13 ms·
One thing that I find truly amazing is just the simple fact that you can now be fuzzy with the input you give a computer, and get something meaningful in return
by gdubs 1y ago
One thing that I find truly amazing is just the simple fact that you can now be fuzzy with the input you give a computer, and get something meaningful in return. Like, as someone who grew up learning to code in the 90s it always seemed like science fiction that we'd get to a point where you could give a computer some vague human level instructions and get it more or less do what you want.
- coliveira 1y agoSure, you can now be fuzzy with the input you give to computers, but in return the computer will ALSO be fuzzy with the answer it gives back. That's the drawback of modern AI.
- rienbdj 1y agoIt can give back code though. It might be wrong, but it won’t be ambiguous.
- 0points 1y agoWhen it don't even compile or have clear intent, it's ambiguous in my book.
- swiftcoder 1y ago> It can give back code though. It might be wrong, but it won’t be ambiguous. Code is very often ambiguous (even more so in programming languages that play fast and loose with types). Relative lack of ambiguity is a very easy way to tell who on your team is a senior developer
- isolli 1y agoThe output is also often quite simple to check...
- rienbdj 1y agoFor images and other media, yes. Does it look right? Program correctness is incredibly difficult - arguably the biggest problem in the industry.
- csallen 1y agoIt's mind blowing. At least 1-2x/week I find myself shocked that this is the reality we live in
- FridgeSeal 1y ago[flagged]
- oblio 1y agoWere you expecting builders of Dyson Spheres to drive around in Yugo cars? They're obviously all driving Ford F-750s for their grocery runs.
- selimthegrim 1y agoThis pretty much describes the bimodal distribution of cars in Louisiana modulo some Subarus
- IshKebab 1y agoSome people are never happy. Imagine if you demonstrated ChatGPT in the 90s and someone said "nah... it uses, like 500 watts! no thank you!".
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- postalrat 1y agoMuch less than building an iphone.
- ACCount36 1y agoWait till you hear about the "energy and water consumption" of Netflix.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- cosmic_cheese 1y agoThough I haven’t embraced LLM codegen (except for non-functional filler/test data), the fuzziness is why I like to use them as talking documentation. It makes for a lot less of fumbling around in the dark trying to figure out the magic combination of search keywords to surface the information needed, which can save a lot of time in aggregate.
- pixl97 1y agoHonestly LLMs are a great canary if your documentation / language / whatever is 'good' at all. I wish I would have kept it around but had ran into an issue where the LLM wasn't giving a great answer. Look at the documentation, and yea, made no sense. And all the forum stuff about it was people throwing out random guessing on how it should actually work. If you're a company that makes something even moderately popular and LLMs are producing really bad answers there is one of two things happening. 1. Your a consulting company that makes their money by selling confused users solutions to your crappy product 2. Your documentation is confusing crap.
- NooneAtAll3 1y ago(you're)
- skydhash 1y agoI've just got good at reading code, because that's the one constant you can rely one (unless you're using some licensed library). So whenever the reference is not enough, I just jump straight to the code (one of my latest examples is finding out that opendoas (a sudo replacement) hard code the persist option for not asking password to 5 minutes).
- progval 1y agoThe other side of the coin is that if you give it a precise input, it will fuzzily interpret it as something else that is easier to solve.
- BoorishBears 1y agoIt will, or it might? Because if every time you use an LLM is misinterprets your input as something easier to solve, you might want to brush up on the fundamentals of the tool (I see some people are quite upset with the idea of having to mean what you say, but that's something that serves you well when interacting with people, LLMs, and even when programming computers.)
- progval 1y agoMight, of course. And in my experience it's what happens most times I ask a LLM to do something I can't trivially do myself.
- BoorishBears 1y agoWell everyone's experience is different, but that's been a pretty atypical failure mode in my experience. That being said, I don't primarily lean on LLMs for things I have no clue how to do, and I don't think I'd recommend that as the primary use case either at this point. As the article points out, LLMs are pretty useful for doing tedious things you know how to do. Add up enough "trivial" tasks and they can take up a non-trivial amount of energy. An LLM can help reduce some of the energy zapped so you can get to the harder, more important, parts of the code. I also do my best to communicate clearly with LLMs: like I use words that mean what I intend to convey, not words that mean the opposite.
