What preparations (if any) have you made to deal with blackouts?

[Vortex2]

One observation from the above:

The AI in fact DOES have 'state memory' of some sort.

This is a key component which will lead to self-acting AIs .. which may not necessarily be sentient in any way.

[clv101]

Indeed! Your previous RGR post, had you previously discussed their 'outting' at all with ChatGPT?

[Vortex2]

Indeed! Your previous RGR post, had you previously discussed their 'outting' at all with ChatGPT?

Not that I can recollect.

I have seen some more videos on chatGPT today.

It's scarily clever.

One guy even managed it to pretend to be a LINUX command line.
It 'imagined' files, PING results etc.

One good bit was when he asked it to create a file called jokes.txt .. containing jokes.
It did, and placed the file in the fake LINUX box.

Very weird.

So far it has written me an OS in C, a CANBUS driver in C and a function to return Gaussian random numbers PLUS test harness in C.

Coders on the web are freaking out .. they can see their careers disappearing in a puff of smoke.

The amount of denial and rationalizing going on is astonishing .. but understandable.

The age of the whiteboard coding interview test is just about over.

Already agencies have sprung up handling the recruitment of 'prompt engineers' i.e. specialists who can feed the AIs with prompts and requests that work.

A word to the wise : the chatGPT system has now been 'discovered', so if you want to test it out, do it NOW before it becomes unusable or even gets turned off.

[RevdTess]

Coders on the web are freaking out .. they can see their careers disappearing in a puff of smoke.
The amount of denial and rationalizing going on is astonishing .. but understandable.

To be fair, this sort of anxiety and denial has happened with every shift in programming, when we moved from assembler to high level languages, from mainframes to desktops, from coding every library yourself to importing everything you need from elsewhere, from reading manuals to looking everything up on Stack Overflow. Even over my own coding career, what programmers actually do now is radically different to what we were doing when I started in 1992. I'm not convinced that AI prompts are as profound a shift as some seem to think. We've had code that writes code for a long time - the difference with AI is in the ability to use natural language to describe what you want. What will happen is that AI will be used to shortcut a coding project after which the coders will integrate AI-built components and tweak to finesse what has been produced.

I remember when I started my first coding job there was a guy who was 50+ who was desperate to avoid any of the new techniques and technologies removing his job before retirement. I think these are the people who are going to be worried. Anyone who still has a passion for coding will realise that the abstracting of coding through an AI is no different to previous shifts such as dividing coding teams into 'core library builders' and 'integration specialists', the latter using the former's work as if they were black boxes. Every subsequent generation of coders forgets the underlying levels of complexity that everything they build is based upon. Once upon a time, to show an image on a screen, you had to manually direct the value of every pixel. Now you can use a few lines of code to generate a dynamic photorealistic 3d scene with raytraced lighting.

My only concern with AI generated code is if people just assume it's perfect and don't bother to check. Less competent coders will just take whatever the AI says as gospel.

Personally I'd love to create software simply by iteratively telling an AI what to do. It'll be much like managing a software dev but each iteration would take seconds rather than days or weeks.

[Vortex2]

Less competent coders will just take whatever the AI says as gospel.

Err ... less competent coders will be at the Job Centre

[johnny]

After a couple of semi-failed queries, I got this:

Your final question prompted this:

Quite interesting! His 1990 call was so pre-internet or unknown that the AI went off after others.

[Vortex2]

His 1990 call was so pre-internet or unknown that the AI went off after others.

I had dial up Internet in 1991.
Compuserve was the thing then .. dunno if it still exists.
At that time, I was also evaluating one of the first copies of Windows NT released outside the firm .. hand-delivered to my home by the MD of Microsoft Germany.
I had to get a custom-built PC to have enough memory and CPU to run it.
Those were the days!
I'm just a boring semi-retired nobody now.

[Potemkin Villager]

I'm just a boring semi-retired nobody now.

I think you left out opinionated! What's not to like? One can tell everyone what
they are doing wrong and don't have to take any crap or put up with idiot bosses.

[PS_RalphW]

Ha! I sent my first email in 1980. Typed on a teletype printer. Wrote my first programs on punched cards and paper tape. Floppy disks were 8inches in diameter and very floppy!

My dad programmed a computer that had mercury delay line and crt memories, a magnetic drum store, and a compressed air paper tape reader that he designed and built himself.

[kenneal - lagger]

I was writing programs for a programmable calculator in 1971 and then was applying the output from the company's digital terrain model on punch cards to provide input to the same company's road layout program in 74/5. I left soon after I did that and an engineer from the company contacted me, a mere technician, to find out how I did it. I wasn't very happy with the company so I suggested that an engineer should be able to work it out if a technician could do it and they weren't willing to pay me for the work, either!!

I was self employed designing houses and extensions on a drawing board soon after that so all things computers went out of the window for five or ten years until I got a CAD program and computers came into my life again. I am still using a computer that I put together from bits although I do have a laptop now on which I do most things internet, most things that don't include CAD in fact.

All this is powered by by or off grid generator, battery and PV setup.

[Vortex2]

1980 : Typed on a teletype printer. Wrote my first programs on punched cards and paper tape.

Hah! Me too .. but I wrote my first programs at school in 1968.

The Observer newspaper set up a full computer centre on the top floor of Selfridge's in 1969, to "show school children using computers".

They could only find EIGHT kids who had touched or programmed a computer in the country .. and I was one of them!
I spent the week writing code to enhance the images coming back from the moon landing .. took ages to run each time.
I had to hand edit the pixel values by looking at them and saving their values in a text file. I had to print the images on a teletype using ASCII characters for the pixels!

[Potemkin Villager]

Ha! I sent my first email in 1980. Typed on a teletype printer. Wrote my first programs on punched cards and paper tape. Floppy disks were 8inches in diameter and very floppy!

My dad programmed a computer that had mercury delay line and crt memories, a magnetic drum store, and a compressed air paper tape reader that he designed and built himself.

This reminds me a bit of "My father rode a camel, I drive a car, my son flies a plane and his son will ride a camel."

[Vortex2]

My dad programmed a computer that had mercury delay line and crt memories, a magnetic drum store, and a compressed air paper tape reader that he designed and built himself.

In a few decades, this sort of comment will be more like: "My dad programmed your dad using just a C Compiler and a second-hand neural net. That was in the electronic days just after chatGPT, Peace Be Upon It, emerged from the primordial human soup."

[Catweazle]

I was sent on a training course at the Ferranti plant in Wythenshawe, mid 80's, felt like the cat who got the cream. Later on I trained on the Tandem TXP mainframes, which were widely used in banking and air traffic control, and despite their age probably still are. People made very good money keeping ancient mainframes running, because they were so fault tolerant.

Edit; browsing down memory lane, or Wikipedia as some call it, suggests that the Ferranti Argus 700 I trained on, designed in 1968 and in production until the mid 80's, could still be in service controlling UK nuclear power stations. How reassuring.

[johnny]

His 1990 call was so pre-internet or unknown that the AI went off after others.

I had dial up Internet in 1991.

I didn't have any dialup until 1995, and that was just provided to access company computers after hours. I went to a class on what Netscape was in like 1997 or something. Only got some internet in maybe 1999. Didn't have a personal computer until then either.

I had to get a custom-built PC to have enough memory and CPU to run it.
Those were the days!
I'm just a boring semi-retired nobody now.

I have no patience for building a computer any more than I do an EV. The boy does nowadays, but I just collect one in some configuration or another and call it a day.