5 ms·

Does the hammer lie to you that everything is a nail? Can a voltmeter _lie_ to you? EE are expected to know when their measurements are wrong. And Professiona

by Den_VR 5mo ago

Does the hammer lie to you that everything is a nail? Can a voltmeter _lie_ to you? EE are expected to know when their measurements are wrong. And Professional Engineers are legally accountable for consequences of such mistakes.

possibleworlds 5mo ago
If a hammer had a chat interface that said everything was a nail then the answer would be yes, the hammer lies to you about everything being a nail.
- walletdrainer 5mo ago
  If someone believes a hammer when it tells them such things, they should probably have some sort of a caretaker assigned to help them through life.
  - mvid 5mo ago
    If hammer companies were suddenly the most valuable international companies, and spent millions on ad campaigns and lobbying about trusting the hammer interface, then you can assume a large amount of people might trust the hammer interface
    - walletdrainer 5mo ago
      Where are the ad campaigns telling me to trust LLMs? I don’t use an adblocker, do read traditional dead tree newspapers and do get exposed to satellite tv channels. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone anywhere telling me how reliable LLMs are. Pretty sure this tech sells itself to consumers, enterprise sales are what they’ve always been.
      - card_zero 5mo ago
        So now you're pivoting away from the caretaker proposal? I thought it had potential but I don't know how you'd fund it.
        walletdrainer 5mo ago
        > I thought it had potential but I don't know how you'd fund it. The same way we fund other social services here in Europe. If an individual is incapable of caring for themselves, the state is expected to care for them.
      - alnwlsn 5mo ago
        Literally saw a video ad the other day which went like "I've always been cautious using Google's AI because it sometimes gets things wrong, but this time, it got it right!"
    - leidenfrost 5mo ago
      Still, it's a tool. Even if your tool learns to talk and to make decisions, it's still a tool, not a person. You're the person and the one responsible for the decisions you make based on your tools. Going back from the analogy, the problem is that we conflated software <engineers> with "coders". A lot of people thought their job was to create code, we gave them a tool to generate a lot of code fast, and they truly think that "more code" = "more good"
      - kiba 5mo ago
        A hammer usually doesn't have the power to persuade people.
      - TheScaryOne 5mo ago
        > it's still a tool, not a person. Tell that to the CEO's who have replaced all of their yes-men with yes-chatbots.
- digitalPhonix 5mo ago
  That wasn’t the question though? A hammer doesn’t have a chat interface, that’s the point.
  - kasabali 5mo ago
    Duh
fao_ 5mo ago
If software engineering wants to progress past being an "art" and be considered an engineering discipline, then it should adopt methods and practices from engineering. First and foremost, one of the universal methodologies is analysis of root cause in faults, and redundancies to avoid that. e.g. the FAA has two pilots for planes, and each system is built in redundantly so if an engineer misses a bolt or rivet, the plane won't crash. intersections are designed such that there is a forcing function[0] on the behaviour of the motorists to prevent fault. Or, to take your tool analogy, nail guns are designed to be pressed against something with a decent amount of pressure before you can fire them. All of these systems are designed around the core idea of "a human acting irrationally or improperly is not at fault" and, furthermore, that a human can have a bad day and still avoid a mistake. They all steer someone around a possible fault. Hell, the reason why we divide the road into lanes is itself a forcing function to avoid traffic collisions! So, where is the forcing function in large language models? What part of a large language model prevents gross misuse by laymen? I can think of examples here and there, maybe. OpenAI had to add guard rails to stop people from poisoning themselves with botulism and boron, etc. But the problem here is that the LLM is probabilistic, so there's really no guarantee that those guard rails will hold. I seem to remember there being a paper from a few months back, posted here, that show AI guardrails cannot be proven to work consistently. In that context, LLMs cannot be considered "safe" or "reliable" enough for use. Eddie Burback has a very, very good video showing an absolute worst case result of this[1], that was posted here last year. Even then, off the top of my head Angela Collier has a really, really good video demonstrating that there's an absolute plethora of people who have succumbed, in large ways or small, to the bullshit AI can spew[2]. I feel like if most developers were actually serious about being an engineering discipline, like we claim, then we wouldn't have all jumped on the LLM bandwagon until they'd been properly tested and had a certain level of reliability. Instead there are a sizable chunk of people saying they've stopped coding by hand entirely, and aren't even reviewing the code! i.e. They've thrown out a forcing function that existed to prevent errorenous PRs being committed! And for some bizzare reason, after about 2 decades of people talking about type safety and how we need formal verification to reduce error, everyone seems to be throwing "reduction of error" out the window! [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavior-shaping_constraint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavior-shaping_constraint (if you're curious about the term) [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRjgNgJms3Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRjgNgJms3Q [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pqF90rstZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pqF90rstZQ
perching_aix 5mo ago
> Can a voltmeter _lie_ to you? Hell fucking yes it can?
- digitalPhonix 5mo ago
  When used according to it’s datasheet/user manual, how?
  - perching_aix 5mo ago
    When their precision mismatches their accuracy (or your expectations as driven by their design), just like with any other metrology tool. Now you might say: "but the datasheet will give you the tolerances, and the manual will tell you to mind it!" And yes, that's true. Just like how LLM providers also do: they tell you that outputs may be arbitrarily wrong, and that you should always check for mistakes. Is this bullshit? Yes. So are metrology tools that have a mismatching precision and accuracy, need calibration, and have designs that fail to make you mind either of these, sending you to reading duty instead. Which just so happens to be a whole lot of them. It is also absolutely not bullshit of course, because it is a fundamental limitation, just like those properties are for metrology devices. LLMs produce arbitrary natural language. Short of becoming able to perfectly read and predict the users' mind, they'll never be able to make any hard assurances, ever. Defective devices also exist, and so do incorrect / incomplete documentation.
    - digitalPhonix 5mo ago
      That's the difference - they have well defined and bounded errors. LLMs do not.
      - perching_aix 5mo ago
        Which is a notably different argument than whether they can lie to you. Why are we skipping over the miscalibrated, defective, or ill-documented devices bit though? Those also all have arbitrary error.
  - 5mo ago
heavyset_go 5mo ago
If I had a hammer robot that I told to go hammer some nails in a birdhouse and it goes "Sure, I'm on it!" then it nails a cat to the wall and says "Here's you new complete birdhouse, it's perfect in everyway and will make everyone jealous", then yes, that is a tooling issue.
- digitalPhonix 5mo ago
  The question wasn’t about a hammer robot, it was about a hammer
  - Tostino 5mo ago
    That's not a good analogy then. What benefit is provided by a hammer that just tells the operator (who has eyes and can see) that there is a nail under it (and I assume to swing)?
Gud 5mo ago
Yes, a voltmeter can lie to you. Full disclosure: I do high voltage testing for a living.
- pardon_me 5mo ago
  It can misread, but meters cannot actively generate an incorrect output based on user expectations.
  - Gud 5mo ago
    …yet!
    - wookmaster 5mo ago
      Enshittification knows no bounds

