> it cuts the step of installing the correct interpreter... at the cost of requiring the correct computer architecture.
Obviously this depends on the product but I'd give anything to worry about interpreters over the correct computer architecture in the M1/M2 Intel Embedded world.
Why don't you read the code? The amount of people commenting on this, if there was something to hide they'd have probably caught it already and if not surely by next week.
I'd bet good money you could go back in time and swap out JS with just about any relatively high-level language (maybe the original Scheme plan, maybe Java, literally anything with managed memory) and that language would enjoy JavaScript's popularity today.
JavaScript's ubiquity has everything to do with its monopoly in the browser, and nothing to do with any specific features of the language.
But Javascript has grown into a language that makes some solid and unique trade-offs including its simple single-threaded concurrency, modern language features, async-everything, first-class Promise, and Typescript.
"Javascript sucks and people only use it because they have to" is both wrong and boring. We, as a community, have to stop trotting out this tired comment any time a submission has the word Javascript in it.
TypeScript is not a feature of JavaScript, and the ability to have single-threaded IO event loops is far, far, far from something modern, unique or remarkable about a language, the fact that it's limited to single-threads actually makes it something you really do not want to bring up as a "pro" but rather as "it's something you'll have to keep in mind".
Typescript is certainly a feature of the Javascript ecosystem. Typescript's success and maturity easily puts it ahead of other dynamically-typed languages that tried to bolt on static typing support. Not including TS with JS just seems like a pointless "well actually" quibble.
Single-threaded + async-everything is a unique and powerful feature of Javascript. You might not like it every time, but it's useful most of the time. Most other languages make it easy to write single-threaded but blocking code where you need to reach for an extra solution to write async code, and not everyone needs to even use the same solution, and it doesn't necessarily work with the default blocking ecosystem.
We take that for granted in Javascript.
Once again, this is a very tired thread. Sometimes you just have to admit there are trade-offs and that you aren't going to have a taste for every decision on every trade-off every time. And that's okay.
Nobody in this thread is even interacting with TFA.
Yes, sure. Many languages have them now. (I'm not sure what TCL looked like in 1995. SUN actually had an idea to promote TCL for both frontend and backend work, but then Java happened.)
Tk debuted in 1993, so I presume Tcl's event loop features were in place by then.
IMO Tcl would have been a vastly preferable choice for a browser scripting language. Text is its native data type, and would have minimized impedance mismatches with other functional areas of the text-based HTML/HTTP environment. Also it would have been far easier for newbies to get started with web script hacking. At the time JavaScript seemed like alien algebra to a lot of non-computer science majors.
I don't think JavaScript sucks. But it certainly did suck when in it was first introduced, and it only got better because of the "I have to use it" -> "I'll fix the worst mistakes" -> "still kinda sucks" -> repeat loop that was enforced by its monopoly on the browser space. Any language in its situation would have been refined at least to the level of mediocrity we enjoy in JavaScript today.
If you look at the post I replied to, I was countering the idea that "JavaScript must be good because lots of people use it". JavaScript is popular today because it was popular yesterday, and the roots of that chain is JavaScript was popular in late 90's because it was your only real choice.
I've used actually bad languages professionally. JavaScript today is merely mediocre, thanks to nearly 30 years of fixing. But it's still held back by its roots of being kinda awful. There are unambiguously better choices for non-browser codebases, unless "whatever is popular" is a primary driver.
I (ignorantly) thought of Python as JS with more syntactic sugar, but after I switched over I realized that JS has very little intentional design- its a random collection of features and quirks that invites you to shoot yourself in the foot. I mean just let,const, var and declaring a variable with no keyword at all is a huge mess.
I'm not sure how someone's statement of personal motivation can be wrong? Here is mine: JavaScript doesn't suck. However I personally do "only use it because I have to", i.e. because of the browser support. Nothing more. Where's the "wrong" in that? I'm not lying to you. I promise.
And JavaScript isn't alone! There are many more languages I think are simply okay, and don't suck. Several of those I have used professionally because I had to, but would not choose them for a personal project. I would also use them if they were all a web browser ecosystem supported.
I totally get this sentiment because I feel it myself with some topics. But to give you another perspective: the comment and issue keeps coming up because in the eyes of some (many?) the problem hasn’t been solved.
It’s like I’m getting pin pricked every day so I keep complaining about it.
