This is possibly one of the more cursed single sentences I've ever seen in a job posting

[aud@fire.asta.lgbt]

@[email protected] "it transpiles the COBOL into the JAVA with the LLM or it gets the hose again!"

[xgranade@wandering.shop]

@aud There's that, I agree, but there's also the problem that people who don't know the problem space also don't know what solutions already exist, nor how to evaluate the fitness of a proposed solution.

That's fine as long as you stay curious and all, but that's not the VC techbro way. All of a sudden, LLMs allow them to *appear* to be competent on a wild array of different things that are *already solved*.

[xgranade@wandering.shop]

@aud Like, the difference between "this is a trivial problem I'd assign an undergrad," "this is a tricky problem, but solved; applying the solution takes a lot of work," "this is unsolved, but you can kind of hack around it," and "this is unsolvable, ever, as a matter of principle" is often pretty subtle and takes some training?

[aud@fire.asta.lgbt]

@[email protected] Yeah, I suspect that's the motivation for a lot of them.

I fully admit I sent in two applications today where the subtext of my language was "This application is conditional based on the idea that you aren't just trying to shoehorn the spiky club that is an LLM where it has no business being and are actually interested in solving the problem you claim to be interested in".

[xgranade@wandering.shop]

@aud

- Will this program ever crash? Impossible.
- Will this program ever crash due to a memory safety violation? Difficult, but solvable.
- Does this program include any infinite loops? Impossible.
- Does this program include something from this list of common kinds of infinite loops? Trivial.
- What's the smallest convex shape that includes these points? Solved, but slightly tricky.
- How can this UPS truck take the least number of left-hand turns? I hope you have a galaxy-sized computer!

[xgranade@wandering.shop]

@aud

- What's the solution to this polynomial equation? Trivial.
- Does this polynomial have an integer-valued solution? *cries in agony*
- Does this list of two-variable constraints have a solution? Trivial.
- Does this list of three-variable constraints have a solution? *cries in agony*
- Does this list of two-variable constraints have an approximate solution? *cries in agony*
- Is there a solution to this conda env file? *cries in agony*

[xgranade@wandering.shop]

@aud Like it's just so fucking easy to take a problem in P and accidentally turn it into the halting problem!

Fucking grep did that! By adding a backreference feature that meant that a regex was no longer actually decidable in finite memory, but was undecidable in general!

[xgranade@wandering.shop]

@aud "Is this string a valid e-mail address?" Depends on what you mean by "string," "valid," and "e-mail address," but it's probably either trivial or *cries in agony*.

[xgranade@wandering.shop]

@aud (I'll stop now, I promise.)

[aud@fire.asta.lgbt]

@[email protected]

Does this program include any infinite loops? Impossible

is this one of these "you can't create an algorithm to solve this for any and all loops but could do it for certain cases" type problems?

[aud@fire.asta.lgbt]

@[email protected]

Is there a solution to this conda env file? cries in agony

lmao

[aud@fire.asta.lgbt]

@[email protected] This reminds me of how apparently quite a few job postings have a required LinkedIn profile field and so I've had to cheekily write in https://linkedin.com because apparently they do some string parsing so that lmao://nope.no doesn't work but.

[cptsuperlative@toot.cat]

@aud

Oh, I'm sure that'll be error-free!

[aud@fire.asta.lgbt]

@[email protected] who needs accuracy when you've got VC money?!

[xgranade@wandering.shop]

@aud Basically, yeah. If you have a candidate for an algorithm that can solve the halting problem, you can turn that into an example that the algorithm can't solve.

[aud@fire.asta.lgbt]

sentences more appealing in a job description:

We're combining my foot and your crotch to translate kinetic energy into pain
We're combining pliers and your fingernails to ||redacted||
We're combining onions and belts to translate fashion into what was the style at the time
We're combining lotion and its skin to ensure customers don't get the hose again

[xgranade@wandering.shop]

@aud Yeah, you can basically encode arbitrary computation in the package version constraints.... it almost never comes up in practice. Almost.

[aud@fire.asta.lgbt]

@[email protected] ha ha suck on that algorithm

(once you pointed it out it was super obvious it was the halting problem just... you didn't literally say "lo, it is the halting problem", but I have no idea why that didn't occur to me before that?! gonna blame the headache and the election)

[foolishowl@social.coop]

@aud @CptSuperlative Famously stability is a low priority for applications running in COBOL.

[aud@fire.asta.lgbt]

@[email protected] uhh

sorry, wait, what?

You can do what in a fucking conda

jesus