Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Automation Without Understanding

arxiv.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–64 of 64 posts

Re: Automation Without Understanding

#61

Post by evolve-maz »

lrizzo wrote: post #53
evolve-maz wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't seen a code base which hasn't fallen into degradation from that loop. From personal experience, any "correction" leads to an LLM writing more code, or stripping apart interfaces and mixing logic poorly, or adding some hidden control flow just to catch that edge case rather than the general case for that category of input.

same as in real life?

I wouldn't accept that junk from any engineer in my team.

My experience with good developers has been:

- Create something a bit ugly which works

- As more use cases come in, refactor code and clean up old gnarly bits

LLMs tend to work architecture astronaut style mixed with a junior for implementation. Build theoretically good interfaces but then implement dependencies across all of them. And when changes happen, keep feeding that cycle.

Re: Automation Without Understanding

#62

Post by browski »

supriyo-biswas wrote: post #47
browski wrote: post #6

Yeah how many of us know how to build an ICE engine or shoes of any meaningful quality We set upon end of human craftsmanship decades ago Math is probably the easiest to reclaim given its right in front our faces going about daily life. The syntax of math is not that important; real world quantification the syntax is meant to represent will still exist. Our biochemistry implicitly operates on senses of enough food an…

Arguably, the loss of specialized knowledge is what is holding countries like the US back in domains such as shipbuilding[1], rare-earth refining, and semiconductors. Losing that knowledge puts the losing community in a bad position, and those communities who maintain this information somehow will end up being able to preserve their ability to reason and improve things. Though I don’t expect our current crop of US le…

[dead]

Re: Automation Without Understanding

#63

Post by piloto_ciego »

asdff wrote: post #42
piloto_ciego wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the billionaire folks are pathological or opportunists, nothing really more. As for your landlord, I doubt that will be a problem either. You cannot make 40% - 80% of the country structurally unemployable with AI and eventually robots and keep this same economic system. It will be weird, it’s not going to be hugely fun, but I’m betting that we either get massive deflation, huge changes in land use policy, rev…

Things get sticky fast the longer you think on this problem and the fact leadership has always held little interest in equal distribution of the planet's spare resources vs crony corruption and nepotism. Hard to imagine a future that doesn't look like mad max outside the billionaire compounds protected by loitering robots and drones along with space based technology immune to any rebellion.

It’s really not that hard though. It could be “the culture” or FALC or something similar if we actually decide that is what we want.
Post reply on HN