• finley@lemm.ee
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      “But certainly I can do something with this banana?” you think in a panic as your deadline rapidly approaches…

      “After all, it is a lovely, three-fingered banana!“

    • onlinepersona@programming.dev
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      That’s why prompt engineers exist. They’ll be trained to use a specific AI and know the ins and outs of it - until the next update. It’ll just create drones like those who can only use Adobe or Malus products and are stuck on Macs and Photoshop.

      Anti Commercial-AI license

  • Thorry84@feddit.nl
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    4 months ago

    I spoke to a friend the other day that wanted some help with his dev project. I was surprised since he isn’t a dev and doesn’t even have a job in a tech related field. He said he wanted to make a simple thing and was using AI prompts to just fuck about a bit till he had something working. But he ran into some issues and wanted me to give him some pointers to get on the right track.

    My man wanted to create a “simple” kanban system. I almost fell of my chair as he explained what he was wanting to create. A non devver isn’t going to create basically a Trello clone within a couple of hours and some AI prompts. He started with a frontend and got something hacked together which wasn’t really working or a good base to work from. And hadn’t even considered he would also need some kind of backend. He never heard of the difference between frontend and backend and just thought apps were apps that did it all.

    I explained for what he wanted he would need a team of 15-20 to work for a couple of years to make something good. Not really a thing people do in their free time. I know your nephew created an “app” in a weekend in a hackaton, that doesn’t mean the world of software development is suddenly different from how it’s always been. He was bummed out, but was happy enough to just use Trello. And he could always keep fucking around with AI devving for fun, just don’t expect anything useful to come out of it ever.

    Peoples perspective on software development is so weird these days. Especially since AI has come along, people just expect magic.

    • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      My mother-in-law is a veterinarian and once she asked me to create an app that would tell people whether a particular animal hospital was a good place to take their pets or not. She thought it was just something I could write in an evening since the UI would be pretty simple. She had no conception of the need for, like, a database of pet hospitals and where that database would come from and how it would be maintained and updated.

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        Did she want some features that weren’t part of Google/Apple maps / Yelp / etc?

        If she’s frustrated with user reviews being about nonsense I get it but that’s a human problem, or at least not a system problem anyone’s been able to solve yet.

        • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
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          Yeah, she didn’t feel that online reviews were an accurate or reliable way to evaluate these places. She basically thought that every place but her own was a bucket of shit, so I probably could have actually given her what she wanted and just had the app give a thumbs down to everything except hers.

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        4 months ago

        This is not somebody who can self host anything or setup something for himself. I do not know of any FOSS kanban solutions that are available as a SaaS solution. The available Trello free functionality suits his needs. Is there something wrong with Trello? It’s owned by Atlassian, which is an OK company I think?

        If you have any good FOSS alternatives, I’d be happy to know about them and forward on the recommendation. But keep in mind most folk are not tech minded and won’t get very far with just a Github page.

        • Nomecks@lemmy.ca
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          You can use issues and issue boards in the free tier of GitLab. Not sure if that counts.

          • 2001zhaozhao@sh.itjust.works
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            Does the open source self hostable version have the kanban board feature? I need a kanban board with oauth support for my volunteer team, I can’t afford any paid licenses that are usually priced for salaried employees. Git integration might also be a bonus as I am intending to manage my projects using git repositories

        • freeman@feddit.org
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          I mean I myself am not a dev, only did some programming in school but not like I would know how to program a backend or a frontend. 😅

          I know even less about linux or networking but I setup an old laptop with LinuxMint and made a server out of it (I know LM isnt a good server OS but I am not good with the terminal, so thats the compronise I did). I now selfhost Jellyfin and some more stuff. I would probably be able to setup a trello like app in a afternoon, despite not being IT-trained

            • freeman@feddit.org
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              Wirh “set up” I mean selfhost, not develop. Thats not unreasonable, right? I installed jellyfin in a few with mounting drives and stuff, all with learning linux itself. So now selfhosting a further service is not that much of an effort. Of course it depends on the documentation and plug-and-play-readyness of the service

      • Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works
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        Are any of those FOSS alts actually as good as Trello?

        That’s a genuine question. I’ve been trying to find a trello replacement and so far I’ve had no real luck.