- jacobgkau 1y agoI use words that convey very clearly what I mean, such as "don't invent a function that doesn't exist in your next response" when asking what function a value is coming from. It says it understands, then proceeds to do what I specifically asked it not to do anyway. The fact that you're responding to someone who found AI non-useful with "you must be using words that are the opposite of what you really mean" makes your rebuttal come off as a little biased. Do you really think the chances of "they're playing opposite day" are higher than the chances of the tool not working well?
- Barrin92 1y ago>simple fact that you can now be fuzzy with the input you give a computer, and get something meaningful in return I got into this profession precisely because I wanted to give precise instructions to a machine and get exactly what I want. Worth reading Dijkstra, who anticipated this, and the foolishness of it, half a century ago "Instead of regarding the obligation to use formal symbols as a burden, we should regard the convenience of using them as a privilege: thanks to them, school children can learn to do what in earlier days only genius could achieve. (This was evidently not understood by the author that wrote —in 1977— in the preface of a technical report that "even the standard symbols used for logical connectives have been avoided for the sake of clarity". The occurrence of that sentence suggests that the author's misunderstanding is not confined to him alone.) When all is said and told, the "naturalness" with which we use our native tongues boils down to the ease with which we can use them for making statements the nonsense of which is not obvious.[...] It may be illuminating to try to imagine what would have happened if, right from the start our native tongue would have been the only vehicle for the input into and the output from our information processing equipment. My considered guess is that history would, in a sense, have repeated itself, and that computer science would consist mainly of the indeed black art how to bootstrap from there to a sufficiently well-defined formal system. We would need all the intellect in the world to get the interface narrow enough to be usable" Welcome to prompt engineering and vibe coding in 2025, where you have to argue with your computer to produce a formal language, that we invented in the first place so as to not have to argue in imprecise language https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667...
- vector_spaces 1y agoright: we don't use programming languages instead of natural language simply to make it hard. For the same reason, we use a restricted dialect of natural language when writing math proofs -- using constrained languages reduces ambiguity and provides guardrails for understanding. It gives us some hope of understanding the behavior of systems and having confidence in their outputs There are levels of this though -- there are few instances where you actually need formal correctness. For most software, the stakes just aren't that high, all you need is predictable behavior in the "happy path", and to be within some forgiving neighborhood of "correct". That said, those championing AI have done a very poor job at communicating the value of constrained languages, instead preferring to parrot this (decades and decades and decades old) dream of "specify systems in natural language"
- jiggawatts 1y agoYou can be fuzzier than a soft fluff of cotton wool. I’ve had incredible success trying to find the name of an old TV show or specific episode using AIs. The hit rate is surprisingly good even when using the vaguest inputs. “You know, that show in the 80s or 90s… maybe 2000s with the people that… did things and maybe didn’t do things.” “You might be thinking of episode 11 of season 4 of such and such snow where a key plot element was both doing and not doing things on the penalty of death”
- floren 1y agoSee I try that sort of thing, like asking Gemini about a science fiction book I read in 5th grade that (IIRC) involved people living underground near/under a volcano, and food in pill form, and it immediately hallucinates a non-existent book by John Christopher named "The City Under the Volcano"
- wyre 1y agoClaude tells me it’s City of Ember, but notes the pill-food doesn’t match the plot and asks for more details of the book.
- floren 1y agoGemini suggested the same at one point, but it would be a stretch since I read the book in question at least 7 years before City of Ember was published.
- ghssds 1y agoI know at least two books partly matching that description: "Surréal 3000" by Suzanne Martel and "Le silence de la cité" by Élisabeth Vonarburg.
- floren 1y agoI think Surréal 3000 is the one.
