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Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

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Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#811

Post by bopbopbop7 »

infecto wrote: post #737
bgwalter wrote: post #720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It makes no sense at all, it's cuckooland, are you all on crazy pills? Frequent LLM usage impairs thinking. The LLM has no connection to reality, and it takes over people's minds.

Sounds like you’re taking crazy pills. Far to early from any of the studies done so far to come to your conclusion.

Do you really need a study to tell you that offloading your thinking to something else impairs your thinking?

But yes, there are studies to prove the most obvious statement in the world.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44286277

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#812

Post by bicepjai »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #150
hgl wrote: post #51

It’s fascinating to think about what true GUI for LLM could be like. It immediately makes me think a LLM that can generate a customized GUI for the topic at hand where you can interact with in a non-linear way.

Humans are shit at interacting with systems in a non-linear way. Just look at Jupyter notebooks and the absolute mess that arises when you execute code blocks in arbitrary order.

What is the mess you are referring with regards to Jupyter notebooks ?

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#813

Post by bicepjai »

A lot of people reach for the “electricity” analogy whenever a tech wave crests—crypto, cloud, and now LLMs. With crypto, the comparison always felt forced: the utility was niche, and the energy cost was hard to justify. LLMs, on the other hand, are genuinely useful, but is the electricity comparison still valid ?

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#814

Post by d0mine »

rictic wrote: post #786
dustbunny wrote: post #778

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using assembly is not really more precise in terms of solving the problem. You can definitely make an argument that using a higher level language is equally if not more precise. Especially since your low level assembly will be limited to which architectures it can run on, you can state that the c++ that generates that assembly is "more precisely defining a calculator program".

I agree with your general point, but C++ isn't a great example, as it is so underspecified. Imagine as part of our calculator we wrote the function: int add(int a, int b) { return a + b; } What is the result of add(32767, 1)? C++ does not presume to define just one meaning for such an expression. Or even any meaning at all. What to do when the program tries to add ints that large is left to the personal conscience of…

Precision is not boolean (present or absent/0 or 1). There may be many numbers between 0 and 1. Compared to human languages, programming languages are much more precise that makes the results much more predictable in practice.

I can imagine OS being written in C++ and working most of the time. I don't think you can replace Linux written in C with any number of LLM prompts.

LLM can be a [bad so far] programmer but a prompt is not a program.

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#816

Post by infecto »

bopbopbop7 wrote: post #811
infecto wrote: post #737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you’re taking crazy pills. Far to early from any of the studies done so far to come to your conclusion.

Do you really need a study to tell you that offloading your thinking to something else impairs your thinking? But yes, there are studies to prove the most obvious statement in the world. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44286277

It’s not obvious to me but perhaps you are approach it from a biased perspective. Sure if you left all higher order function to a LLM, thinking about homework and simply parsing it all through a chatbot, of course you are losing out. There is a lot of nuance to it and I am not sure if that very first initial study captures it. Everyone is different and YMMV but I suspect it will come down to how you use the tools not a simple blanket statement like yours.

Do you really latch on to a single early study to make conclusions in the world? Wild. Next time before going down the path of rudeness, why don’t you share a real anecdote or thought. We have all seen that study linked many times already.

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#817

Post by bopbopbop7 »

infecto wrote: post #816
bopbopbop7 wrote: post #811

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really need a study to tell you that offloading your thinking to something else impairs your thinking? But yes, there are studies to prove the most obvious statement in the world. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44286277

It’s not obvious to me but perhaps you are approach it from a biased perspective. Sure if you left all higher order function to a LLM, thinking about homework and simply parsing it all through a chatbot, of course you are losing out. There is a lot of nuance to it and I am not sure if that very first initial study captures it. Everyone is different and YMMV but I suspect it will come down to how you use the tools not…

You asked for a study, you got a study. Yet you’re still playing mental gymnastics to somehow prove that not using your brain doesn’t impair thinking. You want an anecdote now? After dismissing a study? Wild. I doubt that will convince you if a study won’t, just grasping at straws.

And no, it’s not nuanced at all. If you stop using your brain, you lose cognitive abilities. If you stop working out, you lose muscle. If you stop coding and let someone else do it, you lose coding abilities.

No one is being rude, that’s just what it feels like when someone calls you out with evidence.

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#818

Post by semi-extrinsic »

bicepjai wrote: post #812
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans are shit at interacting with systems in a non-linear way. Just look at Jupyter notebooks and the absolute mess that arises when you execute code blocks in arbitrary order.

What is the mess you are referring with regards to Jupyter notebooks ?

If you run cells out of order, you get weird results. Thus you have efforts like marimo which replace jupyter with something that reruns all dependent cells.

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#819

Post by jason_oster »

dax_ wrote: post #741
diggan wrote: post #702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people keep having this reaction to something we're already used to? When you're developing against an API, you're already doing the same thing, planning for what happens when the request hangs, or fails completely, or gives a different response, and so on. Same for basically any IO. It's almost not even new, just that it generates text instead of JSON, or whatever. But we've already been doing "indeterministi…

Why would we embrace that even more? In Software Development we try to keep things deterministic as much as possible. The more variables we're introducing into our software, the more complicated it becomes. The whole notion of adding LLM prompts as a replacement for code just seems utterly insane to me. It would be a massive waste of resources as we're reprompting AI a lot more frequently than we need to. Also must b…

Some algorithms are inherently probabilistic (bloom filters are a very common example, HyperLogLog is another). If we accept that probabilistic algorithms are useful, then we can extrapolate that to using LLMs (or other neural networks) for similar useful work.

You can make the LLM/NN deterministic. That was never a problem.

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#820

Post by guappa »

diggan wrote: post #712
guappa wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah don't worry, llms are a return to crashes as it is :) The other day it managed to produce code that made python segfault.

> produce code that made python segfault To be fair, that's pretty easy for a human to do too.

On purpose yes. But the entire point of languages with managed memory is that they do not segfault.
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