sisyphean

joined 2 years ago
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[–] sisyphean@programming.dev 1 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I will use this everywhere without shame

[–] sisyphean@programming.dev 1 points 2 years ago

Wow, that’s a great analogy!

[–] sisyphean@programming.dev 1 points 2 years ago

I'm glad you like it! /r/bestof was one of my favorite subreddits for a long time (then it went to shit). I hope we can build a high-quality community here.

[–] sisyphean@programming.dev 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

The problem is that they "see" the text at the token level instead of the level of characters. That's why they are bad at reversing strings or counting characters, for example. They perceive tokens as the atomic units of text instead of characters. For example, see how this comment gets tokenized:

With the token IDs shown:

The current ChatGPTs got pretty good at these tasks but they are still hard for them.

Here is an example of a (admittedly more complicated) character-level task failing:

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/11z9tuk/chatgpt_vs_reversed_text/ (It's from the devil's website, so don't open it)

Related tweet by @karpathy:

https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1657949234535211009

Text reversing example from a tweet by @npew:

EDIT: sorry for the infodump, I just find these topics fascinating.

[–] sisyphean@programming.dev 0 points 2 years ago

Is that because most of your recipes are from the US?

[–] sisyphean@programming.dev 1 points 2 years ago (2 children)

We use Celsius like for everything else

[–] sisyphean@programming.dev 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

So you mean deadly effective?

[–] sisyphean@programming.dev 0 points 2 years ago

Here is a Lemmy Award for you:

[–] sisyphean@programming.dev 1 points 2 years ago

It actually said that it would be there:

I will arrive early and get us two cups of coffee.

I think that while this is a very interesting and funny answer (which is why I posted it), we should keep in mind that GPT-4 was trained on human conversations, so however good the RLHF was by OpenAI, sometimes it says something out of character for an AI assistant. It just tried to predict a likely path for the conversation.

[–] sisyphean@programming.dev 1 points 2 years ago

Thanks for creating this community!

[–] sisyphean@programming.dev 1 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Ladies and gentlemen, the winner of the 2023 Turing Award!

[–] sisyphean@programming.dev 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I absolutely agree. But:

  • sometimes you need to modify existing code and you can't add the types necessary without a giant refactoring
  • you can't express units with types in:
    • JSON/YAML object keys
    • XML tag or attribute names
    • environment variable names
    • CLI switch names
    • database column names
    • HTTP query parameters
    • programming languages without a strong type system

Obviously as a Hungarian I have a soft spot for Hungarian notation :) But in these cases I think it's warranted.

118
Programming and Humility (programming.dev)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by sisyphean@programming.dev to c/programming@programming.dev
 

This is something I’ve been wondering about for a long time. Programming is an activity that makes you face your own fallibility all the time. You write some code, compile it or run it, and then 80% of the time, it doesn’t work exactly the way you imagined. There’s an error message, or it just behaves incorrectly. Then you need to iterate on it and fix the issues until you get the desired result, and even then it’s subtly wrong, and causes an outage at 3am on Sunday.

I thought this experience would teach programmers to be the humblest people in the world.

I can’t believe how wrong I was. Programmers can be the most arrogant dickheads you will ever meet. Why is that?

 

While not strictly related to programming, this is very surprising and harmful behavior that demonstrates how important thinking about edge cases is.

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