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It feels like all the parties commercializing AI spend most of their time and resources on writing exceptions. It's like inverse software development, where wit

It feels like all the parties commercializing AI spend most of their time and resources on writing exceptions. It's like inverse software development, where with code you have to tell it what to do, but AI tell it what not to do.

ZeroGravitas 2y ago
Well that's good enough for clients. When it actually matters, which apparently means lawsuits, they realize they have no real control and have to put actual code in that just abort the whole process if it matches a string. And even that doesn't work very well. Not very reassuring.
sanxiyn 2y ago
In my experience, even usual software development is mostly writing exceptions. Because there are more ways to be wrong than ways to be right.
- dotancohen 2y ago
  In what field do you work? In writing public-facing applications I've never felt this way, beyond standard input validation, char-limiting, and carefully escaping outputs (htmlentities, bound parameters, etc).
  - Ekaros 2y ago
    I feel lot of that is dealing with exceptions. In sense preventing them. Exceptions can be either dealt with or prevented by handling them before they become such. So it is somehow dealing with unexpected input, or unexpected output from somewhere else. Which undealt with would result in exception.
  - moffkalast 2y ago
    Some languages lean on exception handling more heavily than others. Golang and Rust don't have them at all while, whereas Python and Java are exception town. On one hand it kinda makes sense to handle rare cases in a way that doesn't affect the normal flow, but on the other hand having a piece of code literally try to crash the program on purpose because something didn't look quite right is a horrible idea in practice.
    - cwillu 2y ago
      Golang definitely has exceptions, they just call them panics.
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    A random war-story from B2B integration land... One customer system we had to interoperate with required an are credentials to be provided via an HTTP header. However it kept giving errors, until I realized that it only recognized the HTTP header when "authorization" was entirely lower-case, a sensitivity in violation of the HTTP spec. Since our stack's own HTTP client libraries always used title-casing on the wire, we had to find a way to slot in a special exception, code to modify that header before it went out. Another fun one is all the services which say their mime type is "application/json" while emitting generic (non-JSON) error message pages. So our logs are full of JSON decoding errors, rather than something describing what actually went wrong on the other end.
    - sybercecurity 2y ago
      I've heard these issues referred to as "bug-for-bug compatibility" or "bug-for-bug interoperable". Making sure something works even if it is in violation of a spec since you can't change the other side of the communication.
  - simion314 2y ago
    If you work with third party stuff 1 you might get invalid json or xml from an API 2 an API might timeout 3 an image will just crash your backend script with no way to catch the error because some bug in the image encoder/decoder you use to resize the image 4 some user browser extension inserts garbage in the requests, you need to check for it and tell the user what is wrong, otherwise same complains reach support "stuff is broken" and support needs to contact developers to check and report back that stuff was corrupted by an extension , most of the time security crap that inserts stuff everywhere 5 I had cases where an API wwas returning soem string before the real result, it was much faster to check for this case and fix it, then have the customer contact their hosting or the author of the plugin that was adding that string before each response.
drtgh 2y ago
The marketing guys are selling to people this tech under the "AI" acronym to deceive people, and they are doing the same calling this errors hallucinations. LLM -and current ML in general- is about generate statistically compressed lossy databases, that the queries statistically decompress with erroneous random data due the nature of this lossy compression technology (I think about it as statistically vectorial linked bits). Writing exceptions is not going to solve the problem, with this they are only doing cosmetic patches, and they know it, at the time there are people who keep making decisions under queries with errors, I mean people without even being aware of the presence of such reconstructed data corruption. Little by little people is learning they ate a marketing hype, but the damage will keep being done, because the tool -for sales purposes- still has incorrect instructions about how trustworthy the data must be taken.
- SturgeonsLaw 2y ago
  > generate statistically compressed lossy databases, that the queries statistically decompress with erroneous random data due the nature of this lossy compression technology An argument could be made that the mind works the same way, and has the same drawbacks
  - snowwrestler 2y ago
    Of course, that is why people have developed so many tools that are external to the mind like language, writing, math, law, the scientific method, etc.
- smeeger 2y ago
  so how is the data encoded?
  - FateOfNations 2y ago
    The model weights.
    - smeeger 2y ago

ZeroGravitas 2y ago

Well that's good enough for clients. When it actually matters, which apparently means lawsuits, they realize they have no real control and have to put actual code in that just abort the whole process if it matches a string. And even that doesn't work very well. Not very reassuring.

sanxiyn 2y ago

In my experience, even usual software development is mostly writing exceptions. Because there are more ways to be wrong than ways to be right.

dotancohen 2y ago
In what field do you work? In writing public-facing applications I've never felt this way, beyond standard input validation, char-limiting, and carefully escaping outputs (htmlentities, bound parameters, etc).
- Ekaros 2y ago
  I feel lot of that is dealing with exceptions. In sense preventing them. Exceptions can be either dealt with or prevented by handling them before they become such. So it is somehow dealing with unexpected input, or unexpected output from somewhere else. Which undealt with would result in exception.
- moffkalast 2y ago
  Some languages lean on exception handling more heavily than others. Golang and Rust don't have them at all while, whereas Python and Java are exception town. On one hand it kinda makes sense to handle rare cases in a way that doesn't affect the normal flow, but on the other hand having a piece of code literally try to crash the program on purpose because something didn't look quite right is a horrible idea in practice.
  - cwillu 2y ago
    Golang definitely has exceptions, they just call them panics.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  A random war-story from B2B integration land... One customer system we had to interoperate with required an are credentials to be provided via an HTTP header. However it kept giving errors, until I realized that it only recognized the HTTP header when "authorization" was entirely lower-case, a sensitivity in violation of the HTTP spec. Since our stack's own HTTP client libraries always used title-casing on the wire, we had to find a way to slot in a special exception, code to modify that header before it went out. Another fun one is all the services which say their mime type is "application/json" while emitting generic (non-JSON) error message pages. So our logs are full of JSON decoding errors, rather than something describing what actually went wrong on the other end.
  - sybercecurity 2y ago
    I've heard these issues referred to as "bug-for-bug compatibility" or "bug-for-bug interoperable". Making sure something works even if it is in violation of a spec since you can't change the other side of the communication.
- simion314 2y ago
  If you work with third party stuff 1 you might get invalid json or xml from an API 2 an API might timeout 3 an image will just crash your backend script with no way to catch the error because some bug in the image encoder/decoder you use to resize the image 4 some user browser extension inserts garbage in the requests, you need to check for it and tell the user what is wrong, otherwise same complains reach support "stuff is broken" and support needs to contact developers to check and report back that stuff was corrupted by an extension , most of the time security crap that inserts stuff everywhere 5 I had cases where an API wwas returning soem string before the real result, it was much faster to check for this case and fix it, then have the customer contact their hosting or the author of the plugin that was adding that string before each response.

drtgh 2y ago

The marketing guys are selling to people this tech under the "AI" acronym to deceive people, and they are doing the same calling this errors hallucinations. LLM -and current ML in general- is about generate statistically compressed lossy databases, that the queries statistically decompress with erroneous random data due the nature of this lossy compression technology (I think about it as statistically vectorial linked bits). Writing exceptions is not going to solve the problem, with this they are only doing cosmetic patches, and they know it, at the time there are people who keep making decisions under queries with errors, I mean people without even being aware of the presence of such reconstructed data corruption. Little by little people is learning they ate a marketing hype, but the damage will keep being done, because the tool -for sales purposes- still has incorrect instructions about how trustworthy the data must be taken.

SturgeonsLaw 2y ago
> generate statistically compressed lossy databases, that the queries statistically decompress with erroneous random data due the nature of this lossy compression technology An argument could be made that the mind works the same way, and has the same drawbacks
- snowwrestler 2y ago
  Of course, that is why people have developed so many tools that are external to the mind like language, writing, math, law, the scientific method, etc.
smeeger 2y ago
so how is the data encoded?
- FateOfNations 2y ago
  The model weights.
  - smeeger 2y ago