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We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works

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Re: We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works

#181

Post by hatthew »

VorpalWay wrote: post #85
saulpw wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When I took software focused computer engineering around 2010, we still had courses that took us all the way down to transistors and even the physics of P and N junctions and how that applies to CMOS. (And even some basic analog electronics.) Did I end up an expert at those layers? Of course not, but I know the basics and I know enough that if I need to I know where to start learning more. Just like I wasn't a C++ or…

Simply by the fact that you say computer engineering, you already went deeper than 99% of "computer people" in 2010

Re: We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works

#182

Post by imoverclocked »

klabb3 wrote: post #147
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of physical (and biological) processes are subjectively non-deterministic outside clean rooms. Doesn’t mean our ancestors couldn’t forge and selectively breed.

In engineering you have tolerances to deal with non-determinism. ”Within these bounds” and ”given these assumptions then…” is the foundation of building something _on top of_ those things. LLMs are the same, it relies on heavily exact Turing machines as input but its output is entirely unstable. Even if you can get determinism it will never get anything resembling ”bounds” out of the box. That makes it a poor foundat…

You’ve clearly not seen monkeys. /sarcasm

I would argue that management is a better discipline to pull from for employing LLMs; It is better equipped to deal with non-determinism and going completely off the rails.

Re: We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works

#183

Post by recursive »

conartist6 wrote: post #129
CharlesW wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI can't be a competent person , but inanmate things can be competent. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/competence

I disagree wholeheartedly. I do not give a fraction of a flying fuck what MW thinks competence is. I'm a goddamn engineer and I know what it means

If you use your own definition for words, don't be upset when there's confusion about what they mean when you try to communicate.

Re: We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works

#184

Post by matheusmoreira »

fritzo wrote: post #15

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.

I do at least try to understand all of those things.

Re: We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works

#185

Post by blks »

cylo wrote: post #141
roywiggins wrote: post #97

A shame that Pangram flags this as AI. https://www.pangram.com/history/c0a9cde2-7a5c-4588-83a3-0269...

Given that I’m the author, I promise you I’m a real human. It’s not AI. Obviously there’s a rise in pure AI writing but I find these sort of services that “analyze” content more harmful than good.

“Pure AI” so you haven’t used any LLM at all, or just partially?

Re: We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works

#187

Post by neerajsi »

budman1 wrote: post #156
vitally3643 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If your design work is not based upon science and mathematics, it is not engineering. Not saying engineering is required to build or improve a product; it is not. "try this" is not engineering.

I disagree. For example, the Wright brothers did air foil engineering empirically without full knowledge of the underlying fluid mechanics. Early and innovative engineering will often be less based on existing scientific or mathematical knowledge, while still using some of the methods. It's still absolutely defined as engineering.

Re: We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works

#188

Post by kev009 »

doitLP wrote: post #177
kev009 wrote: post #162

I came into the US tech industry in 2011 from a CS program (programming on my own longer), which was basically a pipeline into Java or web dev at that time (the classes on other things like OS, compilers, and FPGA were a thing, but seen by most as a hurdle not a promising or practical career pathways). Most of the people I dealt with for the decade following that (i.e. pre-LLM) had little clue how any part of compute…

> At a macro level brain rot is real, but it cuts across all generations and it started long before LLMs. The thing is, if there’s a way to do something easier people will generally just do that. All the nostalgia of the olden days has as a component that there were no alternatives as the example in the article highlights. We can try to preserve the hard way to things that gets improved, but the hard way will only ev…

Sure, humans are attracted to laziness by default and at its best technology must be used to lower toil and suffering (unfortunately there are unintended consequences etc for philosophical debates).

The bigger issue with brain rot is attention spans. Social media has ruined attention spans.

Re: We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works

#189

Post by munk-a »

CommieBobDole wrote: post #22

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…

Exactly, I find this sort of nostalgizing to be unhelpful. I am not _that_ old but I did cut my teeth on C++ and learned about manual memory management, programming language design and had a few (even at the time) esoteric courses about assembly language. I am not assembly fluent and have no desire to be - but getting an understanding of how higher level code compiles into lower level assembly/machine statements is invaluable to get a sense of how performance can be manipulated and the how impactful it can be to do "silly" things like unroll loops to minimize the number of instructions needed for some higher level operation.

Issac Newton/Bernard of Chartres said we stand on the shoulders of giants and that allows us to see further afield but it also loses the detail of the ground beneath us - modern folks will no longer have the broad expertise that someone struggling through building a computer from transistors would gain through overcoming that[1], but we should learn about it academically to garner the bits of knowledge that remain salient. It is incredibly useful when experts in these highly specific fields have the communication skills and knowledge to share what is relevant to others without overwhelming them[2] with detail.

1. Real modern consumer grade computers are far too complex to understand fully without dedicating your life (or a significant portion of it) solely to that. It is more pragmatic to allow specialization and small realm expertise instead.

2. Of course, if you want to geek out and learn the minutiae that's awesome - but we can only geek so much in our limited time here.

Re: We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works

#190

Post by hexasquid »

AIorNot wrote: post #54
CommieBobDole wrote: post #22

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…

Wait a second, its layers all the way down Exactly, I'm over 50 and I remember all the complaints about script kiddies who looked at windows bat files as opposed to all the 'real programmers' who knew C and Assembly and used VIM and linux (which is still going strong) (ie https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/378:_Real_Program... ) but now also as an AI engineer we have to learn how harnesses, sys prompts, vario…

I expect 20 years from now there will be people reminiscing "remember claude.md? Back then we knew how it all worked. We had deep control. We counted tokens, chose the model..."
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