151–160 of 283 posts
> The knowledge is not in danger, in fact, it has never been safer. The AI models have read every manual that no human reads. They will recite, flawlessly and forever, exactly how all machines work. That's wrong, and that's exactly why the loss of knowledge is such a problem. LLMs do not, and cannot , actually know a single thing. They are a statistical model, not knowledge. When they give out wrong information ( and…
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No, that person is just the only one in his family who knows how computers work. There's plenty of people in generations both older and younger that know too, just apparently not his parents or his kids. Some of the most impressive assembly written today is by people younger than 20. It'll be fine.
It's broadly true though, that younger people struggle with the fundamentals of computing, even if there exists specific examples of young people accomplishing exceptional feats. We raised a generation of people on consumption-based computing devices, which means they don't develop the skills necessary to produce things using computers. Of course, we can teach these skills, but to do that, we must first acknowledge i…
I doubt you ever understood the solid state physics, semiconductor fabrication processes, supply chain logistics, monetary policy, shipping routes, mining engineering, etc. "Knowing how things work" is a stone-age attitude.
It's not hard to understand the physics and fabrication. The rest of that isn't part of how a computer works.
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 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.
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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 was a period of a century or more where steam engine design parameters were determined by experiment and gut feel. The physics of fluid dynamics required to explain why a design is optimal just did not exist yet. There's a lot of places in history where engineering far outpaced the science required to explain it.
Not saying engineering is required to build or improve a product; it is not.
"try this" is not engineering.
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No, that person is just the only one in his family who knows how computers work. There's plenty of people in generations both older and younger that know too, just apparently not his parents or his kids. Some of the most impressive assembly written today is by people younger than 20. It'll be fine.
It's broadly true though, that younger people struggle with the fundamentals of computing, even if there exists specific examples of young people accomplishing exceptional feats. We raised a generation of people on consumption-based computing devices, which means they don't develop the skills necessary to produce things using computers. Of course, we can teach these skills, but to do that, we must first acknowledge i…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. What? Definitely not. I went to university and my first two years were subjects where I had to understand really deep levels of abstractions. I had to build logic gates, I had to work with hardware, wires, etc. I didnt see the point back then (I never used any of that profes…
You started with logic gates. How much EE did you do, or the actual physics that makes the transistor possible? Those are the previous (deeper) levels that people had to know before they got abstracted away.
I've been thinking that there might not be new programming languages. The amount of code in the current popular ones will explode, so that's what all LLMs will be trained on. Good luck coming up with a new language and getting enough content out there that LLMs will be fluent with it. If true, I think that's a shame. There's plenty of innovation still to be done.
It certainly does worry me, though. As does the increasing amount of materials and manuals that seem to be written assuming the LLMs will be the (only? primary?) audience
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…
This is out the door for AI generated systems. Unless extreme care is taken there is is no consistency in these new-found codebases. New paradigms are introduced left and right, because in the eye of the LLM, and the prompter, they worked.
It didn't matter that the same pattern was repeated 37 times in a slightly different manner.
So your knowledge now is no longer portable.
It used to be that you could look at code, and ask why? And usually (not always) the answer was something like: 'I tried x, y, and z, and those didn't work', either by past experience or current experimentation. (we could argue if the current experimentation should be documented).
But for LLMs they put in something complex for no other reason than that it does what is requested. Reading a string from a valid source byte by byte until you hit \0 is valid, and it'll work. But if you take a step back at, read the API docs of what you're consuming, and then consider: if the API says X, why am I testing whether that's correct?