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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   3665 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 23, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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How the heck do you people program all day without pulling your hair out? I've spent 5+ hours just trying to clone a jupyter lab notebook from GitHub and open it, and good lord even with GPT's help it's like pulling teeth.

Getting the development environment running for a project is one of the worst aspects of programming IMO. Some people thrive on it and don't get bothered but for me, it goes something like this.

to fix this dependency conflict just run A B C in your terminal.

Then you find out that running A B C, each comes with its own A's B's, and C's and then they recurse forever. You just pray this is the last time you run random terminal commands from StackOverflow and this time it will work.

On the other hand, using ChatGPT is depriving you of learning the debugging skills many of us from the older days before language models had to earn through suffering but at least we know how to do it without gpt.

Also docker has been a godsend in this regard. Also if you are really struggling with getting the dev environment up, maybe its just because you are on Windows. Things are a lot easier to get up and running on Mac and Linux.

On the other hand, using ChatGPT is depriving you of learning the debugging skills many of us from the older days before language models had to earn through suffering but at least we know how to do it without gpt.

Is this a bad thing? Like why would we need debugging skills if ChatGPT can solve that problem?

Oh and I actually have been using a Mac.

Because..

A guy who uses chatGPT and knows how to debug is more powerful than a guy who uses chatGPT and doesn't know how to debug.

I know a lot of posters here have some insane timelines on AGI and think any endeavor of knowledge or skill acquisition is useless because AGI will make us all useless tomorrow. Which MIGHT HAPPEN.

But assuming LLM's don't improve all that much in the near future and we don't get the GOD AGI, what I said will hold. It certainly holds in the present.

The people who know how to code are more effective using GPT than those who don't, if anything they reap exponential gains relative to those who don't know "the basics"

More or less every example I've seen of ChatGPT's touted benefits to programming has had little to do with programming and has ended up being just fairly simple scripting.

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