2 ms·

Has to be something pretty generic. I'm trying to write a little C program that talks to an LCD display via the SPI bus--something I did before a few times, but

by rcarmo 2y ago

Has to be something pretty generic. I'm trying to write a little C program that talks to an LCD display via the SPI bus--something I did before a few times, but not with this particular display and MCU. There is no LLM that can even begin to reason this out since they've been mostly trained on web dev content.

fragmede 2y ago
is there no documentation about that uc and LCD controller? I'd assume they've been trained on every html, pdf, and video tutorial out there, as well as the pdfs of all of those chip's datasheets, and example microcontroller C code out there in the form of vendor documentation. sure that's maybe less than the amount of html web app tutorials but if we assume it's been fed all of the vendor's documentation about an uc and their library documentation as well, the ones it would fail on are undocumented chips out of china that have no data sheets (which make for a very fun project to reverse engineer, mind you), or something very new. Even without that though, it's still able to dot product (not going to call it "reasoning") its way to at least hallucinate code to talk to an LCD controller chip via SPI for a uc is never even heard of, so I can't agree with "even begin to reason this out".
- jokethrowaway 2y ago
  Even if it were trained on everything it wouldn't know everything. You need to do some serious RHLF to get something good out of LLMs
- rcarmo 2y ago
  You don't learn how to program SPI from reading documentation about an LCD controller. You need a lot more context and understand how to string together basic operations, which are quite often not detailed in parts documentation. I think that you have a serious misunderstanding of the capabilities of LLMs - they cannot reason out relationships among documents that easily. They cannot even tell you what they don't know to finish a given task (and I'm not just talking one-shot here, agent frameworks suffer from the same problem).
  - fragmede 2y ago
    you keep making these claims that it's harder than it appears but have yet to back them up. I'd be more than happy to update my understanding of the capabilities of these things if you can actually show me limitations of the technology. until then, just saying SPI is harder than that, when I've written the code for a microcontroller to interface to an LCD, at the advent of Google, (so before stack overflow and ChatGPT), and so I deeply know the frustrations of board bring up, doesn't convince me that it's it's my understanding that's wrong, but yours.
    - rcarmo 2y ago
      I work with LLMs on my day job. Check my profile and links.
      - fragmede 2y ago
        Oh you're that rcarmo? So cool! so help me understand, because that's what we're all here for, curiosity, with a bit more specificity, why SPI to an a LCD controller for this as-of-yet unspecified microcontroller is harder for an LLM than it seems? I buy that it is, but you've yet to give any sort of evidence and appeal to authority is a logic fallacy.
        cactacea 2y ago
        These are an example of some of the docs your LLM would need to work from. GLWT https://wiki.st.com/stm32mcu/index.php?title=Getting_started_with_SPI&stableid=53151 https://wiki.st.com/stm32mcu/index.php?title=Getting_started... http://www.lcdwiki.com/res/MSP2402/ILI9341_Datasheet.pdf http://www.lcdwiki.com/res/MSP2402/ILI9341_Datasheet.pdf

by rcarmo 2y ago

fragmede 2y ago

is there no documentation about that uc and LCD controller? I'd assume they've been trained on every html, pdf, and video tutorial out there, as well as the pdfs of all of those chip's datasheets, and example microcontroller C code out there in the form of vendor documentation. sure that's maybe less than the amount of html web app tutorials but if we assume it's been fed all of the vendor's documentation about an uc and their library documentation as well, the ones it would fail on are undocumented chips out of china that have no data sheets (which make for a very fun project to reverse engineer, mind you), or something very new. Even without that though, it's still able to dot product (not going to call it "reasoning") its way to at least hallucinate code to talk to an LCD controller chip via SPI for a uc is never even heard of, so I can't agree with "even begin to reason this out".

jokethrowaway 2y ago
Even if it were trained on everything it wouldn't know everything. You need to do some serious RHLF to get something good out of LLMs
rcarmo 2y ago
You don't learn how to program SPI from reading documentation about an LCD controller. You need a lot more context and understand how to string together basic operations, which are quite often not detailed in parts documentation. I think that you have a serious misunderstanding of the capabilities of LLMs - they cannot reason out relationships among documents that easily. They cannot even tell you what they don't know to finish a given task (and I'm not just talking one-shot here, agent frameworks suffer from the same problem).
- fragmede 2y ago
  you keep making these claims that it's harder than it appears but have yet to back them up. I'd be more than happy to update my understanding of the capabilities of these things if you can actually show me limitations of the technology. until then, just saying SPI is harder than that, when I've written the code for a microcontroller to interface to an LCD, at the advent of Google, (so before stack overflow and ChatGPT), and so I deeply know the frustrations of board bring up, doesn't convince me that it's it's my understanding that's wrong, but yours.
  - rcarmo 2y ago
    I work with LLMs on my day job. Check my profile and links.
    - fragmede 2y ago
      Oh you're that rcarmo? So cool! so help me understand, because that's what we're all here for, curiosity, with a bit more specificity, why SPI to an a LCD controller for this as-of-yet unspecified microcontroller is harder for an LLM than it seems? I buy that it is, but you've yet to give any sort of evidence and appeal to authority is a logic fallacy.
      - cactacea 2y ago
        These are an example of some of the docs your LLM would need to work from. GLWT https://wiki.st.com/stm32mcu/index.php?title=Getting_started_with_SPI&stableid=53151 https://wiki.st.com/stm32mcu/index.php?title=Getting_started... http://www.lcdwiki.com/res/MSP2402/ILI9341_Datasheet.pdf http://www.lcdwiki.com/res/MSP2402/ILI9341_Datasheet.pdf