Do you think we'll have new hobby programmers 10 years in the future?

[Pete]

With the growth of A.I., I wonder. Right now the programs A.I. can write are of varying languages, including QB64, but the so-called A.I. gets things wrong, meaning the code won't run. Now a hobbyist programmer can tweak that code, maybe 10% - 20% and get it working for projects of nominal size. Sine A.I. will continue to improve... funny if they could get it to actually try running the code it produces... (I wonder if A.I. is aware of words like f**k and damn, already? Oh well, I digress. Anyway, since it will continue to improve, what do you guys think? 10 years from now do you think we will see new users of QB64 and other languages, or will it be all Star Trek programming. Computer, make me a transparent aluminum whale container?

Pete

[Kernelpanic]

AI is completely overrated. I have already recommended the following two books:

What computers can't do - The Limits of Artificial Intelligence and

Mind over Machine
Hubert L. Dreyfus and Stuart E. Dreyfus

Anyone who has read these and compares them with the current state of AI knows that not much has changed in 50 years. Some things have improved, such as the pattern recognition process, so that today you can easily identify faces, but of course only if you have corresponding images as templates.

AI is excellent at tasks that do not require human intuition, but rather a rigid workflow. For example, AI programs were already being used 30 years ago to analyze blood to see whether and how much blood alcohol a "sports driver" had. This analysis process is always the same. Perfect for AI.

[Pete]

That's why I classify golf as a 'game.' That way, I can't get pulled over, on my way back from a bad round, for drunken 'sports driving.'

Okay, I agree overrated for now, but I was trying out Google when it first appeared. It was 90% crap at the start, but look at it now... it's improved to 99% crap, but that's just because it uses A.I. to propagandize results. Seriously, measure Google about 5 or 6 years ago and the more or less unbiased non-ad results were pretty stunning. I see A.I progressing in much the same manner.

Pete

[TerryRitchie]

I believe "AI", as they incorrectly call it, is a snake eating its tail. I'm already reading articles where LLMs are regurgitating content created by other LLMs causing very strange results. I just read an article a few days ago that explained how ChatGPT 4o went completely off the rails when voice recognition was released.

A few reasons why I believe LLMs are doomed:

- It's too damned expensive to operate. The power consumption and raw compute power needed outweighs any profits that might be made.
- Hallucinating will never go away. There's just too much misinformation to digest.
- Copyright holders will eventually win their day in court (see the first entry above)
- Companies with trade secrets will not allow their employees to use it. This includes software companies.
- An LLM helping you do your job is of no use if you are not already proficient at said job. Correcting LLM errors just eats into your productivity.

As Kernelpanic pointed out above we are really no further than we were 50 years ago. The difference today is the compute power at our disposal makes LLMs "appear" to work better then previous attempts at machine learning. Which brings me to my next point, LLMs are not actually learning anything, they are mimicking the input they receive.

Eventually, when all the hype and investor money dries up I'm sure the LLM craze will subside. Hell, Pete's point about Google is a perfect example. Google is doing everything in their power to try and profit from this instead of actually making it work to better their service. It's a snake eating its tail.

So, will hobbyist programmers be around in 10 years. Yes, but only those that don't try to use an LLM to learn a language in the first place. They won't have a skill set to draw from but instead a magic box to wonder about (and why the damn code never runs correctly).

[Pete]

I tried to get my computer to think for itself, but then it got married and now the dishwasher does all thinking for it.

Yeah, it's a misnomer alright. I'm afraid we will be stuck with it for what it potentially could be. That's because we have super powers racing to use it for dominance. Oppenheimer (Is that German for Open Source?) couldn't convince the politicians in the United States to forego building the hydrogen bomb for that exact same reason. 

Well, let's speculate it could build PacMan for Terry, and it worked. Now Terry would have a copy of the source, and a working game, but miss out on all experience of being able to code it himself. Sure, he could look at the code, but for large apps it would be really hard to get familiar enough with everything we build into a program to ever be able to understand it, much less easily work with it.

If I had ChatCrap40 build me a word processor, I'd also want it to completely beta test it and issue a report for every test it made.... as well as report on every nuance that goes into word wrapping, cut, copy, paste, changing font size, etc. If A.I. (Nice fool the monkeys nomenclature) could really accomplish that 10 years form now, I'd be pretty impressed. To tell the truth, I'd probably also drop programming as a hobby, because it would piss me off too much to see a machine do in 10 seconds what would take me 6 or more months to accomplish. What? I know it can already make a working Hello World! program, Steve... So shut the hell up!

