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Ape Coding [fiction]

rsaksida.com

141–150 of 154 posts

Re: Ape Coding [fiction]

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that is not true at all. Natural language is natural because it's good for communicating with fellow humans. We have ways to express needs, wants, feelings, doubts, ideas etc. It is not at all "natural" to program a computer with the same language because those computers were not part of the development of the language. Now, if we actually could develop a real natural language for programming that would be intere…

Natural languages are "natural" because they evolved as the de facto way for humans to communicate. Doesn't need to be with fellow humans, but humans were all we've been able to communicate with over our ~300,000 years of existence as a species. And we've done it in thousands of varieties. > currently LLMs do not participate in natural language development It's quite literally what LLMs are trained on. You create the…

A natural language is a living thing. Every day each speaker adjusts his model a tiny bit. This has advantages but also some serious disadvantages which is why technical writers are very careful to use only a small subset of the language in their writing.

For true natural language programming we'd need to develop a language for reliably describing programs, but this doesn't exist in the language, so why would it exist in the LLM models? It will never exist, unless we invent it, which is, of course, exactly what programming languages are.

Natural languages are not invented. Written scripts are said to be invented, but nobody says a natural language like English or French is invented. It just happened, naturally, as the name suggests.

If natural language were the end goal then mathematics and music would use it too. There's nothing stopping them.

Re: Ape Coding [fiction]

#142

> “Autonomous Proxies for Execration, or APEs,” Pluto said. > “By typing in a few simple commands, I can spawn an arbitrary number of APEs in the cloud,” Pluto said. > “I have hand-tuned the inner loops to the point where a single APE can generate over a megaBraden of wide-spectrum defamation. The number would be much larger, of course, if I didn’t have to pursue a range of strategies to evade spam filters, CAPTCHAs,…

Honestly this is a wonderful real life strategy.

Make a fictitious subject with all the traits of the person you really want to attack (Subject X). Have your social media bots attack Subject X. Anger spillover on social media will begin attacking your true target by trait association. The real target will have a difficult to impossible time coming at you via legal channels as there is no direct association.

Re: Ape Coding [fiction]

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is why I never use a calculator. I always use the calculator. But, because the numbers that get returned aren't always the right numbers, I try to approximate the answer in my head or with paper and pencil to kind of make sure it's in the ball park. Also, sometimes it returns digits that don't actually exist, and it's pretty insistent that the digit is correct. If I catch it early I just re-run the equation bu…

Solution for a hallucinating calculator: get a second unreliable calculator to verify the work of the first one. This message brought to you by a trillion dollars in investment desperately trying to replace the labor force with pseudo-intelligent calculators. Also, the calculator may refuse to process certain operation deemed to be offensive or against the interest of the corporate-state. Not to forget, the calculato…

>get a second unreliable calculator to verify the work of the first one

In do or die situations we actually use 3 calculators.

Re: Ape Coding [fiction]

#144
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean it is true to say that most people in the West now use a car for transport, and walking has become more of a leisure pursuit (rebranded as "hiking") rather than a practical necessity.

My car is typically used twice a week and (like many others) I mostly ride my bike or walk. I'm not special at all and I certainly use the car, but it has not replaced walking.

Hence why one persons behavior is called an anecdote.

Re: Ape Coding [fiction]

#145
post #35

It's pretty strange to me that we imagine a world where AI can handle every problem but we still talk about code. It's like how the Jetson's had bulky TVs. You don't talk about all the assembly high level languages make, or at least it's no longer how people view things. We don't say "look at this assembly I compiled." Instead the entire concept fades to the back.

The issue is you're measuring this statistic incorrectly.

If you look at the per capita number of people talking about assembly when looking at all the people on the planet it's highly likely there are more people looking at assembly now then whenever your back then was. Programmers simply where a tiny part of the population back then.

Each time we make coding easier and more high level we invite more programmers into the total pool.

