really well for... Oh, wait 🤔
@masukomi Not to mention that not wanting to talk to jr developers is a big issue here.
One should always take time to do so. There’s so much more to gain than the direct solution to the specific issue at hand.
If you can’t speak to and help others, there’s nothing senior about it, imho. I think we need to rethink how we organize ourselves and the stupid hierarchies we build that’s counter productive.
@breadbin yes. However, I didn't get the impression that the senior's didn't want to talk to the juniors, but that management felt that that wasn't a good use of their time. As i said to someone else, it's short term thinking. They don't get that a senior explaining something holistically to a junior gives you 2 people who really understand the thing and how it fits, vs this bs giving you 1 person who really knows it & 1 who thinks they may know 1 piece of it.
@masukomi
Lets stipulate to what you say
If you look at the mind bending progess in computers over the last 50 years, what would you predict that AI can do in the next 10, 20, 40 years ?
@masukomi I did a search yesterday for the scale-length of a plectrum banjo. The AI summary (from an excellent source) told me the length of the standard 5-string banjo, which was invented by Pete Seeger in the 1960s. We need a new human right to turn this shit off :-)
@SteveClough well if you have the seniors explaining things they're not coding themselves.
Typical short-term capitalist thinking. Having a senior sit down and explain things and how they fit holistically into the greater system to a junior gives you 2 people who really understand a thing instead of 1 + 1 who thinks they might understand one small piece of it.
@andreimoment@SteveClough well you definitely shouldn't say that in front of management. "more seniors" means greater payroll, which means less for the c-levels to pocket.
You are "spreading domain knowledge". That's "free". The short-term thinking benefits us here because they won't make the next logical step and realize that folks with more domain knowledge are inherently more senior and thus will need to be promoted. But, you don't mention that in THIS discussion.
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