Yup this is the real world take IME. Code should be self documenting, really the only exception ever is “why” because code explains how, as you said.

Now there are sometimes less-than-ideal environments. Like at my last job we were doing Scala development, and that language is expressive enough to allow you to truly have self-documenting code. Python cannot match this, and so you need comments at times (in earlier versions of Python type annotations were specially formatted literal comments, now they’re glorified comments because they look like real annotations but actually do nothing).

Holy shit you’re right, I’m an idiot. Thanks for helping me shift my perspective.

If you didn’t have an agenda/preconceived idea you wanted proven, you’d understand that a single study has never been used by any credible scientist to say anything is proven, ever.

Only people who don’t understand how data works will say a single study from a single university proves anything, let alone anything about a model trained on billions of parameters across a field as broad as “programming”.

I could feed GPT “programming” tasks that I know it would fail on 100% of the time. I also could feed it “programming” tasks I know it would succeed on 100% of the time. If you think LLMs have nothing to offer programmers, you have no idea how to use them. I’ve been successfully using GPT4T for months now, and it’s been very good. It’s better in static environments where it can be fed compiler errors to fix itself continually (if you ever look at more than a headline about GPT performance you’d know there’s a substantial difference between zero-shot and 3-shot performance).

Bugs exist, but code heavily written by LLMs has not been proven to be any more or less buggy than code heavily written by junior devs. Our internal metrics have them within any reasonable margin of error (senior+GPT recently beating out senior+junior, but it’s been flipping back and forth), and senior+GPT tickets get done much faster. The downside is GPT doesn’t become a senior, where a junior does with years of training, though 2 years ago LLMs were at a 5th grade coding level on average, and going from 5th grade to surpassing college level and matching junior output is a massive feat, even if some luddites like yourself refuse to accept it.

In my line of work (programming) they absolutely do not have a 52% failure rate by any reasonable definition of the word “failure”. More than 9/10 times they’ll produce code at at least a junior level. It won’t be the best code, sometimes it’ll have trivial mistakes in it, but junior developers do the same thing.

The main issue is confidence, it’s essentially like having a junior developer that is way overconfident for 1/1000th of the cost. This is extremely manageable, and June 2024 is not the end all be all of LLMs. Even if LLMs only got worse, and this is the literal peak, it will still reshape entire industries. Junior developers cannot find a job, and with the massive reduction in junior devs we’ll see a massive reaction in senior devs down the line.

In the short term the same quality work will be done with far, far fewer programmers required. In 10-20 years time if we get literally no progress in the field of LLMs or other model architectures then yeah it’s going to be fucked. If there is advancement to the degree of replacing senior developers, then humans won’t be required anyway, and we’re still fucked (assuming we still live in a capitalist society). In a proper society less work would actually be a positive for humanity, but under capitalism less work is an existential threat to our existence.

Glad someone said this, it bothers me even with human ages. Like there’s this perception that as you get older you simply gain knowledge, wisdom, world experience, etc. Not a lot of people account for biological limits for knowledge/memory, nor degradation from aging.

If some young intern decided to try to have sex with Biden, I think there’s genuinely a conversation to be had about if that’s statutory rape. I think you’d need a healthcare professional to rule on if Biden has the mental capacity to fully consent. Similar to a drunk person. They’re still obviously a person able to think/engage with the world, but they’re heavily impaired and unable to fully consent as a result. Age impairs cognition too.

Battle.net games have been some of the most reliable non-steam games you’ll find. You’ll have trouble in the Riot Games space (League on Linux, Windows 7, and 8 are all dead in the next month due to Vanguard), and some Epic Games (Fortnite), but if you’re a Battle.net/Steam gamer Linux is ready for you.

I support creatives with direct donations. When you buy Netflix, you’re supporting extraordinarily wealthy capitalists.

If you actually care about supporting creatives, end all your subscriptions, pirate all your media, and give 100% of your previous subscription costs directly to the creatives you want to support.