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> how to stop reinventing the wheel for the 100th time. The idea of libraries may not have been a good one. It saved human time but no library is perfect becau

by seydor 4y ago

> how to stop reinventing the wheel for the 100th time. The idea of libraries may not have been a good one. It saved human time but no library is perfect because no abstraction is perfect and this causes unnecessary bloat. It seems tha Nature does not use libraries, it uses replication instead, and we can now have that too.

sicariusnoctis 4y ago
Replication does not help in managing completely. That's why we use abstractions, even with the problems they have.
x-shadowban 4y ago
Ha I never wondered what the physical/life version of a shared library is until I read your post so thanks for that.
hinkley 4y ago
So instead everyone who has to solve a problem has to be an expert on that problem, rather than just an informed consumer.
webnrrd2k 4y ago
You have a point, but I think there are some big trade-offs... Nature uses replication, but it's also horrifically complex and we have no real idea about the specifics of how it all works, or what to do when many, many things go wrong. Also, I think nature uses cloning, which I kind of think would be called a 'library' in this case, for single-celled organisms (archaea and bacteria). In addition many eukaryotic organisms can reproduce via cloning under special situations. I don't know, I'm not really trying to argue one way or the other. I'm kinda' thinking out loud here... but I'd like to see LLMs used to create really great libraries, or some other abstractions, that are easy to use and also understandable. It might not happen soon, but I think that there is a lot of value in moving things that way.
- seydor 4y ago
  > but it's also horrifically complex and we have no real idea about the specifics of how it all works, or what to do when many, many things go wrong. Sounds a lot like neural networks. I think libraries are a result of the human brain's limited working memory capacity , while organisms or neural networks aren't so limited in what they can focus on. Perhaps the transformer became successful in syntactic abstraction because it is limited on how many things it can focus on. Computer libraries are equally a result of limited memory and disk. Javascript is a counterexample of what happens when computing is free (because it runs on someone else's computer)

by seydor 4y ago

sicariusnoctis 4y ago

Replication does not help in managing completely. That's why we use abstractions, even with the problems they have.

x-shadowban 4y ago

Ha I never wondered what the physical/life version of a shared library is until I read your post so thanks for that.

hinkley 4y ago

So instead everyone who has to solve a problem has to be an expert on that problem, rather than just an informed consumer.

webnrrd2k 4y ago

You have a point, but I think there are some big trade-offs... Nature uses replication, but it's also horrifically complex and we have no real idea about the specifics of how it all works, or what to do when many, many things go wrong. Also, I think nature uses cloning, which I kind of think would be called a 'library' in this case, for single-celled organisms (archaea and bacteria). In addition many eukaryotic organisms can reproduce via cloning under special situations. I don't know, I'm not really trying to argue one way or the other. I'm kinda' thinking out loud here... but I'd like to see LLMs used to create really great libraries, or some other abstractions, that are easy to use and also understandable. It might not happen soon, but I think that there is a lot of value in moving things that way.

seydor 4y ago
> but it's also horrifically complex and we have no real idea about the specifics of how it all works, or what to do when many, many things go wrong. Sounds a lot like neural networks. I think libraries are a result of the human brain's limited working memory capacity , while organisms or neural networks aren't so limited in what they can focus on. Perhaps the transformer became successful in syntactic abstraction because it is limited on how many things it can focus on. Computer libraries are equally a result of limited memory and disk. Javascript is a counterexample of what happens when computing is free (because it runs on someone else's computer)