That’s still not actually knowing anything. It’s just temporarily adding more context to its model.

And it’s always very temporary. I have a yarn project I’m working on right now, and I used Copilot in VS Code in agent mode to scaffold it as an experiment. One of the refinements I included in the prompt file to build it is reminders throughout for things it wouldn’t need reminding of if it actually “knew” the repo.

• I had to constantly remind it that it’s a yarn project, otherwise it would inevitably start trying to use NPM as it progressed through the prompt.
• For some reason, when it’s in agent mode and it makes a mistake, it wants to delete files it has fucked up, which always requires human intervention, so I peppered the prompt with reminders not to do that, but to blank the file out and start over in it.
• The frontend of the project uses TailwindCSS. It could not remember not to keep trying to downgrade its configuration to an earlier version instead of using the current one, so I wrote the entire configuration for it by hand and inserted it into the prompt file. If I let it try to build the configuration itself, it would inevitably fuck it up and then say something completely false, like, “The version of TailwindCSS we’re using is still in beta, let me try downgrading to the previous version.”

I’m not saying it wasn’t helpful. It probably cut 20% off the time it would have taken me to scaffold out the app myself, which is significant. But it certainly couldn’t keep track of the context provided by the repo, even though it was creating that context itself.

Working with Copilot is like working with a very talented and fast junior developer whose methamphetamine addiction has been getting the better of it lately, and who has early onset dementia or a brain injury that destroyed their short-term memory.

Like I said, I do find it useful at times. But not only shouldn’t it replace coders, it fundamentally can’t. At least, not without a fundamental rearchitecturing of how they work.

The reason it goes down a “really bad path” is that it’s basically glorified autocomplete. It doesn’t know anything.

On top of that, spoken and written language are very imprecise, and there’s no way for an LLM to derive what you really wanted from context clues such as your tone of voice.

Take the phrase “fruit flies like a banana.” Am I saying that a piece of fruit might fly in a manner akin to how another piece of fruit, a banana, flies if thrown? Or am I saying that the insect called the fruit fly might like to consume a banana?

It’s a humorous line, but my point is serious: We unintentionally speak in ambiguous ways like that all the time. And while we’ve got brains that can interpret unspoken signals to parse intended meaning from a word or phrase, LLMs don’t.

Experienced software developer, here. “AI” is useful to me in some contexts. Specifically when I want to scaffold out a completely new application (so I’m not worried about clobbering existing code) and I don’t want to do it by hand, it saves me time.

And… that’s about it. It sucks at code review, and will break shit in your repo if you let it.

“Scientists”

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

It’s true, although the smart companies aren’t laying off workers in the first place, because they’re treating AI as a tool to enhance their productivity rather than a tool to replace them.

The thing is, if they just pared those claims down a bit, they’d be accurate. Switch from “Copilot can build an entire application for you from scratch while giving you a blowjob” to “Copilot can help developers by automating some repetitive and time-consuming tasks,” and you still have a good thing.

Weird. The cuts apparently include cancellation of several games that were planned and many of them will hit the Xbox division.

I would’ve thought that the increased productivity that Copilot theoretically gives developers would have resulted in the reduced staff still being able to finish those games.

Les lacs d’Ardres sont très beaux. La ville est très conviviale.

Je parle français parce que j’aimerais retourner en France un de ces jours. Si je pratique chaque jour.

France. Specifically, a little town called Ardres. J’ai passé des vacances là-bas. C’était incroyable. Nous avons loué un gîte à la campagne. Je retournerais si je pouvais.

J’adore la France.

Autocomplete on steroids, but suffering dementia.

Yep. My TV has not and never will be on the Internet in any way. I picked it for its screen quality, and the fact that it also has “smart” components never even entered into the decision. Because those smart components will literally never do anything.

The thing that’s really got me excited is remembering all the Republicans who claimed Trump was the guy to vote for if you wanted peace and that Democrats were all warmongers.

Fucking mendacious dipshits, the lot of them.

Kind of a weird one, but the beginning theme to the original Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex has stuck with me.

The song is called “Inner Universe,” but the lyrics are Russian.

https://youtu.be/dP4t_GGl3Es

That’s an odd thing to say. For one thing, there are plenty of physical activities that one could get a reasonable description of from ChatGPT, but if you can’t actually do them or understand the steps, you’re gonna have a bad time.

Example: I’ve never seen any evidence that ChatGPT can properly clean and sterilize beakers in an autoclave for a chemical engineering laboratory, even if it can describe the process. If you turned in homework cribbed from ChatGPT and don’t actually know how to do it, your future lab partners aren’t going to be happy that you passed your course by letting ChatGPT do all the work on paper.

There’s also the issue that ChatGPT is frequently wrong. The whole point here is that these cheaters are getting caught because their papers have all the hallmarks of having been written by a large language model, and don’t show any comprehension of the study material by the student.

And finally, if you’re cheating to get a degree in a field you don’t actually want to know anything about… Why?

Why fight against it? Because some of these students will be going into jobs that are life-or-death levels of importance and won’t know how to do what they’re hired to do.

There’s nothing wrong with using a large language model to check your essay for errors and clumsy phrasing. There’s a lot wrong with trying to make it do your homework for you. If you graduate with a degree indicating you know your field, and you don’t actually know your field, you and everyone you work with are going to have a bad time.

Seems like it’s cheaper and more efficient just to pay people to fuck on camera.

Yup. The linked article has been updated to that effect. Both Democrats, the assassin was impersonating a police officer, and both are in grave condition.

Democrats need to start hiring personal security. We’re at that point.

Oh my God… The best/worst thing about the idea of AI porn is how AI tends to forget anything that isn’t still on the screen. So now I’m imagining the camera zooming in on someone’s jibblies, then zooming out and now it’s someone else’s jibblies, and the background is completely different.

I disagree. The richest are such greedy, vile scumbags that they’ll notice it long enough to chortle with glee.

But then yeah, they’ll promptly forget all about it.