I always liked the idea of literate programming, but it never seemed to get a toe in the door.
A good start would be just commenting code! Almost all the code I've looked into recently has been startling - the only comments are the licence boilerplate at the top of each file!
I can think of only one product/library/package that was commented to explain what was happening. Go look at the source for a random package that you depend on. If you're really lucky, there might be something hinting at the meaning of function arguments, but like as not, not even that ;(
And it's been possible to run android on x86 for years. It's just that nobody wants to, except for app developers ... because you wouldn't/couldn't/shouldn't develop on a phone ;)
>> a solution that seems correct under their heuristic reasoning, but they arrived at that result in a non-logical way
Not quite ... LLMs are not HAL (unfortunately). They produce something that is associated with the same input, something that should look like an acceptable answer. A correct answer will be acceptable, and so will any answer that has been associated with similar input. And so will anything that fools some of the people, some of the time ;)
The unpredictability is a huge problem. Take the geoguess example - it has come up with a collection of "facts" about Paramaribo. These may or may-not be correct. But some are not shown in the image. Very likely the "answer" is derived from completely different factors, and the "explanation" in spurious (perhaps an explanation of how other people made a similar guess!)
The questioner has no way of telling if the "explanation" was actually the logic used. (It wasn't!) And when genuine experts follow the trail of token activation, the answer and the explanation are quite independent.
> Very likely the "answer" is derived from completely different factors, and the "explanation" in spurious (perhaps an explanation of how other people made a similar guess!)
This is very important and often overlooked idea. And it is 100% correct, even admitted by Anthropic themselves. When user asks LLM to explain how it arrived to a particular answer, it produces steps which are completely unrelated to the actual mechanism inside LLM programming. It will be yet another generated output, based on the training data.
Yes BUT "I paid it back, so nothing bad ever happened" is not sufficient.
Someone (or a company) does something bad - yes, pay it back, but there needs to be some punishment for doing evil. Pay back X 100. Or pay purchaser + pay fine.
Just paying back the cost (or fraud) is saying "it's fine if you don't get caught, and if you do get caught, there's no real cost to you."
Winch launches are a lot like a kid with a kite. Run fast (wind in the winch) to get speed and up it goes. At its desired altitude, the glider disconnects and goes on its way. https://youtu.be/YePIJKs5me0 gives you an idea.
On a day with a decent breeze, it is possible to "kite" a glider up to very high altitude by letting the wire out again. But this is highly frowned upon because it means there is a very long (and nearly invisible) wire dangling right through the airspace used by other aircraft!
Thanks, I tried to look exactly this up, but couldn't find anything. Looking at that video, the only thing I could think of though was that cable, presumably detaching shortly after the video ended, and the cameraman is just standing there where the cable could presumably fall. It does not look very thick and heavy, but still!
Traditionally, winch cables are single strand steel (fencing) wire - I guess because that's cheap. But they break quite often.
Cable falls can be a problem. A cable falling over power lines causes all sorts of fuss!
Cable breaks can be terrible. The cable will spring back, whip around, and is incredibly destructive - hence the cage around the winch operator. I would not have been standing anywhere nearby and certainly not next-to or behind the drum.
So the real question is - how is amazon going to enshitify drm-free books? Are they trying to wipe out gutenburg, standard-ebooks, etc?
Are they trying to be the youtube of drm-free? The place where everyone goes, and that becomes crap due updating Ts&Cs - inserting ads or charges?
reply