Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI

boydkane.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 461 posts

Re: Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI

#311

Post by hnaccount_rng »

rmccue wrote: post #258
Frieren wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple had two separate teams competing against each other on this topic That is a sign of very bad management. Overlapping responsibilities kill motivation as winning the infighting becomes more important than creating a good product. Low morale, and a blaming culture is the result of such "internal competition". Instead, leadership should do their work and align goals, set clear priorities and make sure that every…

It’s how Apple (relatively famously?) developed the iPhone, so I’d assume they were using this as a model. > In other words, should he shrink the Mac, which would be an epic feat of engineering, or enlarge the iPod? Jobs preferred the former option, since he would then have a mobile operating system he could customize for the many gizmos then on Apple’s drawing board. Rather than pick an approach right away, however,…

But that's not the same thing right? That means having two teams competing for developing the next product. That's not two organisations handling the same responsibilities. You may still end up in problems with infighting. But if there is a clear end date for that competition and then no lasting effects for the "losers" this kind of "competition" will have very different effects than setting up two organisations that fight over some responsibility

Re: Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI

#312

Post by bryanrasmussen »

bjornevik wrote: post #271
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #259

think it's missing the biggest assumption, which is not necessarily true for regular software either but much more true than AI: The same inputs should produce the same outputs. And that assumption is important because dependability is the strength of an automated process.

It's not missing? https://boydkane.com/essays/boss#every-time-you-run-the-code...

that's what I get for trying to read with a screaming kid demanding music videos in my ear.

Re: Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI

#313

Post by silvestrov »

mikkupikku wrote: post #299
remexre wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does feel like somebody forgot that "from the first sentence or two of the email, you can tell what it's about" was already a rule of good writing...

Maybe they remembered that a lot of people aren't actually good writers. My brother will send 1000 word emails that meander through subjects like what he ate for breakfast to eventually get to the point of scheduling a meeting about negotiating a time for help with moving a sofa. Mind you, I see him several times a week so he's not lonely, this is just the way he writes. Then he complains endlessly about his coworker…

I feel too many humanities teachers are like your brother.

Why use 10 words when you could do 1000. Why use headings or lists, when the whole story could be written in a single paragraph spanning 3 pages.

Re: Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI

#314

Post by ponector »

vel0city wrote: post #214
ponector wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess that is because you run it on old hardware. When I've bought my Asus ROG expensive laptop I had bsod almost daily. A year later with all updates I had bsod once in a month on the same device and windows installation.

If you have faulty hardware no amount of software is going to solve your problems (other than software that just completely deactivates said faulty hardware). The fact you continued to have BSOD issues after a full reinstall is pretty strong evidence you probably had some kind of hardware failure.

But there was no reinstall in my case. Years goes by and further in time there are less and less bsod.

My point is if you are using the same "old" modern hardware, bsod is very rare.

Re: Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI

#315

Post by belter »

freetime2 wrote: post #122

For a real world example of the challenges of harnessing LLMs, look at Apple. Over a year ago they had a big product launch focused on "Apple Intelligence" that was supposed to make heavy use of LLMs for agentic workflows. But all we've really gotten since then are a couple of minor tools for making emojis, summarizing notifications, and proof reading. And they even had to roll back the notification summaries for a w…

The thought that a company like Apple, which surely put hundreds of engineers to work on these tools and went through multiple iterations of their capabilities, would launch the capabilities...Only for its executives to realize after release that current AI is not mature enough to add significant commercial value to their products, is almost comical.

The reality is that if they hadn’t announced these tools and joined the make-believe AI bubble, their stock price would have crashed. It’s okay to spend $400 million on a project, as long as you don’t lose $50 billion in market value in an afternoon.

Re: Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI

#316

Post by nedt »

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #162

I found this statement particularly relevant: While it’s possible to demonstrate the safety of an AI for a specific test suite or a known threat, it’s impossible for AI creators to definitively say their AI will never act maliciously or dangerously for any prompt it could be given. This possibility is compounded exponentially when MCP[0] is used. 0 - https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol

Yeah in that regard we should always treat it like a junior something. Very much like you can't expect your own kids to never do something dangerous even if tell it for years to be careful. I got used to getting my kid from the Kindergarten with a new injury at least once a month.

Re: Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI

#317

Post by rightbyte »

bcoates wrote: post #119
chasing0entropy wrote: post #102

70 years ago we were fascinated by the concept of converting analog to a perfect digital copy. In reality, that goal was a pipe drea!m and the closest we can ever get is a near identical facimile to which data fits... But it's still quite easy to determine digital from true analog with rudimentary means. Human thought is analog. It is based on chemical reactions, time, and unpredictably (effectively) random physical…

It's been closer to 100 years since we figured out information theory and discredited this idea (that continuous/analog processes have more, or different, information in them than discrete/digital ones)

In theory or in practice? Wouldn't the Nyquist frequency and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle put practical limits.

Re: Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI

#318

Post by arethuza »

bombcar wrote: post #310
arethuza wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife was in China recently and was sending back pictures of interesting things - one came in while I was driving and my iPhone read out a description of the picture that had been sent - "How cool is that!" I thought. However, when I stopped driving and looked at the picture the AI generated description was pretty poor - it wasn't completely wrong but it really wasn't what I was expecting given the description.

It’s been surprisingly accurate at times “a child holding an apple” in a crowded picture, and then sometimes somewhat wrong. What really kills me is “a screenshot of a social media post” come on it’s simple OCR read the damn post to me you stupid robot! Don’t tell me you can’t, OCR was good enough in the 90s!

The description said "People standing in front of impressive scenery" (or something like that) - it got the scenery part correct but the people are barely visible and really small.

Re: Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI

#319

Post by jvanderbot »

nedt wrote: post #316
AdieuToLogic wrote: post #162

I found this statement particularly relevant: While it’s possible to demonstrate the safety of an AI for a specific test suite or a known threat, it’s impossible for AI creators to definitively say their AI will never act maliciously or dangerously for any prompt it could be given. This possibility is compounded exponentially when MCP[0] is used. 0 - https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol

Yeah in that regard we should always treat it like a junior something. Very much like you can't expect your own kids to never do something dangerous even if tell it for years to be careful. I got used to getting my kid from the Kindergarten with a new injury at least once a month.

We should move well beyond human analogies. I have never met a human that would straight up lie about something, or build up so much deceptive tests that it might as well be lying.

Granted this is not super common in these tools, but it is essentially unheard of in junior devs.

Post reply on HN