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If ChatGPT had existed 20 years ago, things like React would never have been developed and all websites would still be using nested tables for layout.

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> things like React would never have been developed

Not entirely sure that would have been a negative outcome. React is horrible.

I don’t particularly like React, but I don’t think it’s horrible either. I also think it has introduced a lot of important concepts to a space that wasn’t particularly predisposed to them. It’s an overall good, even if it’s not my preference.

> Not entirely sure that would have been a negative outcome. React is horrible.

Oh sweet summer child. It's ancestors were so much worse. They had to deal with Microsoft Internet Explorer

jQuery. bootstrap. And if that doesn't strike fear in your heart, ANGULAR!

Aw come on jQuery was fun! Remember those big long chained commands? Remember how suddenly you could just select anything off the page, using cas selectors? Remember how much easier ajax and animation and dom manipulation and events were with jQuery?

Meh, to a point. Once things crossed a certain threshold of dynamic behavior the state handling became a nightmare. Now, arguably few services needed that much dynamism.

Hard disagree. Front end development was an order of magnitude easier better faster before FB pushed React into the dev mindspace.

No one is stopping you from going back to jQuery. But there's a reason the world moved on to React and others

The main reasons being facebook’s popularity and herd mentality.

You think that's the only reason React took off? Have you ever tried to build a complex web application using only jQuery?

Yeah, I've done it many times successfully, drag and drop interfaces, form builders, dynamic form inputs, animations, etc. It's 10x easier with vanilla JS and sprinklings of jQuery.

Believe it or not, gmail was a much faster cleaner better interface before they switched to Angular, and FB worked much better and was way less buggy and slow before they switched to React. The reason the mega-caps pushed their use was to offload processing power to the client, which saves them server costs. Front end JS frameworks don't solve a problem almost every other company has, hence why they had to be pushed by FB/Google, and didn't grow organically from the open source community.

I suspect when you want complex modals and chat dialogs you'll notice jQuery starting to bend under the weight. It can be done, though not as well as more modern, albeit large frontend tools.

No. Both of those things can be done with light JS use. A framework is definitely not needed.

It seems to me that Facebook has put out many many open source libraries, but React is the only one that has taken off in a bigway outside FB. People generally scoffed at FB technically since they were built on PHP.

I think bringing the functional programming approach and princinpled state management to frontend was just something that the time was ripe for.

(Also React was much different back then, before hooks, etc).

I always use sprinkles of jQuery over React/Angular/Front End Framework de jour if given the choice.

These tools you mention are worse but that doesnt mean react is great. The two statements dont negate each other.

If ChatGPT existed 47 years ago programming as we know it never would have been invented, and we'd just ask our room sized tabulation machines to kindly do payroll.

Just to nitpick, Fortran is pretty much "programming as we know it" and was released 66 years ago (in 1957).

I was going for the invention of fortran, I just did the math very incorrectly

I don’t have a dog in the AI fight, but it seems pretty plausible that React’s core concepts would have been part of a hypothetical 20 years ago training set. All of these were part of at least academic discourse:

- Algebraic effects

- DSLs designed to be expressive and statically analyzable

- [Thing] as a function of state (I’m not sure how much this was applied to UI specifically, but if I had to take a wild guess, probably)

- Abstraction of declarative definitions from computational instructions

If anything, I think a declarative UI model could have come much sooner if there weren’t such deep investment in other techniques. Not that a hypothetical AI of the time would have arrived at that, but I definitely think it had enough training material to go on.

...or ChatGPT would have come up with something like/better than React, and we/it would be using that now.

Has AI produced any novel technology yet that it wasn’t trained to do?

I feel like the fact this question is being asked in plain seriousness 4 months after the technology was made publicly available/known to the general public sends a different message than you meant.

Pretty sure they were asking rhetorically, because the answer is obviously not, since that’s not how LLMs work

Yes. Although over text it sometimes doesn’t come through.

GP’s hypo said “20 years ago”. I assume that in 20 years, AI will have created things more impressive than React.

But that would be totally unrelated to ChatGPT or anything resembling it. Sure, there could be another advance in AI, probably using another approach, but how is that different from 5 years ago?

But ChatGPT doesn't create new texts it remixes pre existing ones.

It reorders existing words but doesn't invent new ones

That is not how it works, at least not for any conventional meaning of “remix”. It doesn’t store a copy of all the text it has been trained on, and it doesn’t just mix existing phrases together. The easiest way to see that is to ask GPT-4 to invent a new word for a concept, which it can do quite easily.

I don't quite see what creating new words has to do with this, but ChatGPT is happy to oblige when you ask it to make up a new word.

In any case, I generally feel that discourse works better when people just remix existing words and concepts rather than rushing to create new ones.

No.

That's not what generative AI does because it produces test that most like fit the prompt.

The probability for new concepts for any prompt is near zero.

> The probability for new concepts for any prompt is near zero.

That is actually what the "temperature" API parameter controls - set it to high and you'll get a high probability of new concepts, coupled with a high probability of nonsense. (I assume) It's like facilitating a brainstorming session and offering the participants edibles.

At least so far, language models have zero capacity and zero indication of capacity they can come up with anything. Or even calculate things.

Not sure what you mean by “calculate things”, but it’s fairly easy to see how language models can at least come up with new combinations of existing things that have never existed.

That's true.

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