by Den_VR 5mo ago

possibleworlds 5mo ago

If a hammer had a chat interface that said everything was a nail then the answer would be yes, the hammer lies to you about everything being a nail.

walletdrainer 5mo ago
If someone believes a hammer when it tells them such things, they should probably have some sort of a caretaker assigned to help them through life.
- mvid 5mo ago
  If hammer companies were suddenly the most valuable international companies, and spent millions on ad campaigns and lobbying about trusting the hammer interface, then you can assume a large amount of people might trust the hammer interface
  - walletdrainer 5mo ago
    Where are the ad campaigns telling me to trust LLMs? I don’t use an adblocker, do read traditional dead tree newspapers and do get exposed to satellite tv channels. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone anywhere telling me how reliable LLMs are. Pretty sure this tech sells itself to consumers, enterprise sales are what they’ve always been.
    - card_zero 5mo ago
      So now you're pivoting away from the caretaker proposal? I thought it had potential but I don't know how you'd fund it.
      - walletdrainer 5mo ago
        > I thought it had potential but I don't know how you'd fund it. The same way we fund other social services here in Europe. If an individual is incapable of caring for themselves, the state is expected to care for them.
    - alnwlsn 5mo ago
      Literally saw a video ad the other day which went like "I've always been cautious using Google's AI because it sometimes gets things wrong, but this time, it got it right!"
  - leidenfrost 5mo ago
    Still, it's a tool. Even if your tool learns to talk and to make decisions, it's still a tool, not a person. You're the person and the one responsible for the decisions you make based on your tools. Going back from the analogy, the problem is that we conflated software <engineers> with "coders". A lot of people thought their job was to create code, we gave them a tool to generate a lot of code fast, and they truly think that "more code" = "more good"
    - kiba 5mo ago
      A hammer usually doesn't have the power to persuade people.
    - TheScaryOne 5mo ago
      > it's still a tool, not a person. Tell that to the CEO's who have replaced all of their yes-men with yes-chatbots.
digitalPhonix 5mo ago
That wasn’t the question though? A hammer doesn’t have a chat interface, that’s the point.
- kasabali 5mo ago
  Duh

