Transmission #53: Building with GTP4, Falling in Love with Semiconductors, more AI, and a Banking Crisis.
Design, ideas and other flotsam
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Building personalised apps in 5 steps with GTP4
We don’t quite know where the sudden arrival of LLMs will take us, but what’s clear right now is that the implications will be deep and widespread.
One application is of course lowering the bar for software creation. I decided to try this out myself, and in a couple of hours had create a simple personalised movie recommendation app, done almost entirely with no code of my own.
Here are the basic steps I took.
Asked GTP to create a table of 50 movies, according to some specific criteria that I set. It was extremely good at this movie selection task. Included in the table was metadata like the movie date, actors, director and a short synopsis.
Pasted the table into a google spreadsheet.
Asked GTP to build the web app. This was my prompt, which got me 75% of the way there:
I want to make a web app called 'What Am I Watching Tonight?' I have a list of movies in a google spreadsheet. This app will show me one movie from my list at a time. The app will display all the information from the spreadsheet alongside the movie name. The app will have one button, called 'Next', which pulls a random movie from the list. Talk me through the steps I would need to create this app. Go one step at a time, and include any code I would need.
Amazingly, once I had patched through my Google Sheet APIs, the site ran pretty much perfectly, right out of the box.
Most of the time building the app was actually me faffing around with styling.
I wanted an image with the movie, so GTP found a repo of movie stills and patched me into it.
I tweaked the typography through the CSS (the only manual coding I needed to do)
And then I styled the background and text colours to responsively change according to the photograph. GTP found a service that would do this for me, and another service to ensure that there was enough contrast between the background and text.
Voila! Check it out: http://martin-brown.net/whattowatch/
Here’s what impressed me the most:
I was able to give some pretty vague instructions, and GTP was really good at inferring what I wanted to happen. With a fairly loose set of criteria, the movie list it generated is 😘
Without even asking, it was able to find other services to plug into my app and integrate them seamlessly.
Debuggging was actually a joy. I simply described what wasn’t working, and it would help me fix it.
I’ve got a bunch of other ideas that I’m planning to build. Next up, a flashcard app to help me with my Japanese lessons.
Having run this experiment myself, there’s a point on this podcast that I’m in full agreement with. It’s where OpenAI’s Sam Altman predicts that now that ChatGTP has made software 10x easier to write, it won’t mean that there’s 10x less developers. It means there will be 10x more software.
Now, back to regular programming:
Guest Post:
I Wrote a Story for a Friend
Julian Gough • Link
A guest post from the Transmissions community. Lisette Muratore sends us this:
The story of the Minecraft End Poem, a story I found really interesting despite never playing minecraft. According to the Twitter thread the story got picked up by the media but then hasn’t run and is suspected that the Microsoft legal team is trying to bury i
Seen something you’d love to share? Drop me a note in the comments.
Design
I Saw the Face of God in a Semiconductor Factory
Virginia Heffernan • Wired • Link
The most beautifully written article about TSMC you will read this year. TSMC is the company that makes most of the high-end computer chips in the world. It is simultaneously at the edge of physics, manufacturing technology and geo-political tensions, and for that reason is probably the most important company in the world right now.
The article is not just filled with delightful tidbits and trivia:
Fab 18 in Tainan—carves and etches a quintillion transistors for Apple. In the form of these miniature masterpieces, which sit atop microchips, the semiconductor industry churns out more objects in a year than have ever been produced in all the other factories in all the other industries in the history of the world.
But is also in turn thought-provoking and poetic:
What a wonderfully human folly, to try to create immaculateness. The lamps in the fabs, like those in hospitals, shed egalitarian, unsparing, but also unjudging light, the approximation of sunlight that’s required of physicians and scientists, and also of democracies.
Highly recommended.
Ideas
The Age of AI has begun
Bill Gates • Link
If you want or need confirmation that ChatGTP/Bing/Bard/LLM are a big deal, Bill Gates is pretty equivocal here, ranking this wave of AI-improvements as on-par with the invention of the Graphical User Interface, back in 1980. (Lolz that Gates is still not rating the iPhone, but anyway)
A lot of the tech world seems to be jumping out of their skins with excitement. The usually circumspect Ben Evans is agog. Tyler Cowen sees it as an ‘inevitable turn in human history’.
There is more content around this topic than you could ever wish to consume. But this interview with Microsoft Research’s Sébastien Bubeck is excellent. As is the previously linked Sam Altman interview.
Chart of the Week
Words Known Better by Females Than Males, and Vice Versa
Other
💸 In what feels like a long time ago in the news cycle (it was 2 weeks), we had a bank run. This is some background and mechanics around what contagion might look like. Link
🎥 If famous movie directors shot the World Cup. Midjourney is getting very, very good. Link
↗️ Staircase appreciation post. Link
✍️ Helen Lewis with some excellent tips for writing. I particularly enjoyed this one:
Park downhill. At the end of every day, finish your writing by stopping halfway through a thought—maybe even halfway through a sentence. That way, there is a small task to complete the next day, helping you navigate the hardest movement in a writer’s life: sitting down at your desk
Thanks for reading, I hope you’ve enjoyed it. See you in a fortnight!