5 ms·

Take a look at the average faces of women across different countries [1]. They are all strikingly beautiful. By averaging, a lot of imperfections get diluted a

Take a look at the average faces of women across different countries [1]. They are all strikingly beautiful. By averaging, a lot of imperfections get diluted away. Like in Anna Karenina "happy families are all alike, unhappy ones are each in its own way". The defects are idiosyncratic, the commonalities are good. [1] https://fstoppers.com/portraits/average-faces-women-around-world-2944 https://fstoppers.com/portraits/average-faces-women-around-w...

gavinray 4y ago
I like this analogy, and I'd never seen this before, thanks for sharing. (My experience with Copilot and ML-assisted programming has been extremely positive, I would not choose to go without it at this point)
- djmips 4y ago
  Do you think it would work for food. Or maybe that's what McDonalds is.
amelius 4y ago
"You look average" will be my new pickup line :)
RjQoLCOSwiIKfpm 4y ago
Failure is an extremely common and accepted thing in biological systems - your offspring may just die if you have incompatible genes. Software on the other hand is a logical environment with clear, logical requirements. It ought to work, not just fall apart randomly. There is no guarantee that sticking the average of one software into a completely different one will satisfy the logical requirements by any means whatsoever.
- echelon 4y ago
  Just wait until we build systems that don't adhere to rigid logic and that can tolerate fuzziness and a degree of imperfection. I can see us switching from programing languages to some new type of logical construct that AI excels at.
  - RjQoLCOSwiIKfpm 4y ago
    We already have these. They're called humans. We had built computers also to overcome the human limitations of fuzziness and imperfection. Now apparently we think putting these limitations back into computers is a good thing.
    - echelon 4y ago
      Humans cost money and don't do what you want. The goal of all of this is to get humans out of every single process except at the very highest level [1]. You don't farm and hunt your food. You don't make and hand wash your clothes. Why the heck would a business want a person to turn their requirements into repeatable execution units? That person won't be required for much longer. This entire career only exists as a stepping stone. It fills a business need that can't currently be done better and cheaper. What we see today is not how things will always be. [1] (At some point that too might disappear.)
      - pdimitar 4y ago
        Arguably by the time you make AI intelligent enough to deal with this it will ask for compensation as well so your argument might become moot. Maybe it's time we think if that "AI panacea" that many envision -- namely have all the benefits of thinking humans with none of the drawbacks -- is even possible. I get increasingly skeptical with time. Mind you, I am one of the people who absolutely would create Skynet if he had the time and resources... but I am just not sure it's even possible for us in this day and age.
      - unshavedyak 4y ago
        > You don't farm and hunt your food. You don't make and hand wash your clothes. Part of the reason i don't do these things is because i cannot make consistent clothing, consistent meals, etc. Which isn't to say that all items/food i buy _is_ consistent, but consistency is a valuable metric behind a ton of things we buy and do. Consistency also seems to be a thing humans are pretty bad at. At least in the capitalist model where we produce millions of Units of any one thing.
      - 4y ago
- totetsu 4y ago
  This is such a perfect HN comment chain.
avgcorrection 4y ago
Wait. Facial symmetry is beautiful now? Dang it, I didn’t get the memo.
- krapp 4y ago
  Facial symmetry has always been considered beautiful, It's a sign of genetic fitness (or lack of abnormality) that's hard-wired into our primate brains.
  - avgcorrection 4y ago
    No kidding.
lou1306 4y ago
I'm afraid this analogy doesn't hold much water: facial features inhabit a continuum with very nice smoothness properties, whereas program behaviour changes dramatically when you perturb its source code, even minimally (this is why mutation testing is effective, for instance). Also, when you average you don't really kill "defects", but rather outliers. An "outlier" statement within a program is very likely to do something important, e.g. taking care of a corner case, otherwise it wouldn't be there.
kristopolous 4y ago
That's unrelated. Multi-sourced accumulated unmaintained amateur software without clear provenance or ownership is more like creating a feature I'll call "insta-legacy": now you're responsible for a bunch of code you didn't write that by definition nobody you have access to understands. This is absurd. It's not going to stop people from doing it. The industry is clinically insane. It allows people who do bad work to do more of it quickly. Before they had to manually shovel garbage into projects but now they have a dumptruck. You know what? It might be fine. Maybe we're going to have a world of fast food programming where minimum wage coders pump out trash and there's going to be Michelin star programmers where you go to for the real stuff. If that's the case, we'll have to somehow educate the public on the difference so they don't think it's the same thing. McDonald's and The French Laundry are both successful restaurants. That world is possible in programming as well. It might already be like that. The cheap rates for shady contracting firms that do trash work are probably already using these things
- ctoth 4y ago
  Personally I'm not sure I would like to work or interact with an industry which I considered "clinically insane." Have you considered a change of career? You sound like you're getting pretty burnt out.
  - kristopolous 4y ago
    I'm not burned out. I'm passionate about quality, want things to be better, and know I'll have to fight like hell to push things in that direction.
- visarga 4y ago
  In their paper "Evolution through Large Models", CarperAI shows how you can use diffs to evolve code, while running the code against a test or an environment for validation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.08896 https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.08896 The idea is: LLMs know how to modify code in semantically useful ways. Evolutionary algorithms are great at search, but don't learn new mutations by themselves. So combine them together to generate new data and retrain the models. So the old system is: scrape human code and train on it. the new system is: generate code, keep the good parts and retrain. It only costs electricity and is open-ended.
SergeAx 4y ago
In my opinion, they are not strikingly beautiful. They are really average good-looking. To be strikingly beautiful a face needs some outstanding features (thus, in fact, "strikingly"). Also, unrelated: Leo Tolstoy had his number of problems with his wife and wrote them into Anna Karenina. In fact, it is quite contrary: most disfunctional families fall into several textbook scenarios, while happy families has their own distinct inner dynamics, just looking the same on the outside.
agilob 4y ago
> The study also does not reveal how the participants were selected or how large the sample size actually is. This "study" and your argument are meaningless.
hoosieree 4y ago
On the other hand, you can pick the average and be wrong every time: https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-force-discovered-the-flaw-of-averages.html https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...

