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I don't quite know how to put it, what follows is a rough draft of an idea, maybe someone can help me to reword it, or perhaps it's trash. Since its inception,
by qsort 4y ago
I don't quite know how to put it, what follows is a rough draft of an idea, maybe someone can help me to reword it, or perhaps it's trash.
Since its inception, computer science has had two "camps": those who believe CS is engineering, and those who believe CS is mathematics. The reason why we are seeing all of this fuss around LLMs is that they are a new front of this feud. This "extends" the usual debate on emerging technologies between Thymoetes and Laocoon.
Something that works 99 times out of 100 is 99% correct from the first perspective and 100% wrong from the second.
LLMs are therefore a step forward if you take the first view, a step back if you take the second.
If you accept this interpretation, an interesting consequence of it is that your outlook on LLMs is entirely dependent on what amounts to your aesthetic judgement.
And it's very hard not to have rather strong aesthetic judgements on what we do 40 hours a week.
- inimino 4y agoThere's never been a camp of computer science that said anything but the truth, which is that CS is applied mathematics. However, there is a pragmatic school of hacking, which says that results are all the matters. If you're in a startup, you should be pragmatic, and worse is better. Nobody truly believes that CS is engineering.
- teaearlgraycold 4y agoSoftware Engineering is engineering
- inimino 4y agoSoftware engineering is actually not engineering either.
- tester756 4y agoTIL I need to tell my school to change my degree on diploma What reasoning are you using to come to conclusion that software is not engineering? >The creative application of scientific principles to design or develop structures, machines, apparatus, or manufacturing processes, or works utilizing them singly or in combination; or to construct or operate the same with full cognizance of their design; or to forecast their behavior under specific operating conditions; all as respects an intended function, economics of operation and safety to life and property It is purely software engineering.
- ThrowawayTestr 4y agoIf there isn't a possibility of someone dying if you make a mistake it isn't engineering.
- linguae 4y agoSoftware used in medical devices, airplanes, and other applications where mistakes can lead to death does exist, and there has been tragic examples of software bugs killing people: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
- ThrowawayTestr 4y agoThe people that write the software for such things are engineers.
- ruko 4y agowhy
- tester756 4y agobecause?
- teaearlgraycold 4y agoWelcome to the real world, where software can get people killed.
- ThrowawayTestr 4y agoHave you ever written such software?
- inimino 4y agoIf you have full expectation and support from your superiors that you may shut down software development operations for ethical reasons based on your technical expertise, you might be a real engineer.
- greenwhite 4y agoThe software people who work on embedded systems like medical devices, speakers, sensors, electronics etc. are doing engineering all the time. Although I guess it's mostly EEs or computer engineers who do that kind of work, but many concepts of CS are still relevant there.
- PheeThav1zae7fi 4y ago[dead]
- jahewson 4y agoEngineering is just applied math too.
- inimino 4y agoThat is true of real engineering; unfortunately "software engineering" has been defined differently by some authors, with quite the opposite meaning.
- canadianfella 4y ago[dead]
- eightysixfour 4y agoI think this comment may miss the computer forest for the computer science trees. For a large portion of the world, computers aren’t engineering or math, computers are a tool to get something else done. For those people, unless something fit within an existing (but large!) range of use cases, they were out of luck without having an engineer or mathematician figure it out for them. Suddenly, there is a glimmer on the horizon that all of that possibility the computer science people see every day could be unlocked for the users, and even if it only works 5% of the time, that is enough to get them excited in ways that are hard to describe to the computer science people.
- waboremo 4y agoThis is a fantastic point, and it's what most software businesses have at their core. They just provide the tools to get something else done. A lot of these smaller places are going to be devastated when people become far more self reliant (or I should say reliant on the AI providers) than them.
- bee_rider 4y agoA “tool to get things done” doesn’t seem to contradict the math or engineering point of view. Which is to say, a screwdriver is an engineered device that is also a tool (it also has a mathematical description I guess, just, a fairly boring one from a pure math point of view I guess).
- eightysixfour 4y agoSure, but the relationship is different. Imagine going to school, a boot camp, or being self taught in everything about screwdrivers and screws. You can discuss at length the advantages and disadvantages of different shapes (Robertson bits > all), materials, screw threads, etc. You can custom design a screwdriver and screw for a specific application, taking into account all of the relevant constraints. Now imagine the guy who needs to tighten a loose cabinet door. Screwdrivers don’t have nearly the complexity or ability to generate work leverage that computers do, moving even a few percent of those capabilities from the first group to the second is huge. It is, at minimum, Excel huge.
