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Human Judgment as a Specification

blog.brownplt.org

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Re: Human Judgment as a Specification

#11

Post by NitpickLawyer »

jMyles wrote: post #6
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ensure that the class of results is formally verified as non-participation in war There are very few things that cannot be stated as dual use, with one totally benign and one totally screwed up. It's like wanting a hammer to distinguish if it's striking a nail for a roof vs. a nail for an illegal animal pen. That's the wrong application of constraints. The hammer shouldn't care.

The author addresses this point as well: > This is also why we do not believe PICK becomes less useful as models improve. Better models do not make user intent more articulate — asked for “a regex matching countries of North America”, a more capable model still cannot tell you whether you want the Caribbean included, or where you want to stop heading south. Better models produce better candidates, faster — which shif…

That's not I'm saying tho. I quoted the "non-participation in war" bit. I don't see how any system can ascertain if a prompt asking for an algorithm is dual use or not.

Re: Human Judgment as a Specification

#12

Post by ekidd »

ramses0 wrote: post #8
ekidd wrote: post #7

> Telling people “you must read all the code generated by an LLM” is definitely meaningful—but it is not at all moderate (so most people won’t do it). I am honestly heartbroken to live in a world where reading the code is seen as an unreasonable ask by either students or by professional working programmers.

Don't tell me you're reading all assembly generated by your local golang or javac compiler? And that you've read every line of code down the dependency tree for your node_modules? I'm just upset that we are throwing away the original prompts for generated code in such a cavalier fashion.

The difference is that a compiler is a rigorous, (nearly) determinisic, heavily tested artrifact built by expert humans. I have only encountered genuine code generation bugs in compilers twice in my career. And yes, those bugs I did trace to the assembly.

An LLM prompt, even a huge one, is an incredibly vague document that leaves out most of the edge cases. And even Fable 5 happily ignores clear instructions in its prompt.

Now, to be fair, I absolutely expect the buggy slop to win, and to drive out the people that either write their own code or at least read the output. This will, in turn, make customers less willing to spend money on software after they get burnt a few times by buggy garbage. I think this is pretty much inevitable once Fable returns. It's just too damn good at long time horizon tasks, generating far more mostly sorta working code than any human could reasonably read.

Re: Human Judgment as a Specification

#13

Post by acedTrex »

ramses0 wrote: post #8
ekidd wrote: post #7

> Telling people “you must read all the code generated by an LLM” is definitely meaningful—but it is not at all moderate (so most people won’t do it). I am honestly heartbroken to live in a world where reading the code is seen as an unreasonable ask by either students or by professional working programmers.

Don't tell me you're reading all assembly generated by your local golang or javac compiler? And that you've read every line of code down the dependency tree for your node_modules? I'm just upset that we are throwing away the original prompts for generated code in such a cavalier fashion.

I despise this retort that i see constantly, in no way shape or form is it remotely an accurate analogy. They are two completely different things and its dishonest to attribute the two together.

Re: Human Judgment as a Specification

#14

Post by warkdarrior »

ekidd wrote: post #12
ramses0 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't tell me you're reading all assembly generated by your local golang or javac compiler? And that you've read every line of code down the dependency tree for your node_modules? I'm just upset that we are throwing away the original prompts for generated code in such a cavalier fashion.

The difference is that a compiler is a rigorous, (nearly) determinisic, heavily tested artrifact built by expert humans. I have only encountered genuine code generation bugs in compilers twice in my career. And yes, those bugs I did trace to the assembly. An LLM prompt, even a huge one, is an incredibly vague document that leaves out most of the edge cases. And even Fable 5 happily ignores clear instructions in its p…

> The difference is that a compiler is a rigorous, (nearly) determinisic, heavily tested artrifact built by expert humans.

How do you know your compiler is a rigurous and deterministic? Did you review all of its code?

Re: Human Judgment as a Specification

#15

Post by [deleted] »

warkdarrior wrote: post #14
ekidd wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that a compiler is a rigorous, (nearly) determinisic, heavily tested artrifact built by expert humans. I have only encountered genuine code generation bugs in compilers twice in my career. And yes, those bugs I did trace to the assembly. An LLM prompt, even a huge one, is an incredibly vague document that leaves out most of the edge cases. And even Fable 5 happily ignores clear instructions in its p…

> The difference is that a compiler is a rigorous, (nearly) determinisic, heavily tested artrifact built by expert humans. How do you know your compiler is a rigurous and deterministic? Did you review all of its code?

[deleted]

Re: Human Judgment as a Specification

#16

Post by ramses0 »

acedTrex wrote: post #13
ramses0 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't tell me you're reading all assembly generated by your local golang or javac compiler? And that you've read every line of code down the dependency tree for your node_modules? I'm just upset that we are throwing away the original prompts for generated code in such a cavalier fashion.