fao_ 5mo ago

If software engineering wants to progress past being an "art" and be considered an engineering discipline, then it should adopt methods and practices from engineering. First and foremost, one of the universal methodologies is analysis of root cause in faults, and redundancies to avoid that. e.g. the FAA has two pilots for planes, and each system is built in redundantly so if an engineer misses a bolt or rivet, the plane won't crash. intersections are designed such that there is a forcing function[0] on the behaviour of the motorists to prevent fault. Or, to take your tool analogy, nail guns are designed to be pressed against something with a decent amount of pressure before you can fire them. All of these systems are designed around the core idea of "a human acting irrationally or improperly is not at fault" and, furthermore, that a human can have a bad day and still avoid a mistake. They all steer someone around a possible fault. Hell, the reason why we divide the road into lanes is itself a forcing function to avoid traffic collisions! So, where is the forcing function in large language models? What part of a large language model prevents gross misuse by laymen? I can think of examples here and there, maybe. OpenAI had to add guard rails to stop people from poisoning themselves with botulism and boron, etc. But the problem here is that the LLM is probabilistic, so there's really no guarantee that those guard rails will hold. I seem to remember there being a paper from a few months back, posted here, that show AI guardrails cannot be proven to work consistently. In that context, LLMs cannot be considered "safe" or "reliable" enough for use. Eddie Burback has a very, very good video showing an absolute worst case result of this[1], that was posted here last year. Even then, off the top of my head Angela Collier has a really, really good video demonstrating that there's an absolute plethora of people who have succumbed, in large ways or small, to the bullshit AI can spew[2]. I feel like if most developers were actually serious about being an engineering discipline, like we claim, then we wouldn't have all jumped on the LLM bandwagon until they'd been properly tested and had a certain level of reliability. Instead there are a sizable chunk of people saying they've stopped coding by hand entirely, and aren't even reviewing the code! i.e. They've thrown out a forcing function that existed to prevent errorenous PRs being committed! And for some bizzare reason, after about 2 decades of people talking about type safety and how we need formal verification to reduce error, everyone seems to be throwing "reduction of error" out the window! [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavior-shaping_constraint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavior-shaping_constraint (if you're curious about the term) [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRjgNgJms3Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRjgNgJms3Q [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pqF90rstZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pqF90rstZQ

perching_aix 5mo ago

> Can a voltmeter _lie_ to you? Hell fucking yes it can?

digitalPhonix 5mo ago
When used according to it’s datasheet/user manual, how?
- perching_aix 5mo ago
  When their precision mismatches their accuracy (or your expectations as driven by their design), just like with any other metrology tool. Now you might say: "but the datasheet will give you the tolerances, and the manual will tell you to mind it!" And yes, that's true. Just like how LLM providers also do: they tell you that outputs may be arbitrarily wrong, and that you should always check for mistakes. Is this bullshit? Yes. So are metrology tools that have a mismatching precision and accuracy, need calibration, and have designs that fail to make you mind either of these, sending you to reading duty instead. Which just so happens to be a whole lot of them. It is also absolutely not bullshit of course, because it is a fundamental limitation, just like those properties are for metrology devices. LLMs produce arbitrary natural language. Short of becoming able to perfectly read and predict the users' mind, they'll never be able to make any hard assurances, ever. Defective devices also exist, and so do incorrect / incomplete documentation.
  - digitalPhonix 5mo ago
    That's the difference - they have well defined and bounded errors. LLMs do not.
    - perching_aix 5mo ago
      Which is a notably different argument than whether they can lie to you. Why are we skipping over the miscalibrated, defective, or ill-documented devices bit though? Those also all have arbitrary error.
- 5mo ago

heavyset_go 5mo ago

If I had a hammer robot that I told to go hammer some nails in a birdhouse and it goes "Sure, I'm on it!" then it nails a cat to the wall and says "Here's you new complete birdhouse, it's perfect in everyway and will make everyone jealous", then yes, that is a tooling issue.

digitalPhonix 5mo ago
The question wasn’t about a hammer robot, it was about a hammer
- Tostino 5mo ago
  That's not a good analogy then. What benefit is provided by a hammer that just tells the operator (who has eyes and can see) that there is a nail under it (and I assume to swing)?

Gud 5mo ago

Yes, a voltmeter can lie to you. Full disclosure: I do high voltage testing for a living.

pardon_me 5mo ago
It can misread, but meters cannot actively generate an incorrect output based on user expectations.
- Gud 5mo ago
  …yet!
  - wookmaster 5mo ago
    Enshittification knows no bounds