There's a pretty big gap between "this tool is so bad it's impossible to use" and "this tool is quite bad but determined people can still make it work"—my experience is that the latter is totally sufficient for a tool to go mainstream, but it can still be fair to call it the wrong tool :P
"Essentially the entire globe" is way off. In the web world, yes, and some niche people doing stuff with JS because they can, maybe. I don't think you find much, if any, of it in cars, planes, telecom, robotics and other areas of computing. Correct me if I'm wrong, though.
And just because something is ubiquitous doesn't mean there doesn't exist anything better.
Can any situation that exists in the world be bad? Yes, indeed. If anything, the ubiquity of JavaScript makes its shortcomings a worse problem than if JavaScript weren't so widespread.
You know what does though? Irrigation. You know what allows you to optimally irrigate so you don't waste money that you could be spending either on growing more crops or your family? Maths.
Only a fool pretends the ground floor of a house is worthless because they live on the second floor.
I'm not saying Math is useless, I'm saying there must be tiers for topics in how useful they are such that someone can say "Hey, that's pointless!" and one can't follow with "Therefore all things are pointless". Or, that allow me to rank niche topics in their usefulness.
Irrigation is very important. Now, is Irrigation Maths more important to us as a species than Terrence Taos work on spontaneously combusting water? Probably! Would it be more useful to have PhDs be funded in optimizing food routes between countries after climate change over game theory applications for blackjack? Probably!
Unfortunately, no. Maths is so vast that what might seem a trivial and silly brain teaser can turn out to unlock a massive problem in a seemingly completely unrelated subfield of mathematics, and we won't know until someone discovers that link.
What someone might call "a silly little brain teaser" today could actually result in a breakthrough paper weeks (or centuries) from now in a different subfield because someone far smarter than us realized that part of the problem they were working was actually analogous to a number theory related problem that was simplified, even a tiny bit, by this solution. (Hell, Nash built his entire career on spotting those kind of links and then telling other mathematicians to focus on working out the individual pieces)
Maths plays out over "we don't even know how long or short" time scales. What's the use? We don't know, it's probably completely useless. Until someone suddenly realizes that it's not.
>Now, is Irrigation Maths more important to us as a species than Terrence Taos work on spontaneously combusting water? Probably! Would it be more useful to have PhDs be funded in optimizing food routes between countries after climate change over game theory applications for blackjack? Probably!
I imagine you would be equally annoyed at Euler in 1736 when he was wasting his time with bridge brain teasers (and invented graph theory in the process) instead of solving bubonic plague or optimizing irrigation. Science just doesn't (in general) work the way you propose.
Sounds like you forgot that's literally everything niche until a post doc or tenured mathematician goes "yo hold up. This tiny proof (helps) solve(s) X". And now their name's in the science history books.
The interesting thing about the question is that there really aren't any right or wrong answers.
People pointing out that maths is full of advancements that had no immediately identifiable use at the time, but that came to be useful later, is correct. Yet it doesn't even begin to answer the OP's question.
I doubt very much that many people choose to pour their lives into endeavours that they don't particularly enjoy just because some hypothetical person at some hypothetical future point in time might hypothetically find a hypothetical use (hypothetically ;P).
The answer is that "value" presupposes the question "valuable to who and why?"
Newton invented Calculus because he had an immediate use for it. Other mathematicians pour themselves into solving problems because they enjoy it and find a lot of reward in the prospect of solving a previous unsolved problem. Both are "valuable", just to different people for different reasons.
Yeah it's fine for mathematicians to amuse themselves, the problem is when they demand salaries to do that and taxpayers like OP rightfully ask "whats in it for me?" And when the answer is "IDK but maybe in a century we might have a problem this math is useful in solving" then it's not surprising that no one wants to fund pure math research. It's not the 20th century anymore when math research was going to meaningfully improve someone's life through the invention of things like electrical devices.
Yeah, if you force other people to pay for something then you had better offer them an attractive value proposition. Though public funding of mathematics and other sciences is not what I thought we were discussing :)
In which world do you think mathematicians are raking in taxpayer money? Mathematics requires very little funding: a blackboard, some chalk, a pen and paper, a desk, some coffee. That's it.
Thats a pretty myopic view of history there champ.
The pragmatic, practical perspective here is that funding the egg heads has had incredible outcomes (and its so cheap too), so dont let the simpletons shake the golden goose down just because they don't understand anything they cant fuck, fight, or eat.
They were trying to solve a real world problem using this kind of math, and then decided it'd be easier to improve upon the math itself than to continue to pound at the problem - so by definition, I'd say you're absolutely wrong here, or they never would have started this proof in the first place.
