https://archive.md/n3rpA
"I have always taken it for granted that, just as my parents made sure that I
could read and write, I would make sure that my kids could program computers.
It is among the newer arts but also among the most essential, and ever more so
by the day, encompassing everything from filmmaking to physics. Fluency with
code would round out my children’s literacy—and keep them employable. But as I
write this my wife is pregnant with our first child, due in about three weeks.
I code professionally, but, by the time that child can type, coding as a
valuable skill might have faded from the world.
I first began to believe this on a Friday morning this past summer, while
working on a small hobby project. A few months back, my friend Ben and I had
resolved to create a
Times-style crossword puzzle entirely by computer. In
2018, we’d made a Saturday puzzle with the help of software and were surprised
by how little we contributed—just applying our taste here and there. Now we
would attempt to build a crossword-making program that didn’t require a human
touch.
When we’ve taken on projects like this in the past, they’ve had both a hardware
component and a software component, with Ben’s strengths running toward the
former. We once made a neon sign that would glow when the subway was
approaching the stop near our apartments. Ben bent the glass and wired up the
transformer’s circuit board. I wrote code to process the transit data. Ben has
some professional coding experience of his own, but it was brief, shallow, and
now about twenty years out of date; the serious coding was left to me. For the
new crossword project, though, Ben had introduced a third party. He’d signed up
for a ChatGPT Plus subscription and was using GPT-4 as a coding assistant.
Something strange started happening. Ben and I would talk about a bit of
software we wanted for the project. Then, a shockingly short time later, Ben
would deliver it himself. 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."
Via Kenny Chaffin.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