Re: Ape Coding [fiction]

#147
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you sound like someone in 1995 saying "everyone will have their own webpage!" which is kind of true but also note how many people actually make their own custom website. Even for people who do have their own "custom" website, they usually use WordPress or an existing static-site generator with a theme they found and tweaked a little.

Websites are manually put together things. I'm talking about something that runs automatically in the background and you don't even think about it. Our computers today are 10,000 times faster than what we had in 1990. Now extrapolate into the future. 100 years from now someone will be able generate a custom OS at today's level as a toy in minutes or less.

The speed of light disagrees with you unless subatomic computing pops up at some point.

Or to put this a different way, they won't be developing a whole cloth custom OS but more like customizing a linux kernel to do what they want. The reason is there is some minimum of problem space exploration required, hence entropy generation needed, to understand the interactions of the hardware and it's limitations.

Hence if you wanted to run this 10,000,000X faster computer in the future to do what you are saying, it would explode like a supernova with the energy concentration required to do it quickly.

TL;DR it's a few trillion times more energy efficient not to do this.

Re: Ape Coding [fiction]

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Natural languages are "natural" because they evolved as the de facto way for humans to communicate. Doesn't need to be with fellow humans, but humans were all we've been able to communicate with over our ~300,000 years of existence as a species. And we've done it in thousands of varieties. > currently LLMs do not participate in natural language development It's quite literally what LLMs are trained on. You create the…

A natural language is a living thing. Every day each speaker adjusts his model a tiny bit. This has advantages but also some serious disadvantages which is why technical writers are very careful to use only a small subset of the language in their writing. For true natural language programming we'd need to develop a language for reliably describing programs, but this doesn't exist in the language, so why would it exis…

> For true natural language programming we'd need to develop a language for reliably describing programs

We really don't. Eventually we won't even be programming anymore per se. Consider communicating with someone who isn't fluent in any language you know, and vice versa. In the beginning you need to use a pretty restricted vocabulary set so you understand each other, similar to a programming language. But over time as communication continues, that vocabulary set grows and things become increasingly "natural", and it's easier for you to "program" each other.

Same with LLMs. We just need to get to the point where a model has sufficient user context (as it already has all the vocabulary) for effective communication. Like OpenClaw is currently accessing enough context for enough use cases that its popularity is through the roof. Tell it to do something, and as long as it has access to the relevant tools and services, it just gets it done. All naturally.

Re: Ape Coding [fiction]

#149
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Websites are manually put together things. I'm talking about something that runs automatically in the background and you don't even think about it. Our computers today are 10,000 times faster than what we had in 1990. Now extrapolate into the future. 100 years from now someone will be able generate a custom OS at today's level as a toy in minutes or less.

The speed of light disagrees with you unless subatomic computing pops up at some point. Or to put this a different way, they won't be developing a whole cloth custom OS but more like customizing a linux kernel to do what they want. The reason is there is some minimum of problem space exploration required, hence entropy generation needed, to understand the interactions of the hardware and it's limitations. Hence if yo…

It's amusing to me that folks think nanometer size is the only way to increase density. Also your math is quite a bit off. 10,000 times more compute than a current average desktop is only 10,000 times more energy ... today. Let alone decades from now.

Re: Ape Coding [fiction]

#150
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The speed of light disagrees with you unless subatomic computing pops up at some point. Or to put this a different way, they won't be developing a whole cloth custom OS but more like customizing a linux kernel to do what they want. The reason is there is some minimum of problem space exploration required, hence entropy generation needed, to understand the interactions of the hardware and it's limitations. Hence if yo…

It's amusing to me that folks think nanometer size is the only way to increase density. Also your math is quite a bit off. 10,000 times more compute than a current average desktop is only 10,000 times more energy ... today. Let alone decades from now.

And way over 10,000 times more distance, hence why I'm talking about speed of light. We've made very few to no advances on cooling high energy 3d structures in a long term reliable way. Things start to get very big very fast and use a lot of power, hence generating a ton of heat.
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