Until it's not, because someone suddenly realizes that a seemingly completely unrelated problem in a completely different subfield that's holding up a major proof is actually analogous to a problem where this result removes a bunch of roadblocks.
That's the problem with math from a "so what is this good for?" perspective: we don't know yet, but we sure have a litany of instances where seemingly useless proofs had a profound impact anywhere from weeks to centuries later.
>Predicting the probability of water spontaneously combusting, while interesting, provides much less food.
Unless you can make a prediction that water will combust in low energy conditions, in which you can use this combusting water to generate excess power. Then use that power to compress nitrogen into ammonia, and then use that product as fertilizer.
The British show Connections went over how completely different things sometimes 'connect' and bring fruitful new ideas.
The problem space of reality has emergent behaviors that are not (easily?) predictable. Sometimes you have to iterate large portions of it.
What is the point of providing food? Surviving? Existing? Is that the highest achievement? Is remaining breathing for a few more seconds the greatest goal?
Agreed that may be the case but all OpenAI needs to do is release a nice UI for GPT and they've suddenly pushed these SaaS out of the market. Why fund miners over the companies making pickaxes?
That will probably happen. But it will take some time. Twitter did that. At first they were super open let everyone build apps, then they started blocking and copying the most popular ones, or acquiring them.
However, the companies will probably soon be able to switch out the LLM they are using, so potentially they could use Google’s PaLM, or Facebook’s Llama, or some open source LLM, who knows.
They can also fine-tune the models for just-your-data, so that the responses for you are better than just using a general LLM.
I think the key is that OpenAI wants to focus on building AGI and not waste time appeasing users requests for UX shortcuts for GPT powered code search. Sure, they can hire an extra team to manage the user's requests for UX, but at that point they're moving away from their target goal.
That takes time and money on OpenAI's behalf. Alternatively they can aquire Bloop after Bloop does all the leg work of integrating their niche with chat GPT. But I agree its a tenuous place to be in as an investor / employee / cofounder of a startup that is at OpenAI's mercy. This model of relying on another vendor's product to base your own saas product on has worked in the past, and it has also failed in the past.
or a few iteration down ChatGPT will create that UI too.
In the future it will not be a "boring" text chat but an interface that always morphs into the specific task you are asking it about.
Ah I apologize for the presumption, I just have seen so many Cryptobros going all in on ChatGPT and it sort of grinds my gears - I'm worried there will be all sorts of highly marketed get-rich business ideas sold to people now crypto is in a bear market.
I wonder if "prompt engineering" will be replaced by improvements to LLMs within the next couple years and this is just a bad DX step gap along the journey
Prompt engineering is really more like the art of exploring the emergent behavior of the LLMs. Unlike traditional software that has known features and capabilities. We build a model and then we literally don't know what it does until we explore it.
Short version: I think prompt engineering will be an important skill for a very long time. Using these systems to the maximum of their (currently unknown) potential will always involve expert knowledge!
As long as language is used, prompt engineering will always be a thing. The term "prompt engineering" is just a fancy way of describing being a good communicator.
A good communicator, but also a good sophist. For example, I discovered pretty quick that I could twist the ChatGPT 4 guardrails into knots, even without "DAN" prompts, just by feeding it a lot of philosophical nonsense about semantics and meaning.
You can say whatever you like and live with the results, or try to phrase your communication in a way that elicits the kind of response you want from the other party.
We’ve engineered it away with computers where we learn a programming language or the rules of an operating system and the acceptable input is translated into a deterministic result.
But natural language is much more creative and open ended.
Advances seem to make some of the hacks less necessary (such as CoT behaving better with newlines), but precisely specifying what you want will always be useful.
I can’t remember the last time I played an illegal move tbf, and I’ve played 7 games of chess this morning already to give you an idea of total games played
This argument is pretty flimsy. ChatGPT makes illegal moves frequently. In all my years of playing competitive chess (from 1000 to 2200), I have never seen an illegal move. I'm sure it has happened to someone, but it's extremely rare. ChatGPT does it all the time. No one is arguing that humans never make illegal moves; they're arguing that ChatGPT makes illegal moves at a significantly higher rate than a 1400 player does (therefore ChatGPT does not have a 1400 rating).
Edit:
Without reading everything again, I'll assume someone said "never." They're probably assuming the reader understands that "never" really means "with an infinitesimal probability," since we're talking about humans. If you're trying to argue that "some 1400 player has made an illegal move at some point," then I agree with that statement, and I also think it's irrelevant since the frequency of illegal moves made by ChatGPT compared to the frequency of illegal moves made by a 1400 rated player is many orders of magnitudes higher.
