51–60 of 82 posts
Failures in production remain expensive.
Do they, though? AWS and CloudFlare recently had the worst outages in their history, and GitHub is flirting with zero nines of uptime these days. Doesn’t seem to have cost them any business.
This is a severe misunderstanding in how LLMs work..
I don't know how this got on my front page....
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not just you imagining things, that's the world around you changing. That's real and it matters.
So reading this, I know it’s probably a human posing as an LLM. But the problem with formats like this is that I don’t actually know. If a human said this to me in real life, and I laughed, it would probably help build a connection with that person, as it’s signaling that we have in common an unusually strong grasp of the patterns in LLM output (unusually strong at least in comparison to the general population). But…
> LLMs aren’t lazy. They don’t cut corners because a simpler solution feels good enough. If they know how to solve something thoroughly, they will. I don't know why they think this, but no? Perhaps it's badly expressed, but LLMs cut corners all the time. It's sort of their core fault really. Anyway, I disagree with the core premise[1]. Re-writes are not cheap, because 1) code can be so bad it's unclear how to rewrite…
I think this is a matter of perspective about what counts as "cutting corners".
I think they look like you describe only because they have limited competence; this is on the basis that when I asked one to make a fusion reactor simulator (to see if it could) by using open source plasma physics libraries which it had itself suggested at the start of this process (e.g. WarpX), it didn't take the "lazy" option of actually using those libraries, it tried to write its own plasma physics simulation from scratch "as a fallback if we can't install the libraries".
As it was not sufficiently competent, the resulting "simulator" was hilariously wildly unphysical.
Would have been much better if it had been lazy.
To your deeper point: I agree. In this case it made so much of a mess that there was no point trying to rescue it; as it was done from scratch, throwing it away and starting again was fine*, but if this had been pushing commits that got interleaved with real work on the main branch of an existing project it would have been a serious issue.
* or in my case, not even bothering to start again. Like I said, this was done to see if it could.
Writing blog posts has become cheap, making them sound human has become hard.
The simple sentences LLM keep generating break my brain, it's like 95% of writing is now 3rd grade level. Compare that to e.g. Martin Amis: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Martin_Amis
And the rewrite can only reliably solve the problem if you understand the problem, and even then it's obviously not a guarantee.
If you have a huge blob of code that nobody understands then re-generating a new blob of code that nobody understands is unlikely to solve the problem.
That said: I've always been a fan of optimistic rather than pessimistic merging, at least for human-generated code.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not just you imagining things, that's the world around you changing. That's real and it matters.
So reading this, I know it’s probably a human posing as an LLM. But the problem with formats like this is that I don’t actually know. If a human said this to me in real life, and I laughed, it would probably help build a connection with that person, as it’s signaling that we have in common an unusually strong grasp of the patterns in LLM output (unusually strong at least in comparison to the general population). But…
Rewrites are only cheap if the rewrite solves the problem. And the rewrite can only reliably solve the problem if you understand the problem, and even then it's obviously not a guarantee. If you have a huge blob of code that nobody understands then re-generating a new blob of code that nobody understands is unlikely to solve the problem. That said: I've always been a fan of optimistic rather than pessimistic merging,…
An incomprehensible source of truth is still a source of truth.