4 ms·
I can’t believe programming is now at the stage where advice like "first have the computer give you totally wrong answers, then just find a function that maps t
by Sharlin 2mo ago
I can’t believe programming is now at the stage where advice like "first have the computer give you totally wrong answers, then just find a function that maps the wrong answers to the correct ones!" is a thing.
- agos 2mo agothe trick is that it's not totally wrong to start with
- addandsubtract 2mo agoIf there is no truth, there is no wrong.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- speerer 2mo agoThis is so similar to human decision-making though. First I my innate experience to approximate to what I expect is right, then I map that to the truth. It's the same for so many things: - reading documentation (what do I expect this function to be called?) - finding clothes in a shop (something long-sleeved and light) - picking the fridge for dinner - finding a book in the library... so many analogues where I'm not coming cold to a choice.
- willturman 2mo agoI can't believe people spend their lives finding lazier ways to classify a bunch of objects that will end up heaped in dormitory dumpsters across the US next spring.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- pie_flavor 2mo ago> 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. He clearly didn't know enough about vector embeddings.
- Xirdus 2mo agoUnironically, LLM is absolutely amazing at giving you the right answers when you put in wrong input, compared to every other algorithm ever invented.
- antonvs 2mo agoThat’s one of the properties that distinguishes intelligence from traditional deterministic algorithms.
- ChadNauseam 2mo agoI feel like I'm fighting a losing battle but I don't see why so many people consider LLMs innately non-deterministic, an LLM running on a CPU with greedy decoding would be 100% deterministic and still have the intelligence we associate with LLMs
- antonvs 2mo agoValid point, it’s why I included the word “traditional”, to try to qualify that. What I meant is something more like explicitly programmed vs. learned. Intelligence can result from learned behavior, but not from explicit programming of rules by humans. An aspect of this is that “learning” is unpredictable - we can’t predict in advance exactly how the resulting model will behave, except broadly. It seems non-deterministic if only by virtue of its complexity, which is beyond anything we’re able to predictively model.
- AdieuToLogic 2mo ago> Intelligence can result from learned behavior, but not from explicit programming of rules by humans. This is incorrect. Simulated intelligence can and has been encoded explicitly by humans defining rules programmatically in the form of expert systems[0]. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system
- devmor 2mo agoThis been the case for a long time! The entire problem of search is that the user has the wrong data and wants to use it to receive the correct data. That was the start, not the state we’ve ended up at - it is unironically how we got to LLMs.
- wseqyrku 2mo agoI think you mean "incomplete", It's not "wrong" to look for 'schism tool lyrics'
- philipov 2mo agoIf information is totally wrong then all you have to do is invert it to get the truth. What was it that Sherlock Holmes said? The problem ends up being that it often takes a tremendous number of counterexamples to eliminate everything that is impossible. Worse is when you don't know whether the answers you have are totally wrong.
- dcrazy 2mo agoEh? “Generate an approximation and refine it algorithmically” is a well-known technique.
- antonvs 2mo agoThe terminology is misleading you. “Hallucinate” is misleading here. In the given example, a classification is being done very successfully - it’s just that it requires an extra step to map it to an arbitrary predefined list of classifications. If you can articulate why you think this isn’t a good approach, I’d be interested to hear it.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- wseqyrku 2mo agoI couldn't believe programming has become all strings either. In the olden days it was either a code smell or compiler tests.