- pjc50 4y ago> the usual debate on emerging technologies between Thymoetes and Laocoon. Could you expand on this? > Something that works 99 times out of 100 is 99% correct from the first perspective and 100% wrong from the second Interesting. From a _manufacturing_ perspective, you can't achieve 100%, you can only get asymptotically closer to it with statistical process control. And of course there are limits to the perfectibility of humans. This suggests that the big deployment of AI will be in areas where there is no clear boundary between right and wrong answer.
- qsort 4y ago>> the usual debate on emerging technologies between Thymoetes and Laocoon. > Could you expand on this? Not important, it's just a rhetorical flourish. In the second book of the Aeneid, Thymoetes is the guy who says (paraphrasing) "let's bring the horse inside" and Laocoon is the guy who says (literally) "beware of Greeks bearing gifts". > This suggests that the big deployment of AI will be in areas where there is no clear boundary between right and wrong answer. "AI" is an umbrella term at this point. If by AI we mean LLMs or similar technology, then my hunch is to agree with the statement. I don't think this is particularly controversial though, IIRC Yann LeCun said something similar.
- mangamadaiyan 4y ago"Timeo Danaos et Dona Ferentes" Roughly, "I fear Greeks even when they come bearing gifts".
- VeninVidiaVicii 4y agoI find your observation about the two camps in computer science quite compelling, and it got me thinking about another analogy that might further illuminate the LLM debate: the evolution of cities. Urban development can be seen as a balance between careful planning (akin to the mathematics camp) and organic growth (resembling the engineering camp). A city designed with a focus on aesthetics and theoretical frameworks might be visually appealing, but it could lack adaptability. On the other hand, a city that grows organically may not be as cohesive, but it's more practical and responsive to its inhabitants' needs. This parallel can help us better understand the emergent properties of LLMs, which arise from their complex interactions. By appreciating both the engineering and mathematics perspectives, we can gain a more comprehensive understanding of these properties. Moreover, the balance between early adoption and risks, as seen in urban development, can also apply to LLMs. Early adopters of LLMs can tap into their potential, but they must also be aware of potential risks, such as biases and ethical concerns. Oh yeah ChatGPT wrote this answer.
- it_was_cool 4y agoGood reminder of how vacuous even thoughtful-sounding writing can be.
- asah 4y agoFTFY: 20 hours a week !
- Nevermark 4y agoCamp 3: Those of us who have viewed coding as a craft. Math - the study of well defined concepts and their relationships. Solving problems with proofs. Engineering - solving well characterized problems based on math and physics (which can include materials with known properties, chemistry, approximations, models, …), and well defined areas of composability (circuits, chemical processes, structural design, …) Craft - solving incompletely characterized problems with math, physics, engineering and enormous amounts of experience, intuition, heuristics, wisdom, patterns, guesses, poorly understood third party modules, partial solutions pulled from random web sites … Art - Solving subjective problems by any means necessary.
- 908B64B197 4y agoAll four are prevalent in our industry. I recall a self taught dev (or maybe from a bootcamp) coming up with a cascade of nested if-else, nested 8 deep. Someone with a background in CS asked him what he was trying to do and basically concluded that what he was trying to do could be expressed as a state machine. To which the initial dev replied that it was "way too fancy" and that he didn't need the code to be fancy, just work.
- throwaway2037 4y ago+9000 for your post. The ugly part: The nested-8-deep solution was faster to market and costs less. And, it will be thrown away in 6 months during the "big rewrite after we scale". So the perfect-is-the-enemy-of-good state machine solution written by an expensive engineer has less value. Oompf.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- inimino 4y agoPossibly. Or not. It could be that the elegant expression can be written in less time by the expensive engineer, doesn't need to be rewritten in 6 months, and it may be that both of these people are getting paid the same anyway. So you can make up any "just so" story that you like about a made-up anecdote. If programs A and B implement the same function and both have adequate performance, then the differences between the two artifacts come down to style.
- saurik 4y agoThe issue I see with attempting to claim that these are merely differences of opinion is that it only takes a single bug in your code for someone well-versed in exploitation to not just steal all your data but often replace your entire program with their own evil one. I spend quite a lot of my outreach efforts essentially having to explain to the people who think software development is somehow unrelated to math that once you accept a bug into your codebase the effects tend to be as non-local as accepting "1+1=3" into a math proof, resulting in lost privacy, lost money, or even lost lives.
- slowmovintarget 4y agoComputer Science is, by definition, math. Coding and software construction is engineering or craft, and is not Computer Science. LLMs are neither. They are power tools for concept realization. It's the difference between stone chisels and a suite of shop tools. We had pen and paper, or small steps up from those, and now we have LLMs.
- bsder 4y agoWell, the interesting question is whether LLMs will enable programming to go back to being interesting. So much of programming is rote boilerplate garbage simply linking things together and so little of it is actual creative thought. If LLMs could actually generate the rote boilerplate, programming would be soooo much better. Alas, my optimism isn't that high.