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   lambdageek@mastodon.social's status on Friday, 21-Mar-2025 04:38:57 JST lambdageek

   Me, a programmer with many years of experience: *does some things*

   Also me: literally googles "how to write elseif in <lang>" every time I have to switch contexts.

   The LLM is very happy to auto-complete total nonsense btw

   • Embed this notice
     mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 21-Mar-2025 04:38:56 JST mcc

     in reply to

     @lambdageek Back before "neural network" meant "boil the oceans and elect a fascist President", I spent some time imagining a language whose parser is just a neural network trained on various other programming languages. Have it *guess* what you meant— a RNN could probably deduce "elseif", "else if", "elsif" and "elif" mean one thing. There's jokes about Python being "executable pseudocode". Why not make literally executable pseudocode. Like yes it's a bad idea but when has that ever stopped

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 21-Mar-2025 04:38:56 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • mcc

     @mcc @lambdageek
     I mean…this is exactly, exactly what a bunch of non-programmers think LLM code generation is. I think that’s at least half the stock valuation in the AI bubble.

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 21-Mar-2025 04:42:20 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • mcc

     @mcc @lambdageek
     Yeah, basically this exact question for almost everything that generative AI is doing right now: what if we just made it a fun art project?

   • Embed this notice
     mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 21-Mar-2025 04:42:21 JST mcc

     in reply to

     • Paul Cantrell

     @inthehands @lambdageek yes but what if we actually did it (as an art project) instead of pretending to do it (to scam people out of money)

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     Jed Brown (jedbrown@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 21-Mar-2025 12:07:14 JST Jed Brown

     in reply to

     • mcc
     • Paul Cantrell

     @inthehands @mcc @lambdageek Hah, yes, the ethical uses are of that variety, but "fun art project" doesn't support trillion dollar bubbles. The promise of exploitation and extraction is what hooked the investors, not mere technical marvel or fantasy.