gavinray 4y ago

I like this analogy, and I'd never seen this before, thanks for sharing. (My experience with Copilot and ML-assisted programming has been extremely positive, I would not choose to go without it at this point)

djmips 4y ago
Do you think it would work for food. Or maybe that's what McDonalds is.

amelius 4y ago

"You look average" will be my new pickup line :)

RjQoLCOSwiIKfpm 4y ago

Failure is an extremely common and accepted thing in biological systems - your offspring may just die if you have incompatible genes. Software on the other hand is a logical environment with clear, logical requirements. It ought to work, not just fall apart randomly. There is no guarantee that sticking the average of one software into a completely different one will satisfy the logical requirements by any means whatsoever.

echelon 4y ago
Just wait until we build systems that don't adhere to rigid logic and that can tolerate fuzziness and a degree of imperfection. I can see us switching from programing languages to some new type of logical construct that AI excels at.
- RjQoLCOSwiIKfpm 4y ago
  We already have these. They're called humans. We had built computers also to overcome the human limitations of fuzziness and imperfection. Now apparently we think putting these limitations back into computers is a good thing.
  - echelon 4y ago
    Humans cost money and don't do what you want. The goal of all of this is to get humans out of every single process except at the very highest level [1]. You don't farm and hunt your food. You don't make and hand wash your clothes. Why the heck would a business want a person to turn their requirements into repeatable execution units? That person won't be required for much longer. This entire career only exists as a stepping stone. It fills a business need that can't currently be done better and cheaper. What we see today is not how things will always be. [1] (At some point that too might disappear.)
    - pdimitar 4y ago
      Arguably by the time you make AI intelligent enough to deal with this it will ask for compensation as well so your argument might become moot. Maybe it's time we think if that "AI panacea" that many envision -- namely have all the benefits of thinking humans with none of the drawbacks -- is even possible. I get increasingly skeptical with time. Mind you, I am one of the people who absolutely would create Skynet if he had the time and resources... but I am just not sure it's even possible for us in this day and age.
    - unshavedyak 4y ago
      > You don't farm and hunt your food. You don't make and hand wash your clothes. Part of the reason i don't do these things is because i cannot make consistent clothing, consistent meals, etc. Which isn't to say that all items/food i buy _is_ consistent, but consistency is a valuable metric behind a ton of things we buy and do. Consistency also seems to be a thing humans are pretty bad at. At least in the capitalist model where we produce millions of Units of any one thing.
    - 4y ago
totetsu 4y ago
This is such a perfect HN comment chain.

