Programmer Humor

I asked ChatGPT with help about bare metal 32-bit ARM (For the Pi Zero W) C/ASM, emulated in QEMU for testing, and after the third iteration of "use printf for output" -> "there's no printf with bare metal as target" -> "use solution X" -> "doesn't work" -> "ude printf for output" ... I had enough.

It's pretty random in terms of what is or isn't doable.

For me it's a big performance booster because I genuinely suck at coding and don't do too much complex stuff. As a "clean up my syntax" and a "what am I missing here" tool it helps, or at least helps in figuring out what I'm doing wrong so I can look in the right place for the correct answer on something that seemed inscrutable at a glance. I certainly can do some things with a local LLM I couldn't do without one (or at least without getting berated by some online dick who doesn't think he has time to give you an answer but sure has time to set you on a path towards self-discovery).

How much of a benefit it's for a professional I couldn't tell. I mean, definitely not a replacement. Maybe helping read something old or poorly commented fast? Redundant tasks on very commonplace mainstream languages and tasks?

I don't think it's useless, but if you ask it to do something by itself you can't trust that it'll work without singificant additional effort.

I use it sometimes, usually just to create boilerplate. Actual functionality it's hit or miss, and often it ends up taking more time to fix than to write myself.

And that's what happens when you spend a trillion dollars on an autocomplete: amazing at making things look like whatever it's imitating, but with zero understanding of why the original looked that way.

Well I've got the name for my autobiography now.

My uncle. Very smart very neuronal. He knows the entire Internet, can you imagine? the entire internet. Like the mails of Crooked Hillary Clinton, that crook. You know what stands in that Mails? my uncle knows. He makes the best code. The most beautiful code. No one has ever seen code like it, but for him, he's a genius, like i am, i have inherited all his genius genes. It is very easy. He makes the best code. Sometimes he calls me and asks me: you are even smarter than i am. Can you look at my code?

Awwwww snap look at this limp dick future we got going on here.

You managed to get an ai to do 200 lines of code and it actually compiled?

Practically all LLMs aren't good for any logic. Try to play ASCII tic tac toe against it. All GPT models lost against my four year old niece and I wouldn't trust her writing production code 🤣

Once a single model (doesn't have to be a LLM) can beat Stockfish in chess, AlphaGo in Go, my niece in tic tac toe and can one-shot (on the surface, scratch-pad allowed) a Rust program that compiles and works, than we can start thinking about replacing engineers.

Just take a look at the dotnet runtime source code where Microsoft employees currently try to work with copilot, which writes PRs with errors like forgetting to add files to projects. Write code that doesn't compile, fix symptoms instead of underlying problems, etc. (just take a look yourself).

I don't say that AI (especially AGI) can't replace humans. It definitely can and will, it's just a matter of time, but state of the Art LLMs are basically just extremely good "search engines" or interactive versions of "stack overflow" but not good enough to do real "thinking tasks".

It will have consumed the GigaWattHours capacity of a few suns and all the moisture in our solar system, but by Jeeves, we'll get there!

...but it won't be that impressive once we remember concepts like "monkey, typing, Shakespeare" were already embedded in the training data.

llms are systems that output human-readable natural language answers, not true answers

It generates an answer that looks correct. Actual correctness is accidental. That's how you wind up with documents with references that don't exist, it just knows what references look like.

It confidently gave me one

IMO, that's one of the biggest "sins" of the current LLMs, they're trained to generate words that make them sound confident.

Man, I can't wait to try out generative AI to generate config files for mission critical stuff! Imagine paying all of us devops wankers when my idiot boss can just ask Chat GPT to sort all this legacy mess we're juggling with on the daily!

Did the generated code get merged? I'd be curious to see the PRs

Hello, fellow old person 🤝

Not reliably, no. Python is too dynamic to do that kind of thing without solving general program equivalence which is undecidable.

Use a static language, problem solved.

I'm going to laugh in Java, where this has always been possible and reliable. Not like ai reliable, but expert reliable. Because of static types.

For the most part "Rename symbol" in VSCode will work well. But it's limited by scope.

I use pycharm for this and in general it does a great job. At work we've got some massive repos and it'll handle it fine.

The "find" tab shows where it'll make changes and you can click "don't change anything in this directory"

IntelliJ IDEA, if it knows it is the same variable, it will rename it. Usually works in a non fucked up codebase that uses eval or some obscure constructs like saving a variable name into a variable as a string and dynamically invoking it.