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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

#221

Post by eikenberry »

tines wrote: post #155
staindk wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People use the word "determinism" when they really mean something akin to "linearity", i.e. the predictability of a change in input on a change in output. Compilers for example are both deterministic and "more linear" in the sense that I can tell what the output will look like given a change in input (yes yes optimizations violate this to a small degree). LLMs can be made totally deterministic, but a seemingly insign…

The generally used term that I'm familiar with for this is "referential transparency", that given the same inputs you'll get the same outputs every time. LLMs can be deterministic (referentially transparent) but almost none are, i.e. when they are given the exact same input they do not return the exact same output.

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

#222

Post by klibertp »

throeei4 wrote: post #21

> The graybeards are aging out, nobody compiles their kernel anymore, and someday something deep will break and there will be no one left who can climb down and fix it. Maybe. But I think competence is the part that’s fine. > knew a beige computer in 1995 that wouldn’t run a game until I had rearranged its bits by hand. More dependent than ever If you look at previous article from this author, it says how Mac is amaz…

That other post is just plain wrong. LLMs are just about the only thing that can meaningfully benefit from having access to almost all the code your environment is built from. If you're on Linux, the agents not only have all that code accessible in web search, but also almost certainly include most of it in their training data.

If anything, agents are an opportunity for the "Linux year on the desktop". Granted, I don't personally believe Linux needs to have that year; it's just fine without any mass adoption there. It's simply no longer that important a segment. I thought most of the debate around that also died out years ago (perhaps even a decade?)

Still, I recently had the opportunity to compare how Codex configures macOS and Fedora for the same task, and the latter was a bit faster and significantly cheaper (in tokens). That's obviously anecdata - maybe the particular task was overrepresented on one side or something - but I wouldn't be surprised if this was a more general trend.

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

#223

Post by andai »

Hfuffzehn wrote: post #208
andai wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/h8ElOpITBjQ > It was a Minecraft convention. We had the game set up with a keyboard, and a controller. By the 2nd day we realized, none of the kids could use a keyboard. So on the 2nd day we set up two controllers instead. > Then I noticed something else. We counted it. 50% of the kids would come up to the console, push the controller out of the way, and try to touch the screen.

I never felt more violated than when a coworker 15 years younger than me started to touch my work laptop screen. I mean, she was right, it turned out to be a touch screen, but really who does something like that?

When I was growing up, my school had Macintosh Computers, and their displays were Soft and Squishy, and we'd spend long periods of time just squishing the displays to observe the satisfying visual effects that this would produce.

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

#224

Post by no_multitudes »

busymom0 wrote: post #214
b40d-48b2-979e wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps that's a you issue? but it has tells all throughout the text.

Would you mind elaborating on what other tells the text had that it's written by AI? The top comment only based off of one sentence which to me doesn't seem AI. And the author is saying in comments here that it's not AI. I am genuinely curious as I'd like to update my brain on how to detect AI slop if that's the case here.

> "they will be as easy with it as you are with the light switch you never once thought about."

This metaphor doesn't really feel coherent.

> "What is dying is acquaintance."

This is a very odd topic sentence.

> "The kids coming up will not feel this as a loss, and they are not wrong not to."

Claude loves stacking big piles of negatives and arguing both sides of everything.

> "I went looking the other night for a recording of a modem connecting. People keep them around like pressed flowers."

No they don't?? People don't keep recordings of modems connecting around like pressed flowers. I, of course, understand that this is a simile. The simile just does not make sense.

> "I played one back for no reason except to hear it."

Again, note the unnecessarily florid negative phrasing. It would be much more parsimonious to write "I played one back just to hear it"

> "I know that sound by heart. People will never know the machine that just played the sound back to me. Not the way I knew the one that used to make it."

> "The difficulty was the knowledge. You came to know that machine the way you come to know anything that pushes back. The resistance was the whole medium."

The X -was- the Y, twice in short succession, to say the same thing.

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

#225

Post by DrProtic »

no_multitudes wrote: post #224
busymom0 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind elaborating on what other tells the text had that it's written by AI? The top comment only based off of one sentence which to me doesn't seem AI. And the author is saying in comments here that it's not AI. I am genuinely curious as I'd like to update my brain on how to detect AI slop if that's the case here.

