Dangers of ChatGPT

Friday, 27 January 2023
  • By
  • Jeff Ammons
  • Tags:
  • Programming
  • Projects
  • dotnet
  • .NET
  • C#
Look guys, says RIGHT HERE in black and white that ducks are secretly controlling the world!
Look guys, says RIGHT HERE in black and white that ducks are secretly controlling the world!

I'm a programmer, software engineer, developer, architect, whatever you want to call me. I have written code for, checks notes, well let's say since actual mastodons roamed the earth.

I've seen lots of cool tech come and go, but sometimes I see one that has a great potential to do harm as well as the proposed good it is advertised to bring.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of those techs that could do great harm.

I'm not talking about self-driving cars chasing us down and running us over because we didn't consider their feelings when driving down a dusty dirt road.

No, this is a bit more insidious.

If you haven't played with ChatGPT, you should go give it a try.

It is being heralded as the latest thing greater than sliced bread.

In a nutshell it is machine learning and AI that has been trained on an internet worth of text. That text includes all kinds of human generated documents from religious tracts to historical fiction to software code.

The machine learning bit involves looking for patterns. The AI bit involves simulating an understanding of questions and assembling bits of what it has learned and presenting it as a response.

This could range from asking a question like “When did da Vinci paint the Mona Lisa” to write a Python script to calculate pi to 750 digits. In fact you could ask “Write an essay about da Vinci painting the Monda Lisa”.

Hey, presto! Here is what you wanted.

The Problem

The problem is that the system lacks the ability to distinguish reasonable responses from pure propaganda. Pretty much like everyone's uncle on FaceBook…

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Developing ASP Apps with Visual Studio Code and WSL 2

Sunday, 08 January 2023
  • By
  • Jeff Ammons
  • Tags:
  • Programming
  • Projects
  • dotnet
  • .NET
  • C#
  • WSL
  • Linux
  • Ubuntu
Visual Studio Code and WSL2: A Match Made in Redmond?
Visual Studio Code and WSL2: A Match Made in Redmond?

I like to do my dev work in a virtual machine so that I can keep my host system as clean as possible.

Developers tend to install lots and lots of alpha and beta level libraries, frameworks, SDKs, and just about anything else we can get our grubby little mits on.

That inevetably leads to system destabilization and a death spiral which inexorably degrades into the collapse of civillization as we know it. Well maybe not that bad, but pretty darned bad.

The only true fix is to start anew with a fresh install of the OS. A pain with your host system, a bit less painful with a VM.

For a while I've been using a Windows 11 VM hosted in Hyper-V. Fun fact the Windows 11 installer says it can't run on my desktop hardware. Yet it happily runs in a VM on that same hardware.

The main draw for me sticking with Windows is gaming, I'm not going to lie. The other day I tried to fire up Cyberpunk 2077 and couldn't because of a lack of RAM. Yada, yada, yada, my dev VM had to be shut down.

What Ever Shall I Do?

My first thought was to switch to Linux. See Developing with dotnet on Fedora for more of my thoughts on dotnet and Linux.

Then it hit me. WSL 2 is a Linux VM.

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