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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

#261

Post by EvanAnderson »

ajuc wrote: post #146
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of physical (and biological) processes are subjectively non-deterministic outside clean rooms. Doesn’t mean our ancestors couldn’t forge and selectively breed.

There's a pretty cool article about trying to understand electronics and fix a radio the way we try to understand biology. https://mappingignorance.org/2014/07/02/biologists-cant-unde... So now instead of improving the tools of biology so we can actually understand it deeply - we increase complexity of IT so we have to rely on muddy, side-effecty tools of biology to try to infer some of the properties of the systems…

I feel crushing sadness when I think about how humans made these wonderful deterministic machines that we can understand and manipulate to do our bidding. Within a scant few generations, though, we've managed to effectively turn them into "magic boxes" that, soon, we'll only be able to poke and prod at when they don't do what we want.

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

#262

Post by dbalatero »

Insanity wrote: post #67
AIorNot wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait a second, its layers all the way down Exactly, I'm over 50 and I remember all the complaints about script kiddies who looked at windows bat files as opposed to all the 'real programmers' who knew C and Assembly and used VIM and linux (which is still going strong) (ie https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/378:_Real_Program... ) but now also as an AI engineer we have to learn how harnesses, sys prompts, vario…

A (sad/funny) anecdote. Someone told me earlier this week "Not using a coding agent today is like using Vim for development instead of an IDE, you're just lagging behind". As someone who's been exclusively using Vim for my development (and can definitely integrate it with AI workflows), that's just an insanely silly opinion. But I guess it shows how the next generation thinks about these tools that they've heard of b…

I just ignore people that can't coherently talk about the pros and cons of Vim.

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

#263

Post by mrob »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #258
mrob wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a big difference between "deterministic + noise" non-determinism and "intelligent agent" non-determinism. Only the former can be statistically modeled to characterize and work around the noise with any reliability. If you measure hallucination rate for one prompt it tells you nothing about hallucination rate for another prompt.

> There's a big difference between "deterministic + noise" non-determinism and "intelligent agent" non-determinism I think I agree, but could you expand? My point is humans have made progress on understanding systems without clean determinism. Genetics and cosmology is technically deterministic, practically speaking, but I don’t think that’s accessible to pre-modern societies. Instead, trends and tendencies were obse…

One big difference is the former doesn't "know" it's being experimented on. Gregor Mendel was able to grow large numbers of pea plants and identify patterns in their inheritance because the non-determinism followed consistent statistical laws. A plant can't suddenly decide to follow different laws of genetics because it saw a biologist.

On the other hand, an LLM "knows" what a benchmark is, and is capable of detecting benchmark-like scenarios. A prompt that appears reliable in testing may fail unexpected in the real world. In this way, an LLM is like a stock market (also composed of intelligent agents): the act of experimenting on it changes its properties. Such systems are never reliably predictable.

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

#264

Post by raxxorraxor »

Lwerewolf wrote: post #3

Modding communities are still going. Kids, afaik, are still playing around with hosting minecraft servers or whatever is en vogue/cool/meta/etc nowadays. DIY 8-bit computers are gaining popularity. IMO the fact that something's become very mainstream doesn't necessarily mean it's been watered down for everybody. There will always be people with various levels of curiosity and enthusiasm.

I think so too. The others were already lost when smartphone replaced computers for the casual user.

Although I could imagine never having invested in software development if an agent could just have solved my problems. Same with learning an instrument. Very slow progress to what an AI can do today. And for most pop songs you cannot even claim that it copied more than the other generic pop songs.

Yes, if you cannot trim the code, there is a complexity barrier you won't march through.

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

#265

Post by throw0101a »

saulpw wrote: post #57
101008 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The issue with this is that we don't know how it works. Generally speaking, we know how the level of abstraction that we were born with works. What? Definitely not. I went to university and my first two years were subjects where I had to understand really deep levels of abstractions. I had to build logic gates, I had to work with hardware, wires, etc. I didnt see the point back then (I never used any of that profes…

You started with logic gates. How much EE did you do, or the actual physics that makes the transistor possible? Those are the previous (deeper) levels that people had to know before they got abstracted away.

> You started with logic gates. How much EE did you do, or the actual physics that makes the transistor possible?

As someone with an EE degree, in first year studies we had physics classes on quantum topics that talked about electron tunnelling and its applicability to transistors:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_physics

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

#267

Post by tines »

switchbak wrote: post #249
tines wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you can use a TV to read books, but nobody does. Every technology has ways it can be used, and ways it wants to be used. This one wants to be used in a way that produces outcomes we won't like.

That’s the “diets don’t work” line. I’m not denying that most people use AI for the path of least resistance, but I am saying that there’s more potential than just that, and it’s almost entirely overlooked in the broad debate.

Bad counterexample, c.f. the current obesity epidemic and the popularity of GLP-1s.

I get what you're saying, it's just that I think what you're saying is not overlooked, it's simply insignificant to the debate about the effect of these tools on society. Your argument comes off to me like someone saying "everyone is complaining about how these cigarettes cause cancer, but you can just as easily use lit cigarettes to warm your hands on a cold day. This is what everyone's missing in this debate."

I don't think we can change each others' minds with talk, we'll just have to see how it plays out in the coming decades.

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

#268

Post by WJW »

StanislavPetrov wrote: post #219
WJW wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Young people know all about computers" was never true either. It was maybe true for people like you and me, the type of people who now frequent places like HN. But for the vast majority of people, computers were never all that interesting.

>"Young people know all about computers" was never true either. That's true, but only because not all young people owned or used computers. I was born in the mid 70s and got my first computer as a young child. Back then you had to "know all about computers" to use the computer and get it to function. These days, every kid grows up surrounded by computers, with a computer in their pocket, and very few have even an ink…

It wouldn't have been true even if all young people in our generation would have had all the access to computers they would've liked. Most people just don't like tinkering with technology and that's fine!

The whole argument is pretty dumb anyway. Just try replacing "computers" with any other technology and you see how weird it starts sounding.

- "People use roads every day but almost nobody even knows how to make asphalt from scratch these days."

- "People use electricity every day but almost nobody even knows the basic equations for electric generators."

- "Children these days use refrigerators only as consumers, they don't even understand the differences between HCFC and A3 type refrigerants..."

Computer programmers despairing about how few children understand computers has strong vibes from https://xkcd.com/2501/ IMO.

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

#269

Post by ghjv »

nairboon wrote: post #216
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.

That's not an AI text.

It's 100% AI Generated, stick it in Pangram yourself and see.

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

#270

Post by JumpCrisscross »

gonzalohm wrote: post #110
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of physical (and biological) processes are subjectively non-deterministic outside clean rooms. Doesn’t mean our ancestors couldn’t forge and selectively breed.

I think it's safe to say that computing should be mostly deterministic. I know compilers use heuristics that are stochastic, but come on. Imagine if you were given a layer of abstraction that randomly flipped bits from time to time... That's not an abstraction, it's random programming.

> Imagine if you were given a layer of abstraction that randomly flipped bits from time to time

To be fair, this isn’t a bad description of human vision.

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