One of the biggest hurdles for me in terms of being a Hive developer is simply how long it takes me to look up simple problems that other people have had and apply the solutions to my own work. This was such a difficult thing to do before stuff like Google and Stackoverflow existed. In many cases developers had to spend countless hours simply building up generic knowledge before they even attempted a real project that actually did something. Now anyone can basically ask the Internet their question and get an answer exponentially faster than they did before.
There are other problems as well.
The first of which being I really don't want to stop writing blog posts, even though I know that I should if I really want to commit to my Hive projects. Do you see any other dev on Hive blogging like I do? Of course not. It quite simply takes up too much time. I probably average 2-3 hours every day writing a post. I'm quite fortunate for this time allocation to still be worth it even with the price of Hive being down 90% since peak. Others are not so lucky, but then again reputation building during the bear market is also quite important, even if the rewards dolled our are not financially worth it at the time. It's kinda like Bitcoin mining on a laptop back in the day. Those 50 BTC blocks were basically worth nothing at the time, and now they are worth a million dollars even after the price of BTC is down 75%+.
Secondly, a huge hinderance to being a dev are my back and shoulder issues. I sit in my computer chair for too many hours and sitting pinches a nerve or something in my back that migrates up to my right shoulder and messes me up real good. I usually sleep in every morning, not because I'm tired, but because my shoulder is so jacked I don't even want to deal with it.
And to be fair I could be doing a lot more about this. I know the exercises and and stretches I need to be doing, and I'm simply not doing them. Haven't been to a gym since covid started. I should be working out my rotator cuffs every day, and I actually have been doing that a little bit recently, but not enough.
Misery loves company
It also doesn't help that I live with people that are just as bad. Like I'll tell myself I'm going to cut candy and soda out of my diet, but then there is candy and soda just lying around. Makes it harder to break a habit when the people around you are engaged in those habits. Most recently when I was trying to reduce my caffeine intake someone would ask me to make them coffee, and then that idea would go straight out the window.
I also need to buy a new chair. The current computer chair I have is pretty good, but I feel like I need a REALLY good one. Not sure if a gaming chair is the way to go, but it might be. At the same time I don't want to commit to buying an expensive item during the bear market when I don't even know if I'll get the result I want. Blah blah blah.
This problem is heavily exacerbated by my ADHD in combination with the chronic pain problems. They really feed on each other. It is seemingly impossible to focus, and I haven't been prescribed amphetamine salts (legit meth) for over a decade. I mean maybe I should get some, but there is a big tradeoff there as well. I can focus well enough to write these posts, so it's possible all I really need to do to get my mind right is an aggressive physical training program that I actually adhere to.
One of the biggest challenges with programming on Hive is how many different technologies it takes to do so. Want to interface with the Hive API? Ah well you should probably learn JavaScript. Want to host a server that can respond to requests? You better figure out how Node.JS works. Want your server to be accessible though a browser extension? Better learn how to do that. Does your server need to store, sort, and recall information? Better figure out SQL. Are you building a website? HTML/CSS/Javascript. Want it to interface with Discord? Better learn the Discord API and how bots work. Needless to say it is daunting when looking at the full-stack and what needs to be done even for basic functionality.
These AI chatbots change everything.
I have often flirted with the idea (especially during the bull market) of taking gains and hiring tutors to jump start my ability to program on Hive. That seems a bit untenable given the current state of the markets, but hot damn these AI chatbots might be even better.
https://beta.openai.com/playground
I've often talked about how the constantly increasing price and lower actual value of higher education will eventually lead to the compete irrelevance of college. This new wave of AI hitting the public eye is definitive proof of this fact. The entire way we think about learning is going to change. Mediocre teachers are going to become outdated and useless. The best ones will probably be using AI themselves to help them ascend to greater levels of understanding.
I asked OpenAI an incredibly niche question that it should not have been able to answer, and yet it still gave me an answer. Not a very good one, but also that's to be expected. It is quite clear from this answer that if I wanted to build something with Solidity and Ethereum/EVM tech it would be able to help me a lot more, because databases like GitHub have way more examples for something like Ethereum than they do for our small corner of the Internet.
