this article is incredibly long and rambly, but please enjoy as this asshole struggles to select random items from an array in presumably Javascript for what sounds like a basic crossword app:
At one point, we wanted a command that would print a hundred random lines from a dictionary file. I thought about the problem for a few minutes, and, when thinking failed, tried Googling. I made some false starts using what I could gather, and while I did my thing—programming—Ben told GPT-4 what he wanted and got code that ran perfectly.
Fine: commands like those are notoriously fussy, and everybody looks them up anyway.
ah, the NP-complete problem of just fucking pulling the file into memory (there’s no way this clown was burning a rainforest asking ChatGPT for a memory-optimized way to do this), selecting a random item between 0 and the areay’s length minus 1, and maybe storing that index in a second array if you want to guarantee uniqueness. there’s definitely not literally thousands of libraries for this if you seriously can’t figure it out yourself, hackerman
I returned to the crossword project. Our puzzle generator printed its output in an ugly text format, with lines like
"s""c""a""r""*""k""u""n""i""s""*" "a""r""e""a". I wanted to turn output like that into a pretty Web page that allowed me to explore the words in the grid, showing scoring information at a glance. But I knew the task would be tricky: each letter had to be tagged with the words it belonged to, both the across and the down. This was a detailed problem, one that could easily consume the better part of an evening.
fuck it’s convenient that every example this chucklefuck gives of ChatGPT helping is for incredibly well-treaded toy and example code. wonder why that is? (check out the author’s other articles for a hint)
I thought that my brother was a hacker. Like many programmers, I dreamed of breaking into and controlling remote systems. The point wasn’t to cause mayhem—it was to find hidden places and learn hidden things. “My crime is that of curiosity,” goes “The Hacker’s Manifesto,” written in 1986 by Loyd Blankenship. My favorite scene from the 1995 movie “Hackers” is
most of this article is this type of fluffy cringe, almost like it’s written by a shitty advertiser trying and failing to pass themselves off as a relatable techy
shuf -n 100 /usr/share/dict/words
I would have expected JS standard library to contain something along the lines of
random.samplebut apparently not. A similar thing exists in something calledunderscore.jsand I gotta say it’s incredibly in-character for JavaScript to outsource incredibly common utility functions to a module called “_”.Language bashing aside, there’s something to enjoy about these credulous articles proclaiming AI superiority. It’s not the writing itself, but the self-esteem boost regarding my own skills. I have little trouble doing these junior dev whiteboard interview exercises without LLM help, guess that’s pretty impressive after all!
Really love the bit about how gpt is able to tackle the simple stuff so easily. If an original insight, I take my hat off to you. I came to the edge of it, but never quite really saw it as you point out.
if you never have, find YouTube videos of folks trying to use an LLM to generate code for a mildly obscure language. one I watched that gave the game away was where someone tried to get ChatGPT to write a game in Commodore BASIC, which they then pasted directly into a Commodore 64 emulator to run. not only did the resulting “game” perform like a nonsensical mashup of the simple example code from two old programming books, there was a gigantic edit in the middle of the video where they had to stop and make a significant number of fixes to the LLM’s output, where it either fictionalized something like a line number or constant, or where the mashup of the two examples just didn’t function. after all that programming on their part for an incredibly substandard result, their conclusion was still (of course) that the LLM did an amazing job
