• Kekzkrieger@feddit.org
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    23 days ago

    CEOs without a clue how things work think they know how things work.

    I swear if we had no CEOs from today on the only impact would be that we wouldve less gibberish being spoken

    • CaptPretentious@lemmy.world
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      23 days ago

      If AI could replace anyone… it’s those dingbats. I mean, what would you say, in this given example, the CEO does… exactly? Make up random bullshit? AI does that. Write a speech? AI does that. I love how these overpaid people think they can replace the talent but they… they are absolutely required and couldn’t possibly be replaced! Talent and AI can’t buy and enjoy the extra big yacht, or private jets, or over priced cars, or a giant over sized mansion… no you need people for that.

  • tal@lemmy.today
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    24 days ago

    That’d be an exciting world, since it’d massively increase access to software.

    I am also very dubious about that claim.

    In the long run, I do think that AI can legitimately handle a great deal of what humans do today. It’s something to think about, plan for, sure.

    I do not think that anything we have today is remotely near being on the brink of the kind of technical threshold required to do that, and I think that even in a world where that was true, that it’d probably take more than 2 years to transition most of the industry.

    I am enthusiastic about AI’s potential. I think that there is also – partly because we have a fair number of unknowns unknowns, and partly because people have a strong incentive to oversell the particular AI thing that they personally are involved with to investors and the like – a tendency to be overly-optimistic about the near-term potential.

    I have another comment a while back talking about why I’m skeptical that the process of translating human-language requirements to machine-language instructions is going to be as amenable as translating human-language to human-consumable output. The gist, though, is that:

    • Humans rely on stuff that “looks to us like” what’s going on in the real world to cue our brain to construct something. That’s something where the kind of synthesis that people are doing with latent diffusion software works well. An image that’s about 80% “accurate” works well enough for us; the lighting being a little odd or maybe an extra toe or something is something that we can miss. Ditto for natural-language stuff. But machine language doesn’t work like that. A CPU requires a very specific set of instructions. If 1% is “off”, a software package isn’t going to work at all.

    • The process of programming involves incorporating knowledge about the real world with a set of requirements, because those requirements are in-and-of-themselves usually incomplete. I don’t think that there’s a great way to fill in those holes without having that deep knowledge of the world. This “deep knowledge and understanding of the world” is the hard stuff to do for AI. If we could do that, that’s the kind of stuff that would let us create a general artificial intelligence that could do what a human does in general. Stable Diffusion’s “understanding” of the world is limited to statistical properties of a set of 2D images; for that application, I think that we can create a very limited AI that can still produce useful output in a number of areas, which is why, in 2024, without producing an AI capable of performing generalized human tasks, we can still get some useful output from the thing. I don’t think that there’s likely a similar shortcut for much by way of programming. And hell, even for graphic arts, there’s a lot of things that this approach just doesn’t work for. I gave an example earlier in a discussion where I said “try and produce a page out of a comic book using stuff like Stable Diffusion”. It’s not really practical today; Stable Diffusion isn’t building up a 3D mental model of the world, designing an entity that stably persists from image to image, and then rendering that. It doesn’t know how it’s reasonable for objects and the like to interact. I think that to reach that point, you’re going to have to have a much-more-sophisticated understanding of the world, something that looks a lot more like what a human’s looks like.

      The kind of stuff that we have today may be a component of such an AI system. But I don’t think that the answer here is going to be “take existing latent diffusion software and throw a lot of hardware at it”. I think that there’s going to have to be some significant technical breakthroughs that have not happened yet, and that we’re probably going to spend some time heading down dead-end approaches before we get to that. There’s probably going to be a lot of hard R&D before we get there, and that’s going to take time.

  • Fosheze@lemmy.world
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    23 days ago

    A company I used to work for outsourced most of their coding to a company in India. I say most because when the code came back the internal teams anways had to put a bunch of work in to fix it and integrate it with existing systems. I imagine that, if anything, LLMs will just take the place of that overseas coding farm. The code they spit out will still need to be fixed and modified so it works with your existing systems and that work is going to require programmers.

    • ammonium@lemmy.world
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      23 days ago

      So instead of spending 1 day writing good code, we’ll be spending a week debugging shitty code. Great.

  • casmael@lemm.ee
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    24 days ago

    I know just enough about this to confirm that this statement is absolute horseshit

  • riodoro1@lemmy.world
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    24 days ago

    Todays news: Rich assholes in suits are idiots and don’t know how their own companies are working. Make sure to share what they’re saying.

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    23 days ago

    Translation: “We’re going to make the suite for building, testing, and deploying so obnoxiously difficult to integrate with your work environment that in two years nobody in your DevOps team will be able to get anything to a release state.”

    Me, fiddling with a config file for a legacy Perl script that’s been holding up the ass-end of the business since 1996: “Uh, yeah that’s great.”

  • TriflingToad@lemmy.world
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    23 days ago

    Seriously how can these CEOs of a GPU company not talk to a developer. You have loads of them to interview

    • Chais@sh.itjust.works
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      24 days ago

      Really simple. Just ask it to point out the error. Also maybe tell it how the code is wrong. And then hope that the new code didn’t introduce new errors in formerly working sections. And that it understood what you meant. In a language that is inherently vague.

    • Zess@lemmy.world
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      24 days ago

      They think it will be easier than having people write the code from scratch. I don’t know shit about coding but I know that’s definitely not right.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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        24 days ago

        AI is quite good at writing small sections of code. Usually because it’s more or less just copying something off the internet that it’s found, maybe changing a few bits around, but essentially just regurgitating something that’s in its data set. I could of course just have done that but it saves time since the AI can find the relevant piece of code to copy and modify more or less instantly.

