The comparison between AI and compilers is kind of stupid though. When you program in a given language, you’re writing out the entire logic and behavior of your program. Not to mention that the compiler is a deterministic machine, it will always behave in a certain manner and produce predictable results. On the other hand, using AI you just write a sentence and it can create a whole bunch of code that will not always be the same even if you always use the same model. Not to mention all od the detrimental effects AI has, cognitively speaking, when you start to rely on it.
Compilers are not always deterministic, there is a lot of “smart” code in compilers to automatically optimize code and that can mean that whole parts or functions are replaced with what the compiler thinks is best.
Devil’s advocating for the sense of completeness here rather than bickering, but wouldn’t two of the same compiler on two of the same machine with the same code still create the same output? That is to say, it is deterministic rather than stochastic but it just takes unpredictable variables into account when compiling?
I think the difference would be that a compiler will always give you something understandable and explainable even if it’s opaque, but an LLM is literally using RNG to generate its output, so could come out with something completely left field. If it switches to Chinese that’s one thing because you can just ignore that, but equally a hallucinated bug that looks right but is actually very dangerous could slip in instead.
His line seems to be ‘don’t submit shit code.’
Even if you wrote it by seance with a Oujii board, just make sure it works, and that great grandma Ada agrees to a GPL license.
The comparison between AI and compilers is kind of stupid though. When you program in a given language, you’re writing out the entire logic and behavior of your program. Not to mention that the compiler is a deterministic machine, it will always behave in a certain manner and produce predictable results. On the other hand, using AI you just write a sentence and it can create a whole bunch of code that will not always be the same even if you always use the same model. Not to mention all od the detrimental effects AI has, cognitively speaking, when you start to rely on it.
Compilers are not always deterministic, there is a lot of “smart” code in compilers to automatically optimize code and that can mean that whole parts or functions are replaced with what the compiler thinks is best.
Devil’s advocating for the sense of completeness here rather than bickering, but wouldn’t two of the same compiler on two of the same machine with the same code still create the same output? That is to say, it is deterministic rather than stochastic but it just takes unpredictable variables into account when compiling?
I think the difference would be that a compiler will always give you something understandable and explainable even if it’s opaque, but an LLM is literally using RNG to generate its output, so could come out with something completely left field. If it switches to Chinese that’s one thing because you can just ignore that, but equally a hallucinated bug that looks right but is actually very dangerous could slip in instead.
And he’s been 100% consistent with that since the start.
With an undercurrent of being polite but firm toward mistakes from newbies, while occasionally telling oldheads ‘You should fucking know better!’