Still thinking about this post from @tess. (See the threaded follow-up for explanation!)
-
@ShadSterling
Loved those books. -
@RommelRico
You jest, but NullPointerException was a major safety advancement over dereferencing null and getting whatever’s at memory address zero! Why “safety?” Because it made the machine’s rule (“you just can’t dereference null, period”) something that humans could mentally model and predict. -
Paul Cantrellreplied to Sheldon Chang 🇺🇸 last edited by
-
@partnumber2 @tess
Yes, and not just technical either. ALL jobs!Paul Cantrell (@[email protected])
“Can’t you just…” is an idiom that means “I don’t understand the work you do at all”
Hachyderm.io (hachyderm.io)
-
Sophie Schmiegreplied to Paul Cantrell last edited by
@inthehands this has been my biggest problem with all these AI assisted coding tools that have been shoved our collective throats. I'm always happy to see and test out new tools and techniques for writing code, but the tools have to be deterministic and "continuous". If I can't reliably trigger the same action twice, I cannot use it to write code and rather turn it off. If I can't use the performance on one task to predict the performance on a slightly different but very related task, I can't use the tool to help produce code.
I need to know exactly what I am telling the machine, either because I've handwritten the instructions, or because I know what the tool I use to create the instructions does to my input. That's why I love my compilers, but hate spicy autocomplete.
-
Sophie Schmiegreplied to Sophie Schmieg last edited by
@inthehands on second thought, to expand and refine this point: as a cryptography engineer, I have a love-hate relationship with compilers, precisely because of this reason. Cryptography has the unusual requirement that code needs to be executed in constant time, and compilers do not consider that as an invariant. So part of my job is to dig through the assembly compilers spit out and look for conditional jumps.
And when the compiler gets too unreliable, I have to cut it out of the development process entirely and handwrite the assembly. -
Paul Cantrellreplied to Sophie Schmieg last edited by
@sophieschmieg
Yeah, there’s always a point with any tool where it’s not helping. And I see the hope for AI-authored code — not replacing code with AI, but using AI to write code — as being that maybeLLM : high-level code :: high-level code : machine code
I don’t buy that either, but it’s a different discussion than my thread.
-
@denny @inthehands
International! -
Paul Cantrellreplied to DeterioratedStucco last edited by
@SoftwareTheron @denny
Cosmic! -
@inthehands It's also the case that, if I ask someone to do something, at some point any ambiguity in my request is turned into non-ambiguous actions. It's no machine-human threshold. Differences of interpretation are normal in human communication.
What you've called a "tantalizing false promise" in the thread of expecting from LLMs "the same kind of common-sense interpretation we expect of humans", is a *true* promise. I expect and see LLMs making human-like coding mistakes all the time.
-
@inthehands “The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.”
-
argv minus onereplied to Sophie Schmieg last edited by
Why the hell do compilers *still* not have a “this code must execute in constant time, no matter what, and I want a compile error if that's impossible” declaration?
-
@inthehands DAOs were a great object lesson in "what if the laws actually were code‽"
(When looking for the wikipedia link, I was pleasantly surprised to find nothing web3-related in the first page of search results for "dao" - we did it, y'all!)
-
Sophie Schmiegreplied to argv minus one last edited by
@argv_minus_one @inthehands it turns out, compilers are complicated. Compiler folks have tried, but piping an annotation like that through the entire LLVM stack is nontrivial, and there are only very few people trying to write cryptographic code, and very many people trying to write code that is as fast as possible, so the effort that was put into it by compiler folks had a bit of an upper bound. So in the end, godbolt.org is the cryptography engineer's best friend.
-
argv minus onereplied to Sophie Schmieg last edited by
Maybe, but that sounds like a *giant* footgun for timing-attack vulnerabilities. Merely changing the compiler version could create one, nevermind compiling for a new ISA.
I didn't say it's easy to implement such a thing, but it is absolutely necessary.
-
@zachnfine
Richard Cook phrased this as “Actions at the sharp end resolve all ambiguity:” https://how.complexsystems.failIf you think that insight means there’s no difference between what the average human does and what the best LLM does, I have some discounted swampland to sell you.
-
@phaedral
As quoted upthread! -
@inthehands Sorry I missed it!
-
Paul Cantrellreplied to argv minus one last edited by
@argv_minus_one @sophieschmieg
It does sound like a worthwhile effort, and it does sound just perniciously difficult! There’s a half a dozen graduate theses here waiting to be written, probably. -
@Tak
I’m old enough to still think DAO means “data access object.”
