zlacker

>>tablet+(OP)
One thing that I find truly amazing is just the simple fact that you can now be fuzzy with the input you give a computer, and get something meaningful in return. Like, as someone who grew up learning to code in the 90s it always seemed like science fiction that we'd get to a point where you could give a computer some vague human level instructions and get it more or less do what you want.

>>gdubs+Z
It's mind blowing. At least 1-2x/week I find myself shocked that this is the reality we live in

>>csalle+z1
Today I had a dentist appointment and the dentist suggested I switch toothpaste lines to see if something else works for my sensitivity better.

I am predisposed to canker sores and if I use a toothpaste with SLS in it I'll get them. But a lot of the SLS free toothpastes are new age hippy stuff and is also fluoride free.

I went to chatgpt and asked it to suggest a toothpaste that was both SLS free and had fluoride. Pretty simple ask right?

It came back with two suggestions. It's top suggestion had SLS, it's backup suggestion lacked fluoride.

Yes, it is mind blowing the world we live in. Executives want to turn our code bases over to these tools

>>malfis+Y5
What model and query did you use? I used the prompt "find me a toothpaste that is both SLS free and has fluoride" and both GPT-4o [0] and o4-mini-high [1] gave me correct first answers. The 4o answer used the newish "show products inline" feature which made it easier to jump to each product and check it out (I am putting aside my fear this feature will end up kill their web product with monetization).

0 - https://chatgpt.com/share/683e3807-0bf8-800a-8bab-5089e4af51...

1 - https://chatgpt.com/share/683e3558-6738-800a-a8fb-3adc20b69d...

>>Game_E+kp
The problem is the same prompt will yield good results one time and bad results another. The "get better at prompting" is often just an excuse for AI hallucination. Better prompting can help but often it's totally fine, the tech is just not there yet.

>>wkat42+8F
If you want a correct answer the first time around, and give up if you don't get it, even if you know the thing can give it to you with a bit more effort (but still less effort than searching yourself), don't you think that's a user problem?

>>Aeolun+8J
If you are genuinely asking a question, how are you supposed to know the first answer was incorrect?

>>3eb798+zL
The person that started this conversation verified the answers were incorrect. So it sounds like you just do that. Check the results. If they turn out to be false, tell the LLM or make sure you're not on a bad one. It still likely to be faster than searching yourself.

>>socalg+vP
I somehow can't reply to your child comment.

It depends on whether the cost of search or of verification dominates. When searching for common consumer products, yeah, this isn't likely to help much, and in a sense the scales are tipped against the AI for this application.

But if search is hard and verification is easy, even a faulty faster search is great.

I've run into a lot of instances with Linux where some minor, low level thing has broken and all of the stackexchange suggestions you can find in two hours don't work and you don't have seven hours to learn about the Linux kernel and its various services and their various conventions in order to get your screen resolutions correct, so you just give up.

Being in a debug loop in the most naive way with Claude, where it just tells you what to try and you report the feedback and direct it when it tunnel visions on irrelevant things, has solved many such instances of this hopelessness for me in the last few years.

>>lechat+nU
So instead of spending seven hours to get at least an understanding how the Linux kernel work and the interaction of various user-land programs, you've decided to spend years fumbling in the dark and trying stuff every time an issue arises?

>>skydha+ge2
I would like to understand how you ideally imagine a person solving issues of this type. I'm for understanding things instead of hacking at them in general, and this tendency increases the more central the things to understand are to the things you like to do. However, it's a point of common agreement that just in the domain of computer-related tech, there is far more to learn than a person can possibly know in a lifetime, and so we all have to make choices about which ones we want to dive into.

I do not expect to go through the process I just described for more than a few hours a year, so I don't think the net loss to my time is huge. I think that the most relevant counterfactual scenario is that I don't learn anything about how these things work at all, and I cope with my problem being unfixed. I don't think this is unusual behavior, to the degree that it's I think a common point of humor among Linux users: https://xkcd.com/963/ https://xkcd.com/456/

This is not to mention issues that are structurally similar (in the sense that search is expensive but verification is cheap, and the issue is generally esoteric so there are reduced returns to learning) but don't necessarily have anything to do with the Linux kernel: https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/42611

I wonder if you're arguing against a strawman that thinks that it's not necessary to learn anything about the basic design/concepts of operating systems at all. I think knowledge of it is fractally deep and you could run into esoterica you don't care about at any level, and as others in the thread have noted, at the very least when you are in the weeds with a problem the LLM can often (not always) be better documentation than the documentation. (Also, I actually think that some engineers do on a practical level need to know extremely little about these things and more power to them, the abstraction is working for them.)

Holding what you learn constant, it's nice to have control about in what order things force you to learn them. Yak-shaving is a phenomenon common enough that we have a term for it, and I don't know that it's virtuous to know how to shave a yak in-depth (or to the extent that it is, some days you are just trying to do something else).