        But it falls apart if you ask it to build entire applications. You can barely even get it to write pong without a lot of tinkering around after the fact which rather defeats the point really.

        It also doesn’t deal well if the thing you’re trying to program for is not very well documented, which would include things like drivers, which presumably is their bread and butter.

        • frezik@midwest.social
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          24 days ago

          That might actually be a good test for managers who think coders can be replaced by this. Have them try to make a working version of Pong using AI prompts.

  • SomeGuy69@lemmy.world
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    24 days ago

    But coding never was the difficult part. It’s understanding a concept, identify a problem and solve it with the possible methods. An AI just makes the coding part faster and gives me options to quicker identify a possible solution. Thankfully there’s a never ending pile of projects, issues, todos and stackholder wants, that I don’t see how we need less programmers. Maybe we need more to deal with AI, as now people can do a lot more in house instead of outsourcing, but as soon as that threshold is reached, companies will again contact large software companies. If people want to put AI into everything, you need people feeding the AI with company specific data and instruct people to use this AI.

    All I see is middle management getting replaced, because instead of a boring meeting, I could just ask an AI.

    • curry@programming.dev
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      24 days ago

      I dread meetings and I can’t wait for AIs to replace those managers. Or perhaps we’ll have even more meetings because the management wants to know why we’re so late despite the AI happily churning out meaningless codes that look so awesome like all that CSI VB GUI crap.

    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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      24 days ago

      It’s been said before but the whiter your collar the more likely you are to be replaced by AI simply because the grunts tend to do more varied less pleibeon things.

      Middle managers tend to write a lot of documents and emails which is something AI excels at. The programmers meanwhile have to come up with creative solutions to problems, and AI is less good at being creative, it basically just copy pastes known solutions from the web.

      • Liam Mayfair@lemmy.sdf.org
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        23 days ago

        Realises devs have always joked about their jobs just being about copy-pasting solutions from StackOverflow 80% of the time

        Oh God…

  • calcopiritus@lemmy.world
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    24 days ago

    If generative AI hasn’t replaced artists, it won’t replaced programmers.

    Generative AI is much better at art than coding.

    • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world
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      24 days ago

      Generative AI is much better at art than coding.

      Mostly because humans invented this convenient thing called abstract art - and since then tolerates pretty much everything that looks “strange” as art. Must have been a deep learning advocate with a time machine who came up with abstract art.

      • calcopiritus@lemmy.world
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        24 days ago

        Don’t need to be abstract art, it manages to make many kinds of art.

        The difference between art and coding is that if you pick a slightly different color or make a line with slightly the wrong angle, it doesn’t change much. In code, however, slight mistakes usually result in bugs.

          • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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            23 days ago

            I don’t think that’s the case though. Obvious glitches like 6-fingered hands can be avoided by generating a bunch of samples and picking the best one, and less obvious glitches tend to be overlooked, not considered a “feature” due to an appreciation of abstract art.

            AI art works best for pieces that need to fade into the background, like stock images and whatnot to accompany more important copy. If it’s taking center stage, it needs a lot more hand-holding that probably makes it about as costly as just having a human create it.

    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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      24 days ago

      It will never replace artists anyway.

      Art isn’t just about what it looks, like it’s also about an emotional connection. Inherently we think that you cannot have an emotional connection with something created by a computer. Humans will always prefer art created by humans, even if objectively there isn’t a lot of difference.

      • Liam Mayfair@lemmy.sdf.org
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        23 days ago

        The problem is that not everyone looks for that human-to-human emotional connection in art. For some, it’s just a part of a much bigger whole.

        For example, if you’re an indie game dev with a small budget and no artistic skills, you may not be that scrupulous about getting an AI to generate some sprites or 3D models for you, if the alternative is to commission the art assets with money you don’t have.

        Similar idea applies to companies building a website. Why pay for a licence to download some stock images or design assets if you can just get a GenAI to pump out hundreds for you that are very convincing (and probably even better) for a couple bucks?

  • Daemon Silverstein@thelemmy.club
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    24 days ago

    It’s the same claim when tools like Integromat, WayScript, PureData, vvvv and other VPLs (Visual Programming Languages) started to get some hype. I once worked for a company that strongly believed they’d “retire the need for coding”, and my ex-boss was so confident and happy about that… Although VPLs were a practical thing, time is the ruler of truth, and for every dev-related job vacancy I see, they ask some programming language, the written ones (JS, PHP, Python, Ruby, Lua, and so on).

    Because if you look closely, deep inside, voila, there’s code in anything that is claimed to be no-code! Wow, could anyone imagine that? 🤯 /sarcasm

      • Phoenixbouncing@lemmy.world
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        24 days ago

        Looking at your examples, and I have to object at putting scratch in there.

        My kids use it in clubs, and it’s great for getting algorithmic basics down before the keyboard proficiency is there for real coding.

        • barsoap@lemm.ee
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          24 days ago

          It’s still code. What makes scratch special is that it structurally rules out syntax errors while still looking quite like ordinary code. Node editors – I have a love and hate relationship with them. When you’re in e.g. Blender throwing together a shader it’s very very nice to have easy visualisation of literally everything, but then you know you want to compute abs(a) + sin(b) + c^2 and yep that’s five nodes right there because apparently even the possibility to type in a formula is too confusing for artists. Never mind that Blender allows you to input formulas (without variables though) into any field that accepts a number.

  • yokonzo@lemmy.world
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    24 days ago

    How many times does the public have to learn if the CEO says it, he probably doesn’t know what he’s talking about. If the devs say it, listen