What I did find of particular interest is that it knew that "https://api.hive.blog" was a legitimate node I could connect to, to get the data that I needed. That alone was impressive, and it becomes quite clear that with more direction this AI could likely help me with any and all JavaScript or Node.JS issues I come across.
I haven't coded for over a year, but if memory serves me I was running into a lot of problems running a virtual server directly on computer rather than having access to a real server that I'd have to pay for. I literally spent hours trying to figure out the solutions to some of the problems I was having. After a while I was just like 'fuck this' and rage quit. If it takes that long to figure out such basic shit: then I'll never finish the project. AI chatbots like this can reduce hours of debugging and research down to minutes. Obviously I have yet to actually test this to see if it actually works, but I'm convinced that it will.
I would easily pay $100 a year for this service. If I actually built an app on Hive that was profitable, suddenly a service like this becomes worth thousands of dollars a year. Time is money, and if I can just ask AI a question and get any kind of reasonable direction, that's a huge improvement compared to before. OpenAI is going to make a fortune. I can't even imagine the kinds of things that could be built from their API. They can legit charge whatever they want and it would probably be worth the price in many cases.
Value has exploded out of thin air.
It's easy to check the edge cases. How does the AI fail? I did this myself just yesterday.
OpenAI thinks that basic math riddles are a paradox and can't solve them. In fact, it was so bad that the AI was telling me that $0.10 + $1.10 = $1.10 just so it could solve the riddle. How crazy is that? The AI would not accept defeat to the point of giving me an obviously wrong answer.
If given the riddle as an equation, it easily solves it. But given the riddle itself, it gets confused.
Yesterday the AI was telling me that $0.10 + $1.10 = $1.10.
I guess you'll have to take my word for it.
Today the bot gets the correct answer after being corrected.
It's clear that the OpenAI devs are working overtime to fix the edge cases. It's even possible that they even directly looked at the way I framed the question because of the error that got thrown. I've never seen someone post an error like that, and there are dozens of accounts on Twitter who have been playing around with this thing all day for the last week.
When I actually go to run the code that the AI gave me, it unsurprisingly fails. Again we see that the bot does not check its own work to see if what it came up with is valid. If api.hive.blog was an EVM node, I'm guessing this would have worked. It's only a matter of time (a very short amount of time) before the AI starts making sure that the answer it is giving actually works. In fact this might have to be a paid service because of how many resources it might take for the AI to check and recheck hard questions. We'll see how it turns out. In the meantime it is mindboggling to think of how much information the AI must have scraped from the Internet in order for it to present this much information to us. Pretty much grabbed everything it possibly could. I have to wonder how much hard drive space this takes up. Wild.
Conclusion
I'm running out of excuses for why I haven't jumped back into programming. AI is going to disrupt quite a few industries. AI combined with crypto very may well disrupt the entire world, as cliché as the term has become. As cliché as it may be: it's the obvious truth that we must accept at this point. Those who do not pivot around this disruption will be sucked underneath it and crushed definitively.
Again, while the AI may provide incorrect answers often, this is no different than searching Google and finding a solution that didn't help us, which happens all the time. With a little direction, the AI can cut down the time it takes to debug and produce code by several orders of magnitude.
Many think we should be threatened by AI, but it is more obvious than ever that this is simply a very helpful tool that humans can stand on top of to enhance their own abilities. The real threat has been, and will always be: centralization. Crypto is required for the future. Without it all power and money will be funneled into the pockets of the few, which leads to a society that no longer works. The "you will own nothing" mantra is not a viable solution, and will obviously lead to complete economic collapse and people with nothing left to lose overthrowing their own government out of frustration and rage.
This is a very exciting and terrifying time. Time itself is speeding up and humanity is rocketing toward a cliffside. It is the development of things like crypto and OpenAI that make me realize that our fate is not to plummet to the bottom of the cliffside, but rather to engineer wings and fly.
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Return from Not developing on Hive: I'm running out of excuses. to edicted's Web3 Blog