- 1y ago
- bityard 1y agoI was a big fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation as a kid and one of my favorite things in the whole world was thinking about the Enterprise's computer and Data, each one's strengths and limitations, and whether there was really any fundamental difference between the two besides the fact that Data had a body he could walk around in. The Enterprise computer was (usually) portrayed as fairly close to what we have now with today's "AI": it could synthesize, analyze, and summarize the entirety of Federation knowledge and perform actions on behalf of the user. This is what we are using LLMs for now. In general, the shipboard computer didn't hallucinate except during most of the numerous holodeck episodes. It could rewrite portions of its own code when the plot demanded it. Data had, in theory, a personality. But that personality was basically, "acting like a pedantic robot." We are told he is able to grow intellectually and acquire skills, but with perfect memory and fine motor control, he can already basically "do" any human endeavor with a few milliseconds of research. Although things involving human emotion (art, comedy, love) he is pretty bad at and has to settle for sampling, distilling, and imitating thousands to millions of examples of human creation. (Not unlike "AI" art of today.) Side notes about some of the dodgy writing: A few early epsiodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation treated the Enterprise D computer as a semi-omniscient character and it always bugged me. Because it seemed to "know" things that it shouldn't and draw conclusions that it really shouldn't have been able to. "Hey computer, we're all about to die, solve the plot for us so we make it to next week's episode!" Thankfully someone got the memo and that only happened a few times. Although I always enjoyed episodes that centered around the ship or crew itself somehow instead of just another run-in with aliens. The writers were always adamant that Data had no emotions (when not fitted with the emotion chip) but we heard him say things _all the time_ that were rooted in emotion, they were just not particularly strong emotions. And he claimed to not grasp humor, but quite often made faces reflecting the mood of the room or indicating he understood jokes made by other crew members.
- gdubs 1y agoThanks, love this – it's something I've thought about as well!
- jacobgkau 1y ago> The writers were always adamant that Data had no emotions... but quite often made faces reflecting the mood of the room or indicating he understood jokes made by other crew members. This doesn't seem too different from how our current AI chatbots don't actually understand humor or have emotions, but can still explain a joke to you or generate text with a humorous tone if you ask them to based on samples, right? > "Hey computer, we're all about to die, solve the plot for us so we make it to next week's episode!" I'm curious, do you recall a specific episode or two that reflect what you feel boiled down to this?
- wvenable 1y agoI literally pasted these two lines into ChatGPT that were sent to me by one of sysadmin and it told me exactly what I needed to know: App1: requestedAccessTokenVersion": null App2: requestedAccessTokenVersion": 2 I use it like that all time. In fact, I'm starting to give it less and less context and just toss stuff at it. It's more efficient use of my time.
- grishka 1y agoBut when I'm doing my job as a software developer, I don't want to be fuzzy. I want to be exact at telling the computer what to do, and for that, the most efficient way is still a programming language, not English. The only place where LLMs are an improvement is voice assistants. But voice assistants themselves are rather niche.
- dyauspitr 1y agoI want to be fuzzy and I want the LLM to generate something exact.
- kennyloginz 1y agoIs this sarcasm? I can’t tell anymore. Unless your ideas aren’t new, this is just impossible.
- dyauspitr 1y agoWhy? I want the LLM to understand my intent and build something exact. That already happens many times.
- robryan 1y agoIt can get you 80% of the way there, you can still be exacting in telling it where it went wrong or fine tuning the result by hand.
- d_burfoot 1y agoIt's a radical change in human/computer interface. Now, for many applications, it is much better to present the user with a simple chat window and allow them to type natural language into it, rather than ask them to learn a complex UI. I want to be able to say "Delete all the screenshots on my Desktop", instead of going into a terminal and typing "rm ~/Desktop/*.png".
- bccdee 1y agoThat's interesting to me, because saying "Delete all the screenshots on my Desktop" is not at all how I want to be using my computer. When I'm getting breakfast, I don't instruct the banana to "peel yourself and leap into my mouth," then flop open my jaw like a guppy. I just grab it and eat it. I don't want to tell my computer to delete all the screenshots (except for this or that that particular one). I want to pull one aside, sweep my mouse over the others, and tap "delete" to vanish them. There's a "speaking and interpreting instructions" vibe to your answer which is at odds with my desire for an interface that feels like an extension of my body. For the most part, I don't want English to be an intermediary between my intent and the computer. I want to do, not tell.
- skydhash 1y agoWe all want something like Jarvis, but there's a reason it's called science fiction. Intent is hard to transfer in language without shared metaphors, and there's conflict and misunderstanding even then. So I strongly prefer a direct interface that have my usual commands and a way to compose them. Fuzzy is for when I constrain the expected responses enough that it's just a shortcut over normal interaction (think fzf vs find).