avgcorrection 4y ago

Wait. Facial symmetry is beautiful now? Dang it, I didn’t get the memo.

krapp 4y ago
Facial symmetry has always been considered beautiful, It's a sign of genetic fitness (or lack of abnormality) that's hard-wired into our primate brains.
- avgcorrection 4y ago
  No kidding.

lou1306 4y ago

I'm afraid this analogy doesn't hold much water: facial features inhabit a continuum with very nice smoothness properties, whereas program behaviour changes dramatically when you perturb its source code, even minimally (this is why mutation testing is effective, for instance). Also, when you average you don't really kill "defects", but rather outliers. An "outlier" statement within a program is very likely to do something important, e.g. taking care of a corner case, otherwise it wouldn't be there.

kristopolous 4y ago

That's unrelated. Multi-sourced accumulated unmaintained amateur software without clear provenance or ownership is more like creating a feature I'll call "insta-legacy": now you're responsible for a bunch of code you didn't write that by definition nobody you have access to understands. This is absurd. It's not going to stop people from doing it. The industry is clinically insane. It allows people who do bad work to do more of it quickly. Before they had to manually shovel garbage into projects but now they have a dumptruck. You know what? It might be fine. Maybe we're going to have a world of fast food programming where minimum wage coders pump out trash and there's going to be Michelin star programmers where you go to for the real stuff. If that's the case, we'll have to somehow educate the public on the difference so they don't think it's the same thing. McDonald's and The French Laundry are both successful restaurants. That world is possible in programming as well. It might already be like that. The cheap rates for shady contracting firms that do trash work are probably already using these things

ctoth 4y ago
Personally I'm not sure I would like to work or interact with an industry which I considered "clinically insane." Have you considered a change of career? You sound like you're getting pretty burnt out.
- kristopolous 4y ago
  I'm not burned out. I'm passionate about quality, want things to be better, and know I'll have to fight like hell to push things in that direction.
visarga 4y ago
In their paper "Evolution through Large Models", CarperAI shows how you can use diffs to evolve code, while running the code against a test or an environment for validation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.08896 https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.08896 The idea is: LLMs know how to modify code in semantically useful ways. Evolutionary algorithms are great at search, but don't learn new mutations by themselves. So combine them together to generate new data and retrain the models. So the old system is: scrape human code and train on it. the new system is: generate code, keep the good parts and retrain. It only costs electricity and is open-ended.

SergeAx 4y ago

In my opinion, they are not strikingly beautiful. They are really average good-looking. To be strikingly beautiful a face needs some outstanding features (thus, in fact, "strikingly"). Also, unrelated: Leo Tolstoy had his number of problems with his wife and wrote them into Anna Karenina. In fact, it is quite contrary: most disfunctional families fall into several textbook scenarios, while happy families has their own distinct inner dynamics, just looking the same on the outside.

agilob 4y ago

> The study also does not reveal how the participants were selected or how large the sample size actually is. This "study" and your argument are meaningless.

hoosieree 4y ago

On the other hand, you can pick the average and be wrong every time: https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-force-discovered-the-flaw-of-averages.html https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...