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The Tower Keeps Rising

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Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#131

Post by The_Blade »

irishcoffee wrote: post #55
pixl97 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I'll meet you in the middle: an LLM "understands" words in the same way a toddler understands the phrases they say. "My want cookie!" The toddler has zero comprehension of what any of those words mean, but they know that saying them in that order might result in something desirable. An LLM has zero understanding of "my", "want", or "cookie" because an LLM has no id/ego, has never felt desire, and has never eaten a co…

the shy one of my shelter cats that figured out how to open and close the cabinet below the one with wet food at 3am without meowing has infinite more understanding than any LLM of how the world works

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#132

Post by sroerick »

Animats wrote: post #13
tekacs wrote: post #6

I've said for a long time that composability in software is a bit like playing Tetris: the lines have to clear. I feel like that gives an even more literal tower-rising metaphor, and that's what it feels like people using agents naively (and software engineers of lower skill or earlier-career), end up violating. Agents are getting better at folding things into themselves, especially if you direct them to... but unfor…

The upper bound on program complexity used to be the power of the human mind. "Vibe coding" can break through that barrier. But not because the problem being solved needs that complexity. Because the process does not drive itself towards compact abstractions. It's the AI-powered version of the scaling problem Brooks described back in "The Mythical Man-Month". The combinatoric problems get worse with scale. Concretely…

The Allegorical Agent-Aeon?

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#133

Post by sroerick »

ares623 wrote: post #93
baq wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Au contraire if typescript and rust didn’t steal the whole show it’d be a great time to be a lisp LLM pilot: agents can explain pretty much everything without any confabulations nowadays, so the understanding problem essentially goes away, if you care, which is exactly the point of the article if you ask me.

But at that point why use Lisp (which LLMs have been so far still to struggle to get matching parens every now and then) What made Lisp cool and powerful goes away when you do it through an LLM.

I have a web framework running with a lisp interpreter built in, and I think it unlocks a LOT for the LLMs.

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#134

Post by irishcoffee »

pixl97 wrote: post #65
irishcoffee wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll meet you in the middle: an LLM "understands" words in the same way a toddler understands the phrases they say. "My want cookie!" The toddler has zero comprehension of what any of those words mean, but they know that saying them in that order might result in something desirable. An LLM has zero understanding of "my", "want", or "cookie" because an LLM has no id/ego, has never felt desire, and has never eaten a co…

I believe you've made a category error in understanding, um, understanding. You've tied emotion into it. This to me are entirely different concepts where both happen to be wrapped up in meaty flesh that drives us humans. Now, these concepts are very important in sociology and human understanding of how we behave, but they also may have zero importance for the domain that encompases all understanding. HN would commonl…

No I didn’t. You just don’t like the analogy so you rejected it with a lot of empty words.

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#135

Post by sroerick »

baq wrote: post #96
ares623 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But at that point why use Lisp (which LLMs have been so far still to struggle to get matching parens every now and then) What made Lisp cool and powerful goes away when you do it through an LLM.

lisp can do things that make the currently accepted as standard best practice software engineering processes redundant, but it needs a different set of processes which I’m not sure are written about anywhere since apparently nobody is running with e.g. hot patching of application code

I'm doing fully interpreted Lisp with the AST stored in Postgres. I can access the REPL remotely and I honestly dont know if I'm ever going to build an API or CLI again

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#136

Post by CamperBob2 »

The_Blade wrote: post #131
irishcoffee wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll meet you in the middle: an LLM "understands" words in the same way a toddler understands the phrases they say. "My want cookie!" The toddler has zero comprehension of what any of those words mean, but they know that saying them in that order might result in something desirable. An LLM has zero understanding of "my", "want", or "cookie" because an LLM has no id/ego, has never felt desire, and has never eaten a co…

the shy one of my shelter cats that figured out how to open and close the cabinet below the one with wet food at 3am without meowing has infinite more understanding than any LLM of how the world works

How'd your cat do at IMO last year?

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#137

Post by irishcoffee »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #75
irishcoffee wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll meet you in the middle: an LLM "understands" words in the same way a toddler understands the phrases they say. "My want cookie!" The toddler has zero comprehension of what any of those words mean, but they know that saying them in that order might result in something desirable. An LLM has zero understanding of "my", "want", or "cookie" because an LLM has no id/ego, has never felt desire, and has never eaten a co…

I'll meet you in the middle: an LLM "understands" words in the same way a toddler understands the phrases they say. How'd your toddler do at IMO last year?

Ask an LLM for the difference between a definite and indefinite article, and then pronouns. Maybe just a whole run down of basic grammar. And then read the comment again.

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#138

Post by chongli »

gnatolf wrote: post #118
conartist6 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that not sound a little silly to you when you say it? Should I invest in becoming a memory athlete as a way of becoming a better software engineer? ...or should I learn how to build and use tools?

While I don't disagree, memory certainly was more of a restrictions on us humans than it is on llms. Therefore, the answer may not be as obvious as it seems. We build abstractions to reduce (memory) footprint of features, right?

Humans built codebases many millions of lines long, well before LLMs existed. Human memory has not been a restriction on us in a long time.

Look at all the libraries full of books we've built. It's useful for more than mere training sets.

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#139

Post by alkyon »

Ultimately, AI models will need to ingest the slop ziggurat they created. This means, other things being equal, that it won't be so easy as it is now to achieve incremental gains from the sheer fact of gobbling up more code.

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#140

Post by lstodd »

archonis wrote: post #115
jambalaya8 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time I think the past was better, I think about how terrible ksh scripting was in 1995. And look at how great peoples' bash scripting is now compared to when we though bash had reached its apex in like 2009.

Conversely, Rexx scripting on the desktop was glorious in 1995.

ARexx on Amiga was way before 1995. And it was glorious.
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