I despise this retort that i see constantly, in no way shape or form is it remotely an accurate analogy. They are two completely different things and its dishonest to attribute the two together.

"A compiler is free to optimize...", on sufficiently basic prompting "make me a user address collection form that writes to a database table called 'registered_users'..."

...I agree it's not deterministic (neither are all your variations of C compilers, neither is Firefox v Safari v Chrome), but it probably Does Something(tm), and I might not want to peel back the covers and see how it used React, or Vue, VanillaJS, QT, or GTK.

It's upsetting that we are _committing the generated code_ rather than being able to use better and better optimizing compilers against the original prompt of: "make me a user registration form with database connection"

...I'm very with you on "it's not an accurate analogy", but I'm pointing out that there have been sea-changes already w.r.t. strict adherence to the generated code, or inclusion of left-pad v react libraries.

...and there have been corresponding productivity gains (debatable? ;-) when we've worked at these higher levels of abstraction.

I'm personally still in the "blacksmith" stage of working with AI output (put it back in the fire and beat on it a bunch more times), and shudder in horror at the thought of maintaining (or paying to maintain) megabytes of hours of token generation that looks like source code.

I'm hopeful that we'll eventually strip out some of the mud between the CPU and putting pixels on the screen (with the help of LLM's?), and that we'll still be able to understand and reason about the real "DAG" of what our programs are trying to do (eg: declarative guis, kindof like we have declarative sql), but there will always be a muddy middle part where the computer/complier/LLM is doing something in between that _is_ sufficiently reliable for us to ignore those bits most of the time.

Re: Human Judgment as a Specification

#17

Post by totallykvothe »

warkdarrior wrote: post #14
ekidd wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that a compiler is a rigorous, (nearly) determinisic, heavily tested artrifact built by expert humans. I have only encountered genuine code generation bugs in compilers twice in my career. And yes, those bugs I did trace to the assembly. An LLM prompt, even a huge one, is an incredibly vague document that leaves out most of the edge cases. And even Fable 5 happily ignores clear instructions in its p…

> The difference is that a compiler is a rigorous, (nearly) determinisic, heavily tested artrifact built by expert humans. How do you know your compiler is a rigurous and deterministic? Did you review all of its code?

Bad faith argument. You know this comparison is ridiculous

Re: Human Judgment as a Specification

#18

Post by watwut »

ekidd wrote: post #7

> Telling people “you must read all the code generated by an LLM” is definitely meaningful—but it is not at all moderate (so most people won’t do it). I am honestly heartbroken to live in a world where reading the code is seen as an unreasonable ask by either students or by professional working programmers.

What is heart breaking about it? Code reviews were always being the most sucky part of the job.

They are also among more recent inventions, they are not "the traditional" programming at all. It is not like code review was the thing that attracted people to the profession or something that would be ore rewarding part of it.

Re: Human Judgment as a Specification

#19

Post by lkey »

warkdarrior wrote: post #14
ekidd wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that a compiler is a rigorous, (nearly) determinisic, heavily tested artrifact built by expert humans. I have only encountered genuine code generation bugs in compilers twice in my career. And yes, those bugs I did trace to the assembly. An LLM prompt, even a huge one, is an incredibly vague document that leaves out most of the edge cases. And even Fable 5 happily ignores clear instructions in its p…

> The difference is that a compiler is a rigorous, (nearly) determinisic, heavily tested artrifact built by expert humans. How do you know your compiler is a rigurous and deterministic? Did you review all of its code?

Compilers have specifications, test suites, and teams of human beings (over decades) to ensure that what the compiler produces is nearly deterministic relative to code input. This is testable without even opening the black box.

LLMs are intentionally not deterministic, nor is their output subject to any known specification. Output is a point in a high dimensional manifold, determined by the input vector, but this manifold is unknowable in a real and intractable sense.

These are not equivalent constructions and it demeans you to conflate them.

Re: Human Judgment as a Specification

#20

Post by whattheheckheck »

lkey wrote: post #19
warkdarrior wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The difference is that a compiler is a rigorous, (nearly) determinisic, heavily tested artrifact built by expert humans. How do you know your compiler is a rigurous and deterministic? Did you review all of its code?

Compilers have specifications, test suites, and teams of human beings (over decades) to ensure that what the compiler produces is nearly deterministic relative to code input. This is testable without even opening the black box. LLMs are intentionally not deterministic, nor is their output subject to any known specification. Output is a point in a high dimensional manifold, determined by the input vector, but this man…

So write the thing that proves the black box of magic output satisfies the solution?
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