        • thanks_shakey_snake@lemmy.ca
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          FocalBoard from MatterMost is pretty good. It doesn’t have feature parity with Trello-- that’s out of reach for almost everybody-- but it does pretty much everything I want. Plus it’s FOSS, so you can extend it if you want (and are capable).

    • Eheran@lemmy.world
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      But it is like magic…? I copy in a bunch of tables etc. from a datasheet and get out code to read and write EEPROM. I use that to read the content of the old BMS and flash a new chip with it. The battery is now working again, after the BMS had a hardware fault in the ADC, destroying the previous pack of cells.

      I ask for a simple frontend and I get exactly that. Now I can program ESP32s and perfectly control then via a browser. No me shit interface with some touch pins.

      I ask for code to run a simulation on head transfer… answer after some back and forth that is what I get.

      What will it be able to give me in 5 years when it is already like magic now?

        • Eheran@lemmy.world
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          Stop spreading this. It clearly comes up with original things and does not just copy and paste existing stuff. As my examples could have told you, there is no such stuff on the Internet about programming some specific BMS from >10 years ago with a non-standard I2C.

          Amazing how anti people are, even downvoting my clearly positive applications of this tool. What is you problem that I use that to save time? Some things are only possible due to the time saving to begin with. I am not going to freaking learn HTML for a one off sunrise alarm interface.

          • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
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            It “comes up with original things” unless working matters in any way.

            If there wasn’t information in its training set there would be no possibility it gave you anything useful.

            • Eheran@lemmy.world
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              Ah, there is “no possibility”. So unlile everyone else so far you completely understand how LLMs works and as such an expert can say this. Amazing that I find such a world leading expert here in Lemmy but this expert does not want a Nobel prize and instead just correct random people on the Internet. Thank you so much.

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                For it to do something both novel and correct, it would require comprehension.

                Nothing resembling comprehension in any way is part of any LLM.

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            when you ask them simple maths questions from around the time they were trained they got them all right. When they specifically prompted it with questions that provably were published one year later, albeit at the same difficulty, it got 100% wrong answers. You’d be amazed at what one can find on the internet and just how muqh scraping they did to gather it all. 10 years ago is quite recent. Why wouldn’t there be documentation? (regardless of whether you managed to find it?) If it’s non standard, then I would expect something that is specifically about it somewhere in the training set, whereas the standard compliant stuff wouldn’t need a specific make and model to be mentioned.

            • Eheran@lemmy.world
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              GPT scores in the top 1% in creativity. There is no need to discuss this. Anyone can try. It is super easy to come up with a unique question. Be it with stacking items or anything else. It is not just copying existing info.

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            The only thing the Luddites want is an echo-chamber to feed their confirmations bias’. They’ll downvote you or completely ignore you if you bring up any positives regarding machine learning.

            LLMs and machine learning are still in their infancy, yet they’re doing amazing things. It’s a tool in its early stages, not a boogeyman. Look to the billionaires if you want someone to blame. This tool set is advancing so fast that people in this thread are relying on goal posts that were moved long ago. Look at the guy claiming AI can’t generate images of proper fingers yet this is no longer true and Midjourney continues to make an insane amount of progress in such a short amount of time.

            Just look at how many people (50+) upvoted the image claiming AI can’t be used to wash dishes, when a simple Google search would prove them wrong.

            Not to mention… AI is helping physicists speed up experiments into supernovae to better understand the universe.

            AI is helping doctors to expedite cancer screening rates.

            AI is also helping to catch illegal fishing, tackle human trafficking, and track diseases.

            Edit The laymen that responded couldn’t even provide a single source for their unsubstantiated beliefs. It’s fortunate that they’re so inept.

            • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
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              LLMs are absolutely not in their infancy.

              They’re already many orders of magnitude past diminishing returns and don’t scale up for shit.

              • vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de
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                there is literally a loaded die at the end of all generators. It is not part of the llm. It comes later down the pipeline. So not only diminishing returns, but the hallucinations are literally impossible to fix

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    I’ve yet to use AI in my workflows. Nothing against it, but I haven’t seen the value beyond maybe boilerplate code, in which case I prefer the tried-and-true copy, paste, and modify. Why have AI do that and introduce its own mistakes?

    I have noticed younger developers using AI and sometimes I’ve had to help them with the mistakes it makes. It’ll just come up with modules and function calls that don’t exist. Felt like it was less precise version of stack overflow with less context awareness. Programmers that were too dependent on stack overflow were already coming up with poorly mashed together code and this may just be a more “efficient” version of that.