> "they will be as easy with it as you are with the light switch you never once thought about." This metaphor doesn't really feel coherent. > "What is dying is acquaintance." This is a very odd topic sentence. > "The kids coming up will not feel this as a loss, and they are not wrong not to." Claude loves stacking big piles of negatives and arguing both sides of everything. > "I went looking the other night for a rec…

The problem here is, you might be right, it makes sense. But, make it more approachable. Tell people why you think that, elaborate. Don't assume everyone is on the same page.

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

#226

Post by klibertp »

legobmw99 wrote: post #159
jtwaleson wrote: post #47

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.

How pessimistic you are on this subject depends on how much you believe in domain transfer for these tools. No programming language sprung out of a vacuum, and it seems reasonable to think that a LLM sufficiently trained on all the C++, Haskell, and OCaml in the world could probably do a decent job at writing Rust, even if it had never seen it before, given the rust compiler as a tool and rust documentation as input…

> How pessimistic you are on this subject depends on how much you believe in domain transfer for these tools.

I tried to force various LLMs to generate many strange languages for the past 3 years. From Raku to Smalltalk, to Common Lisp and Janet, to Prolog, D, Nim, Zig, Elixir, F#, etc.

It's a mess.

They do a mostly good job with language semantics. Agents can also use standard tooling to catch and fix syntax errors. So far so good, though if a given language provides an unusual implementation for a popular feature, the model can get confused. It's usually easy to spot.

The problem is with the ecosystems. They tend to be tiny, and for new languages, they will be tiny almost by definition. As a result, the vast majority of the generated code either reimplements things from scratch or hallucinates dependencies. Since the agents iterate and the hallucinated deps don't materialize, the model fixes that... more often than not by writing from scratch. Or leaving a `// TODO:` comment.

What I found helpful is straight-up vendoring deps as submodules. Armed with grep and sources, they are much more likely to produce working code. But that also means you still need to handle the dependencies yourself, while it'll "just work" for a Kotlin/Gradle project.

It doesn't matter for all projects to the same degree, of course, but it is a pain point that will add to the difficulty (sky-high already) of a new language getting any traction, unfortunately :(

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

#227

Post by dw_arthur »

busymom0 wrote: post #201
no_multitudes wrote: post #170

>The difficulty was the knowledge. Please write your blog posts yourself. I don't want to have to parse through this stupid claude output to get to your point. Literally just posting the prompt would be better than this.

Hmmmm, I didn't read that as AI. What gives?

It reads like marketing speak is the problem. Why is it written in such a urgent, compelling manner with those short punchy sentences? It may not be AI, but no one writes like that naturally. Maybe the author picked it up from reading a bunch of AI writing? The repetition of using you as a subject is also a red flag.

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

#228

Post by antisthenes »

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.

> "Knowing how things work" is a stone-age attitude.

What absolute nonsense. To openly admit to be proud of one's ignorance.

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

#229

Post by cylo »

no_multitudes wrote: post #224
busymom0 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind elaborating on what other tells the text had that it's written by AI? The top comment only based off of one sentence which to me doesn't seem AI. And the author is saying in comments here that it's not AI. I am genuinely curious as I'd like to update my brain on how to detect AI slop if that's the case here.

> "they will be as easy with it as you are with the light switch you never once thought about." This metaphor doesn't really feel coherent. > "What is dying is acquaintance." This is a very odd topic sentence. > "The kids coming up will not feel this as a loss, and they are not wrong not to." Claude loves stacking big piles of negatives and arguing both sides of everything. > "I went looking the other night for a rec…

There's an old saying of "Never Wrestle with a Pig. You Both Get Dirty and the Pig Likes It" which I'm about to fall victim to here.

The bulk of your comment history seems to be finger-wagging these kinds of slop accusations on others. Maybe you're right with the others, but I definitely know you're not right on this one.

What you're pointing out here sounds more like you just don't like the style of writing and the attempt to add some nostalgia to it, which is perfectly okay to not like. That's not something I can do much about and I'm not forcing you to read the post.

Yet you clearly read the post, and I think we'd all get more out of hearing what you think of the underlying premise rather than you circling some adjectives.

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

#230

Post by MajesticHobo2 »

no_multitudes wrote: post #205
cylo wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is interesting that your recent posts have much more LLM style tics than your post on the same site from 2023. Are you deliberately imitating LLM writing quirks?

Why does it have to be deliberate? It's not surprising that people exposed to output from LLMs will unconsciously pick up their linguistic habits.
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