4 ms·

> In the same way high-level languages are a layer on top of writing machine code manually. Another layer, yes, but NOT "in the same way." It is a new, differe

> In the same way high-level languages are a layer on top of writing machine code manually. Another layer, yes, but NOT "in the same way." It is a new, different kind of layer. The other layers were deterministic, not probabilistic.

baq 2mo ago
Probabilistic algorithms are not new. If the distribution is known you can bend surprisingly many things to your will in the long run - and the most interesting part is the long run can be unexpectedly short. LLMs are quite interesting in that regard because you have a lot of levers to influence the shape of the distribution; the ways are different for each model, so it’s a very experimental science, but applying the scientific method is exactly how you get good results.
- discreteevent 2mo ago
  The scientific method is not about running experiments and then trying to work out the gist of something. It's about understanding and theory building and then doing experiments to verify your model. The end result is not an experimental result but a model that you understand and can use to build solutions etc. LLMs are bringing us back to pre- science correlations and superstitions. That's why all the conversations on these threads about AI are so boring. It's all anecdotes and tips and no understanding.
  - adamddev1 2mo ago
    It almost feels like alchemy.
  - unknownfuture 2mo ago
    Vibecoding == digital dowsing?
  - baq 2mo ago
    Sir you haven’t seen evals done properly if you’re saying this.
schnebbau 2mo ago
I meant that no-one writes assembly anymore. I wasn't around when that transition happened, but I bet there were the same "this high-level language is compiling to inefficient code, it's useless" comments.
- unknownfuture 2mo ago
  Yes. They know what you meant. You missed the point of their response. A compiler is semantically deterministic. It has a spec. Give it an input and you can know exactly what the output will do. And if there's edge cases where behaviour is undefined, thats also well known apriori. (And yes, to get ahead of the nitpickers, I know the specific sequence of bytes the compiler will emit can vary (hence the difficulty of reproducible builds), hence why I said "semantically"). LLMs do not share this property. At all. I mean not even close They are a completely new and different class of tool. They are not just a step up the abstraction layer. They're not compilers for English. To call them that is to fundamentally not grok what a compiler is or does. That doesn't make them bad. It just makes that analogy, and any conclusions you might draw from it, bad.
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]

baq 2mo ago

Probabilistic algorithms are not new. If the distribution is known you can bend surprisingly many things to your will in the long run - and the most interesting part is the long run can be unexpectedly short. LLMs are quite interesting in that regard because you have a lot of levers to influence the shape of the distribution; the ways are different for each model, so it’s a very experimental science, but applying the scientific method is exactly how you get good results.

discreteevent 2mo ago
The scientific method is not about running experiments and then trying to work out the gist of something. It's about understanding and theory building and then doing experiments to verify your model. The end result is not an experimental result but a model that you understand and can use to build solutions etc. LLMs are bringing us back to pre- science correlations and superstitions. That's why all the conversations on these threads about AI are so boring. It's all anecdotes and tips and no understanding.
- adamddev1 2mo ago
  It almost feels like alchemy.
- unknownfuture 2mo ago
  Vibecoding == digital dowsing?
- baq 2mo ago
  Sir you haven’t seen evals done properly if you’re saying this.

schnebbau 2mo ago

I meant that no-one writes assembly anymore. I wasn't around when that transition happened, but I bet there were the same "this high-level language is compiling to inefficient code, it's useless" comments.

unknownfuture 2mo ago
Yes. They know what you meant. You missed the point of their response. A compiler is semantically deterministic. It has a spec. Give it an input and you can know exactly what the output will do. And if there's edge cases where behaviour is undefined, thats also well known apriori. (And yes, to get ahead of the nitpickers, I know the specific sequence of bytes the compiler will emit can vary (hence the difficulty of reproducible builds), hence why I said "semantically"). LLMs do not share this property. At all. I mean not even close They are a completely new and different class of tool. They are not just a step up the abstraction layer. They're not compilers for English. To call them that is to fundamentally not grok what a compiler is or does. That doesn't make them bad. It just makes that analogy, and any conclusions you might draw from it, bad.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]