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    There is a long, long history in this industry, going back to COBOL, at least, of “just one magic tool, bro, and we can get all of the non-programmers to make their own software.”

    It hasn’t happened yet

    • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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      Having dealt with turning requirements into software for 25 years myself, I can say that it will never happen.

      Primarily because most business people can’t even define the problems they’re trying to solve, let alone define a solution for it.

      Half my job seems to be digging back up towards them to get at the real crux of any issue.

      • Optional@lemmy.worldOP
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        Exactly!

        It doesn’t help that AI is shit and millionaires are so divorced from reality.

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    Lower wages, don’t forget lower wages!

    “You don’t use your brains anymore, the AI does it for you so you engineers aren’t worth as much anymore.”

    As you’re fixing the stupid hallucinations the AI shoved into the program that you absolutely need to understand and use your brains to fix…

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    The only people who think AI will ‘lower a workload’ or be helpful, are the people who don’t do any of that work in the first place.

    AI has become just another bullshit buzzword for management idiots to dick around with to make it look like they’re actually doing something.

    From my experience, whenever someone says they used AI to do a task, it means I need to check their work twice to unfuck it. So AI effectively ends up creating more work, not less.

    • Optional@lemmy.worldOP
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      Well I’m convinced. My VC firm, DipshitTechbros, LLC will invest eleventy quazillion dollars in whatever you got.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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        You know the really sad part? If your pitch was “it makes people work harder and less efficiently… but with AI,” you would probably find some interested VCs.

    • The Menemen!@lemmy.world
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      I do think it has potential to reduce workload in specific jobs. E.g. in stuff like recognizing patterns in input data for data analysts. But only to a small degree and defintly not at every job.

      But any company that actually uses chatgpt itself must be crazy or really not have a problem with data breaches.

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    The “old pile of complexity” will be bigger, consisting of vaguely code-shaped papier-mâché constructions no human mind designed, which the harried engineers will have to maintain and figure out which parts work correctly. Oh, and there’ll be fewer of them and they’ll be paid less, because management knows that with AI, their job is much easier and less demanding.

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    It’s fucking worse. I use ChatGPT sometimes when I’m lazy. I ask it a question and it gets me within 50 feet of the answer. I then do Google searches for the rest, but I don’t remember shit after that. It’s the worst for retention. It’s like using Google maps for everything and not knowing how to navigate without it. Old timers like to work on things without reading manuals because they’ll remember how it works after spending time to really understand the problem.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      Old timers like to work on things without reading manuals

      We got that from the video games we played as a kid.

      As far as I’m still concerned, the enemies in Super Mario Bros. are mushrooms and turtles. Because we didn’t read the damn manuals.

  • anarchrist@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    Yeah except the sadder engineer pay should go up because lots of them will quit or retire early and the new ones aren’t going to know how the pile of shit works by osmosis. Unionizing also wouldn’t hurt.

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    The only way AI can “help” with coding is if the content it produces is essentially vanilla boilerplate stuff that you work from, and it requires no additional effort from those actually doing coding work.

    Everything AI generates for code should be scrutinized and intensely reviewed before being merged.

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    I think the AI code gen tools can be great. But, you have to understand and be able to take what they give you and actually build something coherent with them, because (at least with the current generation) they clearly have pretty firmly bounded limits to what they can generate and figure out.

    I actually think this makes a huge advantage for the previous generation of engineers, who didn’t grow up with them. Because we all spent time sitting around creating octree classes and ring buffers, new ones with incredible amounts of repeated effort for every new project, we actually had to learn to be comfortable with reading and understanding and writing code. The muscles had to get strong. I feel like, whether or not AI progresses (soon) to the point that it can make a whole codebase for you and it’ll all work, the engineers who grew up having to develop strong coding muscles will always have some level of advantage.

    It’s like the old-school carpenters who can knock in a nail with 3 hammer strikes and have everything organized in their minds to have what they need in their tool bag every single morning and not have to go and get something new. You can always learn to use the power tools. You can’t go back and force yourself through the time consuming apprenticeship to work out how to work without them, though, once they exist.

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    AI: a stew of turds, mostly old problems wrapped in new problems for no good reason.