Pete

[SMcNeill]

The more I play around with the current state of some AI stuff, the more I wonder.  I don't know if 10 years will be enough to make a noticeable difference in things, but I imagine the children born today will view things a lot differently with AI than we ever will.

Here's the lastest AI toy I've found, to play around with:  https://perchance.org/ai-story-generator

Feed it a few prompts.  Work with it just a little bit.  And see how quickly and easily it generates a fairly readable and thought out story for you.  

Now, it's got some obvious flaws, such as the old John Wayne movies used to have --- John would climb a tree in a red shirt, get shot by a bandit and fall out in a blue shirt, and then ride off into town to see the doc back in his white shirt -- but those seem to be memory limitations as the story grows larger over time.  

It's also got some issues with repetitive cycles, such as "What are we going to do now?"  "Eat cheese and go to bed."  "Okay, but what are we going to do now."  "Eat cheese and go to bed."  "Sounds great!  But what are we going to do now?"

And issues with characters just popping up in the middle of a scene making you go, WTF???

"Joe, Susie, and Tammy go to the pool together.   Susie and Tammy go to the women's changing area to try out their new bikinis.  Joe whistles and complements them pervertedly!"

WTF??  Joe was in the boys locker room just two sentences ago, getting beat up by the jocks for being with two babes!  Now he's suddenly in the girl's shower, just cause he's tagged the "hero" of the story and the AI thinks everything should revolve around him??

---

It's not smart enough to make a cohesive story by itself, but it does a damn good job of taking the grunt work out of things.  It'll describe buildings and places with just a prompt.  Toss out some damn snappy dialog and interactions.  It even follows some awfully confluted logic and is able to come to the proper conclusion.

Honestly, for all its flaws, it's impressed the hell out of me.  Give these things another 20 years of development and progress, and we won't have authors anymore.  We'll just go, "Alexa create me a new western, in the old Zane Grey style, about a dozen bandits attacking some poor girl on the range, and her father coming back and then hunting them all to extinction, one by gory one."

[SMcNeill]

https://perchance.org/ai-story-generator

(Note, if you're going to test the link to the story generator above, take a moment to sign up.  Signing up stops the thing from refreshing with a screen pop up every couple of minutes, saying something like "Blah blah we like ads blah blah".  Sign up is basically just name/email and then you're good.  No costs, no fees.  And no more of those "please let us spam you" crap messages.)

[TempodiBasic]

Hi guys and gals of QB64pe


I dunno how much IA can make the job of coder (write some code for some specific goals). Surely it cannot make the job of programmer (problem solving)!

Going aside... it is wonderful all these news and improvements of QB64pe!
What is the vision of the QB64pe developer team about the future of QB64pe?
For now we have a perfect and empowered QB IDE, with debug, with compiler, with interpreter, with a RAD window application as addon,  moreover so many libraries by greater coders for different purpuoses. An increasing documentation as WIKI and as online tutorials from so good teachers.
All these goods are only for veteran BASIC coders? Or may be it is for any beginner that want to learn modular programming?

Just a philosophycal think that I like to share

[Pete]

Well to Tempo's point, yeah, I thought a bit about this too, when I created this thread. A QB64 A.I.I.D.E. Maybe we could call it QB64AIDE. Anyway, at least with QB53 developers working under the hood, the project might stand half a chance to become a way to voice activate the construction of modules into building a larger program. This concept does, however, fly in the face of what BASIC is all about. Hell, we even pulled the plug on OOP development years ago. It got dragged around a little bit in posts... and then got dropped!

Pete

[hsiangch_ong]

i prefer 90% junk right now. android just wants too much mobile data. not configurable enough.

instead of basic there could be two other programming languages for "hobby."

python could take over. just as long as it doesn't reach version 4.

rust, if there is a great obsession with building and finishing an operating system "more secure" than linux, windows or anything else.

or go back to the roots with c. because c++ was originally meant to be a prank. it was written in at least one book that i have read.

otherwise, more people are calling for linux desktop to run on raspberry pi or other such device. there is already a 15-year-old kid from colombia who made a linux distribution (blendos) and help "resurrect" a desktop (ubuntu unity). we could be surprised in the future with another youngster like that.