[didericis]

Part of what got me into software was this: no matter how complex or impressive the operation, with enough time and determination, you could trace each step and learn how a tap on a joystick lead to the specific pixels on a screen changing.

There’s a beautiful invitation to learn and contribute baked into a world where each command is fully deterministic and spec-ed out.

Yes, there have always been poorly documented black boxes, but I thought the goal was to minimize those.

People don’t understand how much is going to be lost if that goal is abandoned.

[pton_xd]

Agreed. The beauty of programming is that you're creating a "mathematical artifact." You can always drill down and figure out exactly what is going on and what is going to happen with a given set of inputs. Now with things like concurrency that's not exactly true, but, I think the sentiment still holds.

The more practical question is though, does that matter? Maybe not.

[didericis]

> The more practical question is though, does that matter?

I think it matters quite a lot.

Specifically for knowledge preservation and education.

[beefnugs]

Yes, but : not in all cases really. There are plenty of throw away, one off, experimