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Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

stevekrouse.com

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Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#421

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

pier25 wrote: post #381
smokedetector1 wrote: post #367

> unless you believe in magic, it's only a matter of time until we reach the point at which machine intelligence is indistinguishable from human intelligence I find this flippancy about the greatest mystery in the universe extremely arrogant and incurious and wish it wouldn't be so prevalent.

In theory a computer should be able to model any physical process so I do agree it's only a matter of time. That said I don't think I will be alive to see it honestly. The current tech won't get us there just like the steam engine or the internal combustion engine didn't get us to the Moon. And getting to AGI is probably more like getting to Mars.

I personally think we have some tremendous energy problems (and the negative externalities derived from “solutions”) to contend with before we even sniff AGI.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#422

Post by weakfish »

shimman wrote: post #406
moconnor wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been programming professionally for 25 years. Well, 24 really because in the whole last year I barely wrote a line myself but my output increased dramatically. If you can’t see that it’s over, I’m not sure what to tell you. You will, in time.

The type of work matters and understanding how capital interacts with labor is something that hasn't really changed over the last 150 years (not the first time productivity tools have been introduced in capitalism). All we are going to get is increased mass surveillance and molding software engineers into more assembly line work. Both things do not sound good or reasonable nor wanted by a majority in our industry. Bu…

+1, it feels very much like a case of _feeling_ more productive because you’re outputting more …stuff…, but IME, it’s easy to produce a lot of stuff that isn’t useful and just creates a productive vibe (pun intended)

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#424

Post by j45 »

lateforwork wrote: post #71

Chris Lattner, inventor of the Swift programming language recently took a look at a compiler entirely written by Claude AI. Lattner found nothing innovative in the code generated by AI [1]. And this is why humans will be needed to advance the state of the art. AI tends to accept conventional wisdom. Because of this, it struggles with genuine critical thinking and cannot independently advance the state of the art. AI…

LLMs helping with code that is averge to above average might be an improvement overall across most projects, and I also have found that some things that LLMs suggest to me that are new to me can feel innovative, but areas I have experience with I often have a different or more effective way to start at instead of iterating towards it while trying to contain complexity.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#425

Post by nradov »

slopinthebag wrote: post #285
CamperBob2 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a chat bot coding world, how do we ever progress to new technologies? Funny, I'd say the same thing about traditional programming. Someone from K&R's group at Bell Labs, straight out of 1972, would have no problem recognizing my day-to-day workflow. I fire up a text editor, edit some C code, compile it, and run it. Lather, rinse, repeat, all by hand. That's not OK. That's not the way this industry was ever suppose…

That's your fault for still writing C in Ed :P But I do broadly agree that we still write code for a lot of shit that should have been automated long before. I'm not actually sure why it hasn't been automated yet. LLM's can kind of do it, I just wish we had automated it with something deterministic and human.

The fact that LLMs can kind of do it is an indictment of current programming languages and frameworks. We're coding at too low a level of abstraction. Code has too much boilerplate, too little entropy. We need a new generation of much higher level languages which would obviate much of the need for code generation. Of course, the tension there is that high-level abstractions always leak and don't work well when maximum performance and efficiency is required.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#426

Post by chongli »

sally_glance wrote: post #288
chongli wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Experimentation leads to experience Of course it does, but only after the fact. You don't have any experience of the result of the experiment before you perform it . Sure, they can't have apples fall on their heads like Newton had but they can totally observe the apple falling on someones head in a video I have strong doubts that LLMs have any understanding whatsoever of what's happening in images (let alone videos).…

In software, they can and do perform experiments (make a change then observe the log output). I don't think they possess a "world model" or that it's worth spending too much thought on... My reasoning is more along the lines that our brains are also just [very advanced] inference machines. We also hallucinate and mis-identify images (there are image/video classification tasks where humans have lower scores). For me t…

Software is not the world. It’s a tiny bit of what humans do.

The lack of online learning is a critical fault. Much of what humans learn (such as anything based on mathematics) has a dependency tree of stuff to learn. But even mundane stuff involves a lot of dependent learning. For example, ask an LLM to write a cookbook and it can synthesize from recipes that are already out there but good luck having it invent new cooking techniques that require experimentation or invention (new heat source, new cooking utensils, etc).

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#427

Post by logicchains »

smokedetector1 wrote: post #367

> unless you believe in magic, it's only a matter of time until we reach the point at which machine intelligence is indistinguishable from human intelligence I find this flippancy about the greatest mystery in the universe extremely arrogant and incurious and wish it wouldn't be so prevalent.

>I find this flippancy about the greatest mystery in the universe extremely arrogant and incurious and wish it wouldn't be so prevalent.

There's absolutely nothing mysterious about human intelligence unless you refuse to give it a clear definition. All the people waffling on about AGI refuse to give a clear, measurable definition of intelligence, because if they defined it exactly then it's possible to clearly determine whether a given machine does or does not meet that criteria. It's just 21st century woo peddling.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#428

Post by throwup238 »

elgertam wrote: post #348
jofzar wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead of spending hours getting two or three systems to integrate with mine with the proper OAuth scopes or SAML and so on As someone who's job is handling oauth and saml scope, I am not convinced anyone can get these right. Saml atleast acts nice, oauth on the other hand is a fucking nightmare.

Every time I request the wrong OAuth scope that doesn't have the authorization to do what I need, then make a failing request, I hear Jim Gaffigan affecting a funny authoritative voice saying, "No." I can't be the only one who defensively requests too much authority beyond what I need with extra OAuth scopes, hoping one of them will give me the correct access. I've had much better luck with LLMs telling me exactly wh…

I always hear Little Britain’s “computer says nooooo”

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#429

Post by logicchains »

TheTaytay wrote: post #253
isaachinman wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would strongly advise using Codex for a project like that

Please do elaborate. I’ve only tried switching to codex once or twice, and it’s been probably 3 months since I last tried it, but I was underwhelmed each time. Is it better on novel things in your experience?

GPT is much better at anything mathematical than Claude, as is Gemini. This is evidenced by their superior results at math Olympiads, the Putnam, etc.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#430

Post by smokedetector1 »

logicchains wrote: post #427
smokedetector1 wrote: post #367

> unless you believe in magic, it's only a matter of time until we reach the point at which machine intelligence is indistinguishable from human intelligence I find this flippancy about the greatest mystery in the universe extremely arrogant and incurious and wish it wouldn't be so prevalent.

>I find this flippancy about the greatest mystery in the universe extremely arrogant and incurious and wish it wouldn't be so prevalent. There's absolutely nothing mysterious about human intelligence unless you refuse to give it a clear definition. All the people waffling on about AGI refuse to give a clear, measurable definition of intelligence, because if they defined it exactly then it's possible to clearly determ…

> There's absolutely nothing mysterious about human intelligence unless you refuse to give it a clear definition

This begs the question[0] by assuming that it can be given a clear, measurable definition. A large part of the mystery of consciousness and intelligence is that it's hard to define, measure, or explain; the most characteristic aspects (i.e. those relating to a subjective experience) are, in principle, impossible to measure or verify[1]. To say that it's not mysterious once you give it a clear, measurable definition is basically saying "it's not mysterious once you remove all aspects that make it mysterious."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

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