101–110 of 283 posts
Competence Does Not Mean What You Think it Means. Please don't fucking tell people that AI is competent. It is not and it cannot ever be because it is not alive .
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Exactly. Please get used to this sort of depressive, absurd and out of touch tone from HNers, it’s literally all they do now. Don’t bother calling people here hackers anymore, they have checked out emotionally and spiritually.
come on now. so even if you're right, checking out emotionally and spiritually just means more life lived. That ain't some kind of bad thing. life is good sometimes. hard sometimes. and it's long sometimes, so give people a break.
What exactly about checking out makes it 'more living'? I sense a false dichotomy here
The issue with this is that we don't know how it works. Generally speaking, we know how the level of abstraction that we were born with works. We might have some understanding of one or two previous levels, but that decreases the farther down you go. We might understand the next level, and some of the next after that, but eventually people will be making things that we don't have the context to understand without hav…
I think it's more that "Some human some time has known how it works", not that "Any given human knows how it (all) works.". But yea this glosses over a bit trial-and-error designs and, so to speak, "genetic optimization" kinds of designs where we just try random stuff and say "Hey, this works. Not sure why, but it works.".
There's a lot of places in history where engineering far outpaced the science required to explain it.
The change from punch cards to magnetic storage certainly made it so you didn't have to "know how it works" for every single bit.
The change from machine code to a language like Fortran brought about such an abstraction that a Fortran dev didn't "know how it works" at that same level anymore.
At this point, the layers of abstractions between using a React component and something being rendered is immense. React VDOM, the real DOM, browser render engine (which sits on abstractions like ANGLE, skia, etc), calls OS APIs, which call driver APIs, and the lowest level of anything it is still C/C++ that is compiled (abstracted) to something closer to what the hardware expects.
I won't bore you with the ChatGPT output details, but it estimated at least 35 meaningful layers of abstraction between a React component and being rendered to the screen. LLMs seem to be the latest level of abstraction to make it so we "know how it works" less than before.
Oh come on! Of course I wondered how a light switch work, and I then learnt. I remember taking apart broken electronics as a kid, and that later morphed into also trying to repair things. Including the computer (both hardware and software wise). I remember ending up reinstalling the OS so many times as a kid on the computer I had access to when I broke it in various ways past what I was able to fix.
Sure, not everyone will have that drive to understand how the world around them works under the hood. But for engineers and scientists I would expect a far higher percentage to have that sort of personality.
It doesn't matter if it isn't "pushing back", just that I don't understand it is enough to catch my interest and a reason to go poking at the thing.
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I do think there's something to be said for the big difference in the current abstraction layer jump - the loss of determinism. It is meaningfully different.
Plenty of physical (and biological) processes are subjectively non-deterministic outside clean rooms. Doesn’t mean our ancestors couldn’t forge and selectively breed.
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What's absurd is thinking because you took a logic class and made a flip flop 30 years ago that that is the ground floor and that it means you "understand how it all works". You're not building a CPU from logic gates and you don't know how it works. If I put you or OP in a room for a year I highly doubt you could build an 8 bit Atari-like CPU from scratch. I worked with wires and logic too but I'm not arrogant enough…
Don't you think there is a difference from "knowing how it works" and "reproducing every aspect of it at the level of the state of the art" ? Also, your example seems flawed if you restrict to a certain product. Can I build a compiler from scratch? Yes. Can I reproduce in a year a compiler with LLVM/GCC performance level? No. Can I build a compiler from scratch in a year from a room if I need to starting mining from…
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I do think there's something to be said for the big difference in the current abstraction layer jump - the loss of determinism. It is meaningfully different.
Plenty of physical (and biological) processes are subjectively non-deterministic outside clean rooms. Doesn’t mean our ancestors couldn’t forge and selectively breed.