Ian Lance Taylor (of GOLD, Go, and other tech fame) had a take on chatbots being AGI that I liked to see from an influential person of computing.
https://www.airs.com/blog/archives/673
The summary is that chatbots are not AGI, using the current AI wave as the usher to AGI is not it, and all around dislikes in a very polite way that chatbot LLMs are seen as AI.
I remember popping into IRC or a mailing list to ask subsystem questions to learn from the sources themselves how something works (or should work). Depending who what and where definitely had differing experiences but overall I felt like there was typically a helpful person on the other side. Nowadays I fear the slop will make people a lot less willing to help when they are overwhelmed with AI generated garbage patches or mails losing some of the rose-tinted charm of open source.
It’s unfortunate that the bug bounty payout removal is probably the best immediate remedy for some filtering but with curl being everywhere resume padders are still going to rush to generate slop reports or patches. I hope they are more fast and direct with communication as well. Their current patience and politeness is admirable.
Reading through some of the examples at the end of the article it’s infuriating when these slop reports have opened and when the patient curl developers try to give them benefit of the doubt the reporter replies with “you have a vulnerability and I cannot explain further since I’m not an expert”. Oh but for sure it’s broken and you are expert enough to know? One of the examples the reporter kept replying with how a strcpy() could be unsafe and the curl devs were kindly explaining that yes in general that function has potential for issues but their usage was not such a case. Reporter just repeats without paying attention. Insanity.
I love working in systems writing C and assembly but I’ve grown many gray hairs over the years being yelled at that “C is the worst” or “lol memory bug” or the classic “this thing isn’t working perfectly for me so it must have been written in C and we need to rewrite it entirely in (alpha) language which is for sure better than the collective centuries of expertise in C existing now”. These LLMs sure do amplify these obnoxious voices because now the fancy chatbot says so.
I missed predatory company Klarna declares themselves as AI company. CEO loves to spout how much of the workforce was laid off to be replaced with “AI” and their latest earnings report the CEO was an “AI avatar” delivering the report. Sounds like they should have laid him off first.
Much like blockchain the FOMO is so strong people are afraid to say it’s bad even when there is nonstop evidence rolling in. With all the data they still are too cowardly to say anything critical.
It bums me out with cryptocurrency/blockchain and now “AI” that people are afraid to commit to calling it bullshit. They always end with “but it could evolve and become revolutionary!” I assume from deep seated FOMO. Journalists especially need more backbone but that’s asking too much from WSJ I know
when stocks are suffering Bitcoin is seen as the automatic money machine cause allegedly line can only go up. It doesn’t produce or rely on supply chain logistics and is immune to trade wars so it quickly gets popularity again. And there’s no such thing as a former coiner because once there’s a hint of potential bag holders arriving then they activate like fucking sleeper agents ready to push the moon-prop
My experience talking with people has been often this same situation; they have some specialty expertise and for whatever reason now accept ChatGPT as all knowing and use it a lot day to day. It worries me since the response to “why” is usually along the lines of humans aren’t always right but this is AI so it will keep getting better eventually.
Tools should be 100% correct. Your work has regressed because you swapped out good tools and practices for spicy autocorrect
Mention C (and to an extent C++) and turbo nerds froth to show off how ultra cool they are cause they are LoW lEvEl programmers. But like most things, these loud freaks are mostly incoherent with their random insertion of tech words. Putting aside the DEI stuff cause I will rant forever against this racist and sexist fuckwit, it’s massively annoying working in an industry and dummies love to be all hand wavy and suggest something like sanitizers. Thanks bro, let’s all add runtime sanitizers and watch perf tank in the most critical section of your computer. And as you pointed out he doesn’t even mention the right one.
Next time Crowdstrike should just have an if check all registers after every instruction to make sure their values are within your address space! And and and make sure a woman doesn’t program it cause according to him they are exempt from code reviews cause of the left agenda or some bullshit
In capital markets infrastructure low latency and high throughput are the 2 core design principles of any system. Blockchain manages to violate both; how anyone could have thought this is “the future” is beyond me. I still hear all too often “ya blockchain (or cryptocurrency) doesn’t work now but I’m sure it’ll be great and useful eventually!”
Why oh why are people so attached to this proven failed tech idea? I’ll throw it the smallest of bones and say maybe a distributed ledger with cryptographic proofs has some very specific minor use case, but even if that maybe is true for one thing why is it shoved everywhere it doesn’t belong?
I hate this cop out everyone uses when they stuff AI into their system. “By using it it’s actually your fault for believing the information” while also making it the preferred or even only way to try and get information. This is unethical especially in healthcare
I used to think regulations were good and protecting us, then I became someone who wanted to take advantage of you so now regulators are bad. Let me fleece you, stop preventing it
AI influencers are wild. Much like blockchain somehow AI will solve all your problems, but to access the grimoire that is LLM prompts gotta watch a video by someone who claims to have this knowledge access but had their presentation written by ChatGPT
Ian Lance Taylor (of GOLD, Go, and other tech fame) had a take on chatbots being AGI that I liked to see from an influential person of computing. https://www.airs.com/blog/archives/673
The summary is that chatbots are not AGI, using the current AI wave as the usher to AGI is not it, and all around dislikes in a very polite way that chatbot LLMs are seen as AI.
Apologies if this was posted when published.