Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Tuesday, 14th November 2023

A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft (via) James Somers in the New Yorker, talking about the impact of GPT-4 on programming as a profession. Despite the headline this piece is a nuanced take on this subject, which I found myself mostly agreeing with.

I particularly liked this bit, which reflects my most optimistic viewpoint: I think AI assisted programming is going to shave a lot of the frustration off learning to code, which I hope brings many more people into the fold:

What I learned was that programming is not really about knowledge or skill but simply about patience, or maybe obsession. Programmers are people who can endure an endless parade of tedious obstacles.

# 4:36 am / new-yorker, programming, ai, chatgpt, llms

TIL Summing columns in remote Parquet files using DuckDB — [vivym/midjourney-messages](https://huggingface.co/datasets/vivym/midjourney-messages) on Hugging Face is a large (~8GB) dataset consisting of 55,082,563 Midjourney images - each one with the prompt and a URL to the image hosted on Discord.
Monday, 13th November 2023
Wednesday, 15th November 2023