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
Oh my goodness! I apologize for assuming. I read the wrong thing into your comments.
Do the whims of Silicon Valley greatly affect your market? The most I’ve interacted with non-US markets is running some near-shore consulting with one of the majors (spun up a Mexican firm but the executives wanted to pay local rates for remote US work which is a fucking joke). I also know, should I leave the US, I will have a much lower salary. I’ve hired a fair amount of remote talent in the Americas and India for various jobs; I think a good chunk of that work is the kind that could be replaced by LLMs in the next two decades or so.
I live in a North European country. My salary is considerably lower than what American devs make, but I live a comfortably middle-class life. My expenses are also lower: There are a lot of things I don’t need to worry about (eg. healthcare), and I live in a walkable city area where pretty much everything I need day-to-day is at most a 15 minute walk away - except my workplace, which is a comfortable 20 minute bus trip. I don’t have a car and never really miss having one. The great thing about this is that I could take a substantial pay cut and still live reasonably comfortably - I wouldn’t lose healthcare, and if I had any kids I wouldn’t have to worry about their education. But this all works because my country spent the last few decades using social policy to establish a comparatively large “knowledge sector” - which is exactly the thing that AI companies want to move fast and break. If all the middle-class jobs implode and all the major domestic businesses are destroyed by Silicon Valley tech giants, then we’re screwed. The ubiquitous answer of “UBI” won’t work when the economy is being drained from the outside - who’s going to pay for the UBI then?
I don’t know how quickly contemporary AI will be able to replace people to a significant extent (or whether more fundamental breakthroughs are necessary before that sort of labour disruption happens; historically, there’s been a lot of times where it turned out we all dramatically underestimated the real world). There’s a lot of impressive demos, and they do allow rapid code generation (for some well-established tasks) and rapid generation of eloquent natural language - but they suffer from the “last 10%” problem, and the last 10% are already what most professionals seem to be spending all their time on. In programming, this is pretty much by definition: If Copilot is doing it for you, you’re not spending significant time on it - and even the most avid LLM users I know aren’t anywhere near running out of work to do.
We live in a globalized economy, and that means that some whims of tech oligarchs will fly everywhere, and some won’t. Uber never took off here - their excuse that their drivers were “independent contractors” and not employees didn’t fly, and they ended up legally being considered a taxi company rather than an app company, meaning that all the labour protections that apply to taxi drivers would also apply to Uber drivers. That made the whole thing untenable, so they gave up. But that’s different, because Uber can’t teleport a car here from the US. If a Silicon Valley company actually becomes able to deliver fully autonomous digital knowledge worker replacements (which is what they want to do, but not where they currently are), there’s nothing stopping executives here from using them just like executives in Silicon Valley.
Just out of curiosity, why did you assume I was American?
US bias. Nothing more. All of the embedded devs I know are from the US. I know a bunch of European security and data folks, so in those contexts I don’t immediately jump to US there. That’s also why I asked the questions I did. I know my market and I’m really curious how it affects you.
That’s fair (I’m not insulted, just in case).
I really enjoyed your perspective. Thanks for taking the time to ramble on with it and thanks for not getting mad at yet another US-centric dev! I think you have very reasonable fears. I really hope something someone said gives you enough to chew on for a bit to reduce your anxiety somewhat. We’re all in this together.