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Does ‘writing code by hand’ mean you’re not going to use compilers to generate assembly? Now I do feel lucky that I started learning coding about four years be
by photochemsyn 5mo ago
Does ‘writing code by hand’ mean you’re not going to use compilers to generate assembly?
Now I do feel lucky that I started learning coding about four years before the LLM revolution, but these things are really just natural language compilers, aren’t they? We’re just in that period - the 1980s, the greybeards tell me - where companies charged thousands of dollars per compiler instance, right? And now, I myself have never paid for a compiler.
This whole investor bubble will blow up in the face of the rentier-finance capitalists and I’ll be laughing my head off while it happens.
- green_wheel 5mo agoNondeterministic natural language compilers
- photochemsyn 5mo agoJust because the trajectory is chaotic doesn't mean it’s not deterministic.
- zephen 5mo agoA model, given exactly the same inputs, will return exactly the same outputs. But your prompts are not the only inputs. Among other things, there is a random seed injected by the vendor. That is a primary source of non-determinism. Then, of course, is the fact that you don't personally have an old copy of the model, and the vendor isn't going to keep the model forever, and there are no unit tests to make sure that, faced with prompts like you gave it before, the newer models won't suffer major regressions in the functionality you were using. And even if there were no non-determinism, the models suffer greatly (much more so than traditional compilers) from the butterfly effect. It is literally impossible to pin down part of your prompt in such a way that it always will contribute to good outcomes, and such that you can simply vary a tiny bit of the prompt to logically correlate with tiny variations in the output.
- platevoltage 5mo agoSo C++ doesn't count as code now.