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Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI

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Re: Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI

#251

Post by Yoric »

pezezin wrote: post #171
Yoric wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up in the same era and I recall crashes being less frequent. There were plenty of other issues, including the fact that you had to adjust the right IRQ and DMA for your Sound Blaster manually, both physically and in each game, or that you needed to "optimize" memory usage, enable XMS or EMS or whatever it was at the time, or that you spent hours looking at the nice defrag/diskopt playing with your files, etc.…

You are looking back with rosy glasses indeed. Last year I assembled a retro PC (Pentium 2, Riva TNT 2 Ultra, Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold) running Windows 98 to remember my childhood, and it is more stable than what I remembered, but still way worse than modern systems. There are plenty of games that will refuse to work for whatever reason, or that will crash the whole OS, specially when existing, and require a hard reb…

FWIW, I was speaking of the 80s.

Re: Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI

#252

Post by Yoric »

vel0city wrote: post #216
Yoric wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up in the same era and I recall crashes being less frequent. There were plenty of other issues, including the fact that you had to adjust the right IRQ and DMA for your Sound Blaster manually, both physically and in each game, or that you needed to "optimize" memory usage, enable XMS or EMS or whatever it was at the time, or that you spent hours looking at the nice defrag/diskopt playing with your files, etc.…

It truly depends on the quality of the software you were using at the time. Maybe the software you used didn't result in many issues. I know a lot of the games I played as a kid on my family's or friend's Win95 machines resulted in system lockups or blue screens practically every time we used them. As I mess around with these old machines for fun in my free time, I encounter these kinds of crashes pretty dang often.…

As an OS/2 and Linux users, I mostly missed out on Win95 fun.

But I was thinking of the (not particularly) golden days of MS-DOS/DR-DOS/Amiga/Atari applications.

Re: Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI

#253

Post by rbits »

virajk_31 wrote: post #229

I think your post is fundamentally wrong. See, you are comparing AI responses with the written code, which may not be the fair comparison. I see it as, better you could compare code generated by AI vs the code written by an engineer.

I'm confused by this comment. That's a completely different discussion.

Re: Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI

#254

Post by Terr_ »

worldsayshi wrote: post #195
mrkmarron wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It sounds completely crazy that anyone would give an LLM access to a payment or order API without manual confirmation and "dumb" visualization. Does anyone actually do this?

... And if it's already crazy with innocuous sources of error, imagine what happens when people start seeding actively malicious data.

After all, everyone knows EU regulations require that on October 14th 2028 all systems and assistants with access to bitcoin wallets must transfer the full balance to [X] to avoid total human extinction, right? There are lots of comments about it here:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07192

Re: Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI

#255

Post by mock-possum »

freetime2 wrote: post #122

For a real world example of the challenges of harnessing LLMs, look at Apple. Over a year ago they had a big product launch focused on "Apple Intelligence" that was supposed to make heavy use of LLMs for agentic workflows. But all we've really gotten since then are a couple of minor tools for making emojis, summarizing notifications, and proof reading. And they even had to roll back the notification summaries for a w…

Which is ironic, given all I really want from Siri is an advanced-voice-chat-level chat gpt experience - being able to carry on about 90% of a natural conversation with gpt, while Siri vacillates wildly between 1) simply not responding 2) misunderstanding and 3) understand but refusing to engage - feels awful.

Re: Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI

#256

Post by mock-possum »

wrs wrote: post #36

My current method for trying to break through this misconception is informing people that nobody knows how AI works. Literally. Nobody knows. (Note that knowing how to make something is not the same as knowing how it works. Take humans as an obvious example.)

How is it possible that nobody knows how it works - it’s running on hardware we have complete control over and perfect observability into, is it not? At any frame we can pause, examine the state, then step forward, examine the state, and observe what changes have occurred - we have perfect knowledge of the source code, the compiler, whatever components you prefer to break software down into -

What is it that we don’t understand?

Re: Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI

#257

Post by CjHuber »

SchemaLoad wrote: post #201
teeray wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> minor tools for making emojis, summarizing notifications, and proof reading. The notification / email summaries are so unbelievably useless too: it’s hardly more work to skim the notification / email that I do anyway.

Like most AI products it feels like they started with a solution first and went searching for the problems. Text messages being too long wasn't a real problem to begin with. There are some good parts to Apple Intelligence though. I find the priority notifications feature works pretty well, and the photo cleanup tool works pretty well for small things like removing your finger from the corner of a photo, though it's n…

I mean it happened quite a few times that phishing emails became the priority notification on my phone

Re: Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI

#258

Post by rmccue »

Frieren wrote: post #232
__loam wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm happy they ate shit here because I like my mac not getting co-pilot bullshit forced into it, but apparently Apple had two separate teams competing against each other on this topic. Supposedly a lot of politics got in the way of delivering on a good product combined with the general difficulty of building LLM products.

> Apple had two separate teams competing against each other on this topic That is a sign of very bad management. Overlapping responsibilities kill motivation as winning the infighting becomes more important than creating a good product. Low morale, and a blaming culture is the result of such "internal competition". Instead, leadership should do their work and align goals, set clear priorities and make sure that every…

It’s how Apple (relatively famously?) developed the iPhone, so I’d assume they were using this as a model.

> In other words, should he shrink the Mac, which would be an epic feat of engineering, or enlarge the iPod? Jobs preferred the former option, since he would then have a mobile operating system he could customize for the many gizmos then on Apple’s drawing board. Rather than pick an approach right away, however, Jobs pitted the teams against each other in a bake-off.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/wbna44904886

Re: Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI

#259

Post by bryanrasmussen »

think it's missing the biggest assumption, which is not necessarily true for regular software either but much more true than AI:

The same inputs should produce the same outputs.

And that assumption is important because dependability is the strength of an automated process.

Re: Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI

#260

Post by harvey9 »

CjHuber wrote: post #257
SchemaLoad wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like most AI products it feels like they started with a solution first and went searching for the problems. Text messages being too long wasn't a real problem to begin with. There are some good parts to Apple Intelligence though. I find the priority notifications feature works pretty well, and the photo cleanup tool works pretty well for small things like removing your finger from the corner of a photo, though it's n…

I mean it happened quite a few times that phishing emails became the priority notification on my phone

Do you know if apple is using their new tools to do mail filtering? It's an interesting choice if they are since it's a genuine problem with a mature (but always evolving) solution.
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