> No one is arguing that humans never make illegal moves
> something a 1400 ranked player would never do
> fine, fair, "never" was too much.
I mean, yes they were and they said as much after I called them out on it. But go off on how nobody is arguing the literal thing that was being argued.
It's not like messages are threaded or something, and read top-down. You would have 100% had to read the comment I replied to first.
This is a completely fair argument that makes perfect sense to anyone with knowledge of competitive chess. I have never seen a 1400 make an illegal move. He probably hasn't either. Your point is literally correct in the sense that at some point in history a 1400 rated player has made an illegal move, but it completely misses the point of his argument: ChatGPT makes illegal moves at such an astronomically high rate that it wouldn't even be allowed to even play competitively, hence it cannot be accurately assessed at 1400 rating.
Imagine you made a bot that spewed random letters and said "My bot writes English as well as a native speaker, so long as you remove all of the letters that don't make sense." A native English speaker says, "You can't say the bot speaks English as well as a native speaker, since a native speaker would never write all those random letters." You would be correct in pointing out that sometimes native speakers make mistakes, but you would also be entirely missing the point. That's what's happening here.
> Ah yes, of course, just because you never saw it means it never happens. That's definitely why rules exist around this specific thing happening. Because it never happens. Totally.
You seem to have missed the part where I said multiple times that a 1400 has definitely made illegal moves.
> In fact, it's so rare that in order to forefeit a game, you have to do it twice. But it never happens, ever, because pattrn has never seen it. Case closed everyone.
I actually said the exact opposite. You're responding to an argument I didn't make.
> I made no judgement on what ChatGPT can and can't do. I pointed out an extreme. Which the commenter agreed was an extreme. The rest of your comment is completely irrelevant but congrats on getting tilted over something that literally doesn't concern you. Next time, just save us both the time and effort and don't bother butting in with irrelevant opinions. Especially if you couldn't even bother to read what was already said.
The commenter's throwaway account never agreed it was an extreme. I agreed it was an extreme, but also that disproving that one extreme does nothing to contradict his argument. Yet again you aren't responding to the argument.
This entire exchange is baffling. You seem to be missing the point for a third time, and now you're misrepresenting what I said. Welcome to the internet, I guess.
> The commenter's throwaway account never agreed it was an extreme.
> fine, fair, "never" was too much.
This is the second time I've had to do this. Do you just pretend things weren't said or do you actually have trouble reading the comments that have been here for hours? You make these grand assertions which are disproven by... reading the things that are directly above your comment.
> This entire exchange is baffling.
Yeah your inability to read comments multiple times in a row is extremely baffling.
As I said before:
> Next time, just save us both the time and effort and don't bother butting in with irrelevant opinions. Especially if you couldn't even bother to read what was already said.
Ah yes, of course, just because you never saw it means it never happens. That's definitely why rules exist around this specific thing happening. Because it never happens. Totally.
In fact, it's so rare that in order to forefeit a game, you have to do it twice. But it never happens, ever, because pattrn has never seen it. Case closed everyone.
I made no judgement on what ChatGPT can and can't do. I pointed out an extreme. Which the commenter agreed was an extreme. The rest of your comment is completely irrelevant but congrats on getting tilted over something that literally doesn't concern you. Next time, just save us both the time and effort and don't bother butting in with irrelevant opinions. Especially if you couldn't even bother to read what was already said.
No I definitely have, it’s just so rare I can’t remember when I last did it. I do remember playing one in a blitz tournament 20 years ago! But if this is the first game they played, or if it happens in 1/10 matches, that’s wild
Does that somehow prove the assertion of "something a 1400 ranked player would never do"?
Because all I'm hearing is talk about ChatGPT's abilities as a reply to me calling out an extreme statement as being extreme. Something the parent comment even admitted as being overly black and white.
I read an article about a pro player who castled twice in a game and my son hates castling so I make a point of castling twice as often as I can to tease him and attempting other illegal moves as a joke but he never ends the game because of it.
If I was playing that monstrosity though I would play something crazy that is far out of the opening book and count on it making an illegal move.
You're not wrong. I've worked in prod with all the cool languages (Scala, Haskell, Rust, Go, etc...) but stick to Python/typeScript when I want to be pragmatic.
Obviously this depends on the product but I'd give anything to worry about interpreters over the correct computer architecture in the M1/M2 Intel Embedded world.