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Simon Willison

I'm interviewed in the latest episode of the Software Misadventures podcast. It was a *really fun* conversation - we talked about my past career highlights, my experiences as an independent open source developer, my various processes for working in public, blogging and releasing code and (of course) a whole bunch about my explorations of LLMs
softwaremisadventures.com/p/si

10 September at 21:21 | Open on fedi.simonwillison.net
8 comments
Simon Willison

I extracted some highlights from the transcript and wrote them up on my blog: simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/10/

Benefits for people with English as a second language For people who don’t speak English or have English as a second language, this stuff is incredible. We live in a society where having really good spoken and written English puts you at a huge advantage. The street light outside your house is broken and you need to write a letter to the council to get it fixed? That used to be a significant barrier. It’s not anymore. ChatGPT will write a formal letter to the council complaining about a broken street light that is absolutely flawless. And you can prompt it in any language. I’m so excited about that. Interestingly, it sort of breaks aspects of society as well—because we’ve been using written English skills as a filter for so many different things. If you want to get into university, you have to write formal letters and all of that kind of stuff, which used to keep people out. Now it doesn’t anymore, which I think is thrilling…. but at the same time, if you’ve got institutions that are designed around the idea that you can evaluate everyone and filter them based on written essays, and now you can’t, we’ve got to redesign those institutions. That’s going to take a while. What does that even look like? It’s so disruptive to society in all of these different ways.
Letting skills atrophy We talked about the risk of learned helplessness, and letting our skills atrophy by outsourting so much of our work to LLMs. The other day I reported a bug against GitHub Actions complaining that the windows-latest version of Python couldn’t load SQLite extensions. Then after I’d filed the bug, I realized that I’d got Claude to write my test code and it had hallucinated the wrong SQLite code for loading an extension! I had to close that bug and say, no, sorry, this was my fault. That was a bit embarrassing. I should know better than most people that you have to check everything these things do, and it had caught me out. Python and SQLite are my bread and butter. I really should have caught that one! But my counter to this is that I feel like my overall capabilities are expanding so quickly. I can get so much more stuff done that I’m willing to pay with a little bit of my soul. I’m willing to accept a little bit of atrophying in some of my abilities in exchange for, honestly, a two to five X productivity boost on the time that I spend typing code into a computer. That’s like 10% of my job, so it’s not like I’m two to five times more productive overall. But it’s still a material improvement. It’s making me more ambitious. I’m writing software I would never have even dared to write before. So I think that’s worth the risk.
10 September at 22:53 | Open on fedi.simonwillison.net
Simon Willison
Isabel

@simon I'm (eventually) making a personal website by hand-coding HTML and CSS. I'm quite looking forward to having a space on the internet that is entirely mine.

11 September at 0:49 | Open on mathstodon.xyz
Shaun McDonald

@simon one of the downsides of having young kids is getting hardly any home time in front of the computer. What there is, is usually catching up on personal emails or finances. Part of the reason my blog is so empty.

11 September at 8:04 | Open on mastodon.green
Graham Spookyland🎃/Polynomial

@simon "you get to learn SEO" is not a positive lmao

(I say this as someone who has learned more SEO than the average person)

11 September at 11:45 | Open on chaos.social
ineiti

@simon Of course, real nerds build their decentralized network first, before writing their blog post software.

Oups - forgot to write the blog post now... But at least I have a blackboard and a web-proxy :)

Upcoming: blog post for fledger. ETA: 2 years...

web.fledg.re

#nerd #Decentralized #Fledger

11 September at 12:49 | Open on ioc.exchange
Luis Villa

@simon that part about language as filter is so accurate, and it is so deeply engrained. Hard to see how we aren’t totally fucked by it for at least a generation or two before kids internalize that flawless grammar means little.

10 September at 23:00 | Open on social.coop
Matt Hayes

@simon - Great podcast episode with useful real-world advice on LLMs, programming techniques and blogging! It has inspired me to experiment more with AI and blog about it (fighting my natural AI cynicism)

18 September at 8:54 | Open on techhub.social
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