- fragmede 1y agoGenuine question, which part of Jarvis is still science fiction? Interacting with a flying suit of armor powered by a fictional pseudo-infinite power source, as are the robots, and the fighting aliens & supervillains, but as far as having a robot companion like the movie "Her", that you can talk with about your problems, ChatGPT is already there. People have customized their ChatGPT through the use of the memories feature, given it a custom name, and tuned how they want it to respond; sassy/sweet/etc, how they want it to refer to them. they'll have conversations with it about whatever. It can go and search the Internet for stuff. Other than using it to manipulate a flying suit of armor which doesn't exist, to fight aliens, efficient the jury's still out on, which parts are there that are still science fiction? I'm assuming there's a big long list of things, I'm just not at all well versed in the lore enough to have a list of things that genuinely still seem impossible and which seem like just an implementation detail that someone probably already has an MCP for.
- few 1y ago>On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. - Charles Babbage This quote did not age well
- guelo 1y agonot if you consider how confused our ideas are today
- snowwrestler 1y agoNow with LLMs, you can put in the right figures and the wrong answers might come out.
- Velorivox 1y agoFor me this moment came when Google calendar first let you enter fuzzy text to get calendar events added, this was around 2011, I think. In any case, for the end user this can be made to happen even when the computer cannot actually handle fuzzy inputs (which is of course, how an LLM works). The big change with LLMs seems to be that everyone now has an opinion on what programming/AI is and can do. I remember people behaving like that around stocks not that long ago…
- 0points 1y ago> The big change with LLMs seems to be that everyone now has an opinion on what programming/AI is and can do True, but I think this is just the zeitgeist. People today want to share their dumb opinions about any complex subject after they saw a 30 second reel.
- Velorivox 1y agoWhat will it take to get people to admit they don’t actually know what they’re talking about? The answer to that question lies at the bottom of a cup of hemlock.
- 0points 1y agoWell, for once if the LLM:s they interact with or heck even the influencers they listen to would lead the way. I'll be happy the day the LLM says "I don't know".
- forgotoldacc 1y agoThere's the old quote from Babbage: > On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. This has been an obviously absurd question for two centuries now. Turns out the people asking that question were just visionaries ahead of their time. It is kind of impressive how I'll ask for some code in the dumbest, vaguest, sometimes even wrong way, but so long as I have the proper context built up, I can get something pretty close to what I actually wanted. Though I still have problems where I can ask as precisely as possible and get things not even close to what I'm looking for.
- CobrastanJorji 1y agoWe wanted to check the clock at the wrong time but read the correct time. Since a broken clock is right twice a day, we broke the clock, which solves our problem some of the time!
- pca006132 1y agoThe nice thing is that a fully broken clock is accurate more often than a slightly deviated clock.
- meowface 1y agoIt is fun to watch. I've sometimes indeed seen the LLM say something like "I'm assuming you meant [X]".
- jumploops 1y agoComputers finally work they way they were always supposed to work :)
- dogcomplex 1y agoIf anything we now need to unlearn the rigidity - being too formal can make the AI overly focused on certain aspects, and is in general poor UX. You can always tell legacy man-made code because it is extremely inflexible and requires the user to know terminology and usage implicitly lest it break, hard. For once, as developers we are actually using computers how normal people always wished they worked and were turned away frustratedly. We now need to blend our precise formal approach with these capabilities to make it all actually work the way it always should have.
- rullelito 1y agoTo me this is the best thing about LLMs.
- Corey_ 1y ago[dead]
- vb-8448 1y agoIn my opinion, most of the problems we see now with LLMs come from being fuzzy ... I'm used to getting very good code from claude o gemini (copy and paste without any changes that just works) but I have to be very specific, sometime it takes longer to write the prompt than writing the code itself. If I'm fuzzy, the output quality is usually low and I need several iterations before getting an acceptable result. At some point, in the future, there will be some kind of formalization on how to ask swe question to llms ... and we will get another programming language to rule the all :D
- TwoFerMaggie 1y agoIt invalidates this CinemaSins nitpick on Alien completely https://youtu.be/dJtYDb7YaJ4?si=5NuoXaW0pkGoBSJu&t=76 https://youtu.be/dJtYDb7YaJ4?si=5NuoXaW0pkGoBSJu&t=76