I had a client who thought I was a miracle worker for changing the color of every link on the site in under an hour.
Then he got mad because it took me three days to add one field to a form.
Most people cannot begin to comprehend that just having the field on the form doesn’t magically make it do anything. Like, yeah, I can add a field to the form in five minutes, but if you want it to actually work, it’ll take time.
Design mock ups are the bane of my existence.
What do you mean it’ll take 6 months…you have almost all the work done in your demo.
I made some buttons that navigate between pages that have laid out controls on them. Other than those specific navigations…nothing works.
Dotcom days, my company charged a venue $30k for an “emergency change” to disable a form and all links to it.
The dev already had a system switch for it. $30k, 10-second change.
a { color: pink; }And then you realize that the previous programmer abused the anchors to build all of the buttons.
And 50% of the styles are marked as !important
Hey it’s not my fault, this project was started in 2018 and they choose to use bootstrap.
Oh god I didn’t expect that to give me the level of PTSD flashback that it did.
Fuck bootstrap with a rusty pitchfork.
It’s not as bad as it used to be. Some things require you to use a few more selectors that you’d normally write, but that’s really only tables.
Most stuff is exposed via CSS variables nowadays.
Good to know.
I have not touched it in several years so I just remember the 2013-2019 onslaught of bootstrap.
To be fair to the client, I, as a programmer, often struggle to estimate tasks with accuracy, and am very often at a loss at even explaining to co-workers why some things are easy and others impossible.
He was okay when I explained that the custom Magento plugin was written in Bulgarian and I had to translate it before attempting to understand the convoluted mess I’d been given.
Should take you an hour of just testing.
I’m sad that the relevant xkcd is kinda obsolete now (because it’s been long enough for that research team to finish doing its thing).
Google photos is alarmingly good at object and individual recognition. It’ll probably be used by the droid war killbots to distinguish “robot” from “human with bucket on head.”
Not a hot dog
What would be a “nearly impossible” task in this post-AI world? Short of the provably impossible tasks like the busy beaver problem (and even then, you would be able to make an algorithm that covers a subset of the problem space), I really can’t think of anything.
Deterministic answers from AI
Most AI are deterministic, it’s only a small subset of AI that are non-deterministic, and in those cases it’s often by design. Also, in many cases, the AI itself is deterministic, but we choose to use the output in a non-deterministic way, e.g. the AI gives a probability output, and will always give the same probabiliies for the same input, and instead of always choosing the one with highest probability, we choose based on the probability weight, leading to a non-deterministic output.
Tl;Dr. Non-determinism in AI is often not an inherit property of the model, but a choice in how we use the model.
Okay, probably fair. I’ve only been working with LLMs that are extremely non-deterministic in their answers. You can ask same question 17 times and the answers have some variance.
You can request an LLM to create an OpenTofu scripts for deploying infrastructure based on same architectural documents 17 times, and you’ll get 17 different answers. Even if some, most or all of them still manage to get the core principals right, and follow the industry best practices in details (ie. usually what we consider obvious such as enforcing TLS 1.2) that were not specified, you still have large differences in the actual code generated.
As long as we can not trust that the output here is deterministic, we can’t truly trust that what we request from the LLM is actually what we want, thus requiring human verification.
If we write IaC for OpenTofu or whatnot, we can somewhat trust that what we specify is what we will receive, but with the ambiguity of AI we can’t currently make sure if the AI is filling out gaps we didn’t know of. With known providers for, say, azurerm module we can always tell the defaults we did not specify.
Wouldn’t you just set the temperature to 0?
Still going to be non-deterministic for any commercial AIs offered to us. It’s a weird technology. I had a link to an article explaining why but I can’t find it anymore.
Do you have a link explaining what deterministic means in the context of AI? Preferably for noobs
Deterministic means for the same input you always get the same output.
For AI it would be if you ask it a question multiple times using exactly the same words you would get the same answer.
Thank you!
I appreciate the joke, but the rules are exactly why they go “oof”. The scarf has higher requirements for precision and a more constant overhead than a one-off giant summon.
You could make them go “oof” on the summon if you added a requirement that the lava properly flow along the ground and interact with all characters near the event.
Let me translate. Adding a completely new object with new rules is easy compared to modifying exist assets and it’s new a clothing peice. Cosmetics are hard to implement, especially a fucking scarf which is on top of all the major animation areas. Do the animations still look good? Do I need to adjust the cutscenes to account for which scarf is being warn? How does this affect lighting?
The scarf has higher requirements for precision and a more constant overhead than a one-off giant summon.
I mean, there’s a scarf.
And then there’s a scarf
You could make them go “oof” on the summon if you added a requirement that the lava properly flow along the ground and interact with all characters near the event.
I think the better question is “How many polygons do you want and what do you want them to do?”
Exactly, the first request is so vague that you can just implement it in a way that doesn’t require any complicated programming magic, but a scarf has the implicit expectation to swing around and not intersect with the player or itself. Or worse, expect the player to summon a demon wearing a scarf!
(Still a good joke though)
Scarf on the demon is probably fine :) They can bake it into the new movement frames. Player has all kinds of focus and real time physics :)
Or you could go the JRPG way and make the scarf clip through everything including on cut scenes where the devs had 100% of control over the position of everything.
Don’t forget the magnificent scarf in Shinobi (PS2)
No shit. One is moving an existing model upwards. The other is changing an existing model, adding new cloth physics animation to it, and fixing any animation that involves the scarf. One is a one-time thing, the other is the entire game.
