Developer and refugee from Reddit

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • That’s an odd thing to say. For one thing, there are plenty of physical activities that one could get a reasonable description of from ChatGPT, but if you can’t actually do them or understand the steps, you’re gonna have a bad time.

    Example: I’ve never seen any evidence that ChatGPT can properly clean and sterilize beakers in an autoclave for a chemical engineering laboratory, even if it can describe the process. If you turned in homework cribbed from ChatGPT and don’t actually know how to do it, your future lab partners aren’t going to be happy that you passed your course by letting ChatGPT do all the work on paper.

    There’s also the issue that ChatGPT is frequently wrong. The whole point here is that these cheaters are getting caught because their papers have all the hallmarks of having been written by a large language model, and don’t show any comprehension of the study material by the student.

    And finally, if you’re cheating to get a degree in a field you don’t actually want to know anything about… Why?


  • Why fight against it? Because some of these students will be going into jobs that are life-or-death levels of importance and won’t know how to do what they’re hired to do.

    There’s nothing wrong with using a large language model to check your essay for errors and clumsy phrasing. There’s a lot wrong with trying to make it do your homework for you. If you graduate with a degree indicating you know your field, and you don’t actually know your field, you and everyone you work with are going to have a bad time.









  • But it still manages to fuck it up.

    I’ve been experimenting with using Claude’s Sonnet model in Copilot in agent mode for my job, and one of the things that’s become abundantly clear is that it has certain types of behavior that are heavily represented in the model, so it assumes you want that behavior even if you explicitly tell it you don’t.

    Say you’re working in a yarn workspaces project, and you instruct Copilot to build and test a new dashboard using an instruction file. You’ll need to include explicit and repeated reminders all throughout the file to use yarn, not NPM, because even though yarn is very popular today, there are so many older examples of using NPM in its model that it’s just going to assume that’s what you actually want - thereby fucking up your codebase.

    I’ve also had lots of cases where I tell it I don’t want it to edit any code, just to analyze and explain something that’s there and how to update it… and then I have to stop it from editing code anyway, because halfway through it forgot that I didn’t want edits, just explanations.








  • I’m in a similar boat, except I’m waiting to find out if my multinational will be willing to move me. I’m the lead developer, admin, product owner, and architect for a very publicly-facing web presence for my company, so I’m hoping they’ll be willing to in order to keep me happy.

    And if they won’t, I’m going to be applying for similar jobs abroad the moment I know.

    It’s not just for me. My son is trans and my daughter is gay. I have to get them both out of here before the ovens start firing up.

    If you get the impression that at this point I believe the U.S. is a lost cause, you’re correct. If we make it to the 2026 elections intact, the elections are valid, and Democrats sweep, I’ll be extremely surprised.