[treflop]

Wait until AI prints out something that doesn't work and you can't figure out how to fix it because you don't know how it works so you do trial and error for 3 hours.

The difference is that you can trust a good calculator. You currently can't trust AI to be right. If we get a point where the output of AI is trustworthy, that's a whole different kind of world altogether.

[alasdair_]

>The difference is that you can trust a good calculator.

I found a bug in the ios calculator in the middle of a masters degree exam. The answer changed depending on which way the phone was held. (A real bug - I reported it and they fixed it). So knowing the expected result matters even when using the calculator.

[margalabargala]

For replacement like I described, sure. But it will be very useful long before that.

AI that writes a bash script doesn't need to be better than an experienced engineer. It doesn't even need to be better than a junior engineer.

It just needs to be better than Stack Overflow.

That bar is really not far away.

[treflop]

You’re changing the goal post. Your original post was saying that you don’t need to know fundamentals.

It was not about whether AI is useful or not.

[margalabargala]

I'm not changing goalposts, I was responding to what you said about AI spitting out something wrong and you spending 3 hours debugging it.

My original point about not needing fundamentals would obviously require AI to, y'know, not hallucinate errors that take three hours to debug. We're clearly not there yet. The original goalposts remain the same.

Since human conversations often flow from one topic to another, in addition to the goal post of "not needing fundamentals" in my original post, my second post introduced a goalpost of "being broadly useful". You're correct that it's not the same goalpost as in my first comment, which is not unexpected, as the comment in question is also not my first comment.

[Mengkudulangsat]

Hopefully that happens rare enough that when it does, we can call upon highly-paid human experts that still remembers the art of doing long divisions.

[kamaal]

>>The difference is that you can trust a good calculator. You currently can't trust AI to be right.

Well that is because you ask a calculator to divide numbers. Which is a question that can be interpreted in only one way. And done only one way.

Ask the smallest possible for loop and if loop that AI can generate now you have the pocket calculator equivalent of programming.

[abduhl]

>> Well that is because you ask a calculator to divide numbers. Which is a question that can be interpreted in only one way. And done only one way.

Is it? What is 5/2+3?

[TSP00N3]

There is only one correct way to calculate 5/2+3. The order is PEMDAS[0]. You divide before adding. Maybe you are thinking that 5/(2+3) is the same as 5/2+3, which is not the case. Improper math syntax doesn’t mean there are two potential answers, but rather that the person that wrote it did so improperly.

[0] https://www.mathsisfun.com/operation-order-pemdas.html

[abduhl]

So we agree that there is more than one way to interpret 5/2+3 (a correct and an incorrect way) and therefore that the GP statement below is wrong.

“Which is a question that can be interpreted in only one way. And done only one way.”

The question for calculators is then the same as the question for LLMs: can you trust the calculator? How do you know if it’s correct when you never learned the “correct” way and you’re just blindly believing the tool?

[kamaal]

>>How do you know if it’s correct when you never learned the “correct” way and you’re just blindly believing the tool?

This is just splitting hairs. People who use calculators interpret it in only one way. You are making a different and a more broad argument that words/symbols can have various meanings, hence anything can be interpreted in many ways.

While these are fun arguments to be made. They are not relevant to practical use of the calculator or LLMs.

[margalabargala]

> So we agree that there is more than one way to interpret 5/2+3 (a correct and an incorrect way) and therefore that the GP statement below is wrong.

No. There being "more than one way" to interpret implies the meaning is ambiguous. It's not.

There's not one incorrect way to interpret that math statement, there are infinite incorrect ways to do so. For example, you could interpret as being a poem about cats.

[Moru]

Maybe user means the difference between a simple calculator that does everything as you type it in and one that can figure out the correct order. We used those simpler ones in school when I was young. The new fancy ones were quite something after that :)

[visarga]

> Wait until AI prints out something that doesn't work and you can't figure out how to fix it because you don't know how it works so you do trial and error for 3 hours.

This is basically how AI research is conducted. It's alchemy.