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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 16, 2024

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I find that frontier LLMs tend to be better than I am at writing code, and I am pretty good but not world class at writing code (e.g. generally in the first 1% but not first 0.1% of people to solve each day of advent of code back when I did that). What's missing tends to be context, and particularly the ability to obtain the necessary context to build the correct thing when that context isn't handed to the LLM on a silver platter.

Although a similar pattern also shows up pretty frequently in junior developers, and they often grow out of it, so...

LLM is great at writing code in area utterly unfamiliar to me and often better than reading documentation.

But nearly always rewrite/tweaking/fixing is needed, for anything beyond the most trivial examples.

Maybe I am bad at giving it context.

Maybe I am bad at giving it context.

You, me, and everyone else. Sarah Constantin has a good post The Great Data Integration Schlep about the difficulty of getting all the relevant data together in a usable format in the context of manufacturing, but the issue is everywhere, not just manufacturing.

Obtaining the data is a hard human problem.

That is, people don’t want to give it to you.

[...]

Data cleaning doesn’t seem intellectually challenging, but it is surprisingly difficult to automate [...] Part of the issue is that the “reasonable” thing to do can depend on the “real-world” meaning of the data, which you need to consult a human expert on. For instance, are these two columns identical because they are literal duplicates of the same sensor output (and hence one can safely be deleted), or do they refer to two different sensors which happened to give the same readings in this run because the setting that would allow them to differ was switched off this time? The answer can’t be derived from the dataset, because the question pertains to the physical machine the data refers to; the ambiguity is inherently impossible to automate away using software alone.

There's a reason data scientists are paid the big bucks, and it sure isn't the difficulty of typing import pandas as pd.