I get the sentiment behind this post, and it’s almost always funny when LLM are such dumbass. But this is not a good argument against the technology. It is akin to climate change denier using the argument:
“look! It snowed today, climate change is so dumb huh ?”
AI writes code for me. It makes dumbass mistakes that compilers automatically catch. It takes three or four rounds to correct a lot of random problems that crop up. Above all else, it’s got limited capacity - projects beyond a couple thousand lines of code have to be carefully structured and spoonfed to it - a lot like working with junior developers. However: it’s significantly faster than Googling for the information needed to write the code like I have been doing for the last 20 years, it does produce good sample code (if you give it good prompts), and it’s way less frustrating and slow to work with than a room full of junior developers.
That’s not saying we fire the junior developers, just that their learning specializations will probably be very different from the ones I was learning 20 years ago, just as those were very different than the ones programmers used 40 and 60 years ago.
I agree, cursor and other IDE integration have been a game changer. It made it way easier for a certain range of problems we used to have in software dev. And for every easy code, like prototyping, or inconsequential testing, it’s so so fast. What I found is that, it is particularly efficient at helping you do stuff you would have been able to do alone, and are able to check once it’s done. Need to be careful when asking stuff you aren’t familiar with though, cause it will comfortably lead you toward a mistake that will waste your time.
Though one thing I have to say: I’m very annoyed by it’s constant agreeing with what I say, and enabling me when I’m doing dumb shit. I wish it would challenge me more and tell me when I’m an idiot.
“Yes you are totally right”, “This is a very common issue that everybody has”, “What a great and insightful question”… I’m so tired of this BS.
Though one thing I have to say: I’m very annoyed by it’s constant agreeing with what I say, and enabling me when I’m doing dumb shit. I wish it would challenge me more and tell me when I’m an idiot.
There’s a balance to be had there, too… I have been comparing a few AI engines to compare their code generation capabilities. If you want an exercise in frustration, try to make an old school keypress driven application on a modern line-oriented terminal interface while still using the terminal for standard text output. I got pretty far with Claude, then my daily time limits were kicking in. Claude did all that “you’re so right” ego stroking garbage, but also got me near to a satisfactory solution. Then I moved into Google AI and it started out with reading my the “you just can’t do that, it won’t work” doom and gloom it got from some downer stack overflow or similar material. Finally, I showed Google my code that was already doing what it was calling impossible and it started helping me to polish the remaining rough spots. But, if you believed its first line answers you’d walk away thinking that something relatively simple was simply impossible.
Lately, I have taken to writing my instructions in a requirements document instead of relying so much on interactive mode. It’s not a perfect approach, but it seems to be much more stable for “larger” projects where you hit the chat length limits and have to start over with the existing code - what you’ve captured in requirements tends to stick around better than just using the existing code as a starting point of how things should be then adding/modifying from there. Ideally, I’d like it if the engine could just take my requirements document and make the app from that, but Claude still seems to struggle when total LOC gets into the 2000-5000 range for a 200-ish lines requirement spec.
While the environmental impact of AI is absolutely horrible I don’t think it is even in the top 10 of industries. Meat production, Transportation by cars, Airplanes, plastic products etc are all much worse.
The problem is AI is absolutely useless for how big its climate impact is. The other industries at least provide value.
Well i wasnt wrong in the assumption that AI is absolutely dwarfed by other industries, agriculture and energy production, but it is in the top 10, on the same level as aviation (so like place 9)
Yes, I know it has an impact, though not as big as you make it seem, (and so is everything). When you divide it to calculate the personal impact, it is way lower than a huge number of other stuff. I agree that we need to address climate change, but I don’t believe this should be the main focus.
Also, every individual should be able to choose how they spend their “carbon allocation”, personally, I don’t eat meat, I never take the plane, I don’t own a car and do everything using bike and trains, my house is carbon negative (building it actually had a negative carbon footprint) which was a huge sacrifice I had to compromise getting a way way smaller house for way more debt than if I had built a cheap standard house (and of course I’m in debt for decade). LLM makes me more efficient at my job so I think I can afford the carbon footprint that comes with it which, as I said, is not as big per individual as you make it appear.
I understand that hanging on Lemmy makes it seem like AI/LLM is the worse thing that has happened to mankind, but it’s really not, there are lots of issues with it, sure. But there is worse stuff to worry about.
I want to finish by saying that I DO support your action to minimize its impact, what you are doing overall is important and necessary, but I think you should revise the individual argument you put up against LLM, cause this one is not great.
I get the sentiment behind this post, and it’s almost always funny when LLM are such dumbass. But this is not a good argument against the technology.
It’s a pretty good argument against the technology, at least as it currently stands. This was a trivial question where anybody with a basic reading ability can see it’s just completely wrong, the problem comes when you ask it a question you don’t already know the answer to and can’t easily check and it give equally wrong answers.
I get the sentiment behind this post, and it’s almost always funny when LLM are such dumbass. But this is not a good argument against the technology. It is akin to climate change denier using the argument: “look! It snowed today, climate change is so dumb huh ?”
AI writes code for me. It makes dumbass mistakes that compilers automatically catch. It takes three or four rounds to correct a lot of random problems that crop up. Above all else, it’s got limited capacity - projects beyond a couple thousand lines of code have to be carefully structured and spoonfed to it - a lot like working with junior developers. However: it’s significantly faster than Googling for the information needed to write the code like I have been doing for the last 20 years, it does produce good sample code (if you give it good prompts), and it’s way less frustrating and slow to work with than a room full of junior developers.
That’s not saying we fire the junior developers, just that their learning specializations will probably be very different from the ones I was learning 20 years ago, just as those were very different than the ones programmers used 40 and 60 years ago.
I agree, cursor and other IDE integration have been a game changer. It made it way easier for a certain range of problems we used to have in software dev. And for every easy code, like prototyping, or inconsequential testing, it’s so so fast. What I found is that, it is particularly efficient at helping you do stuff you would have been able to do alone, and are able to check once it’s done. Need to be careful when asking stuff you aren’t familiar with though, cause it will comfortably lead you toward a mistake that will waste your time.
Though one thing I have to say: I’m very annoyed by it’s constant agreeing with what I say, and enabling me when I’m doing dumb shit. I wish it would challenge me more and tell me when I’m an idiot.
“Yes you are totally right”, “This is a very common issue that everybody has”, “What a great and insightful question”… I’m so tired of this BS.
There’s a balance to be had there, too… I have been comparing a few AI engines to compare their code generation capabilities. If you want an exercise in frustration, try to make an old school keypress driven application on a modern line-oriented terminal interface while still using the terminal for standard text output. I got pretty far with Claude, then my daily time limits were kicking in. Claude did all that “you’re so right” ego stroking garbage, but also got me near to a satisfactory solution. Then I moved into Google AI and it started out with reading my the “you just can’t do that, it won’t work” doom and gloom it got from some downer stack overflow or similar material. Finally, I showed Google my code that was already doing what it was calling impossible and it started helping me to polish the remaining rough spots. But, if you believed its first line answers you’d walk away thinking that something relatively simple was simply impossible.
Lately, I have taken to writing my instructions in a requirements document instead of relying so much on interactive mode. It’s not a perfect approach, but it seems to be much more stable for “larger” projects where you hit the chat length limits and have to start over with the existing code - what you’ve captured in requirements tends to stick around better than just using the existing code as a starting point of how things should be then adding/modifying from there. Ideally, I’d like it if the engine could just take my requirements document and make the app from that, but Claude still seems to struggle when total LOC gets into the 2000-5000 range for a 200-ish lines requirement spec.
You do know that AI is (if not already) fast approaching a leading CAUSE of climate change?
While the environmental impact of AI is absolutely horrible I don’t think it is even in the top 10 of industries. Meat production, Transportation by cars, Airplanes, plastic products etc are all much worse.
The problem is AI is absolutely useless for how big its climate impact is. The other industries at least provide value.
Your opinion isn’t invalid, it’s just incomplete
https://www.allaboutai.com/resources/ai-statistics/ai-environment/
Combining your source with this https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector
Well i wasnt wrong in the assumption that AI is absolutely dwarfed by other industries, agriculture and energy production, but it is in the top 10, on the same level as aviation (so like place 9)
Yes, I know it has an impact, though not as big as you make it seem, (and so is everything). When you divide it to calculate the personal impact, it is way lower than a huge number of other stuff. I agree that we need to address climate change, but I don’t believe this should be the main focus.
Also, every individual should be able to choose how they spend their “carbon allocation”, personally, I don’t eat meat, I never take the plane, I don’t own a car and do everything using bike and trains, my house is carbon negative (building it actually had a negative carbon footprint) which was a huge sacrifice I had to compromise getting a way way smaller house for way more debt than if I had built a cheap standard house (and of course I’m in debt for decade). LLM makes me more efficient at my job so I think I can afford the carbon footprint that comes with it which, as I said, is not as big per individual as you make it appear.
I understand that hanging on Lemmy makes it seem like AI/LLM is the worse thing that has happened to mankind, but it’s really not, there are lots of issues with it, sure. But there is worse stuff to worry about.
I want to finish by saying that I DO support your action to minimize its impact, what you are doing overall is important and necessary, but I think you should revise the individual argument you put up against LLM, cause this one is not great.
It’s not worth the environmental impact
It’s a pretty good argument against the technology, at least as it currently stands. This was a trivial question where anybody with a basic reading ability can see it’s just completely wrong, the problem comes when you ask it a question you don’t already know the answer to and can’t easily check and it give equally wrong answers.