11–17 of 17 posts
I wish folks trying to formalize prompt generation godspeed.
Dijkstra said that if we ever had the misfortune of having machines programmable in natural language, sooner or later someone would construct a formal language over it. Playing out in real time. We're living legendary times.
We have humans, and we spend a lot of time constructing formal specialized languages for specifying instructions, expected behavior, etc., for them (ironically, many of them, in the history of computing, specifically targeting the people whose job is to program computers), so that's... a pretty obvious prediction.
Dijkstra said that if we ever had the misfortune of having machines programmable in natural language, sooner or later someone would construct a formal language over it. Playing out in real time. We're living legendary times.
> Dijkstra said that if we ever had the misfortune of having machines programmable in natural language We have humans, and we spend a lot of time constructing formal specialized languages for specifying instructions, expected behavior, etc., for them (ironically, many of them, in the history of computing, specifically targeting the people whose job is to program computers), so that's... a pretty obvious prediction.
This is exactly the same sort of "wasted effort" that folks argue against when discussing space exploration, lunar or Martian colonization: It looks like an utter waste of people's time and effort... until they succeed. I wish folks trying to formalize prompt generation godspeed.
This is exactly the same sort of "wasted effort" that folks argue against when discussing space exploration, lunar or Martian colonization: It looks like an utter waste of people's time and effort... until they succeed. I wish folks trying to formalize prompt generation godspeed.
I wouldn't call it wasted effort (neither would I call space exploration and lunar or martian colonization as wasted effort) - it's not the kind of bullshit "prompt engineering" that tries to find magic phrases and sentence structures, and gets invalidated every time the model is updated. If I understood the article correctly, this language implements its operators by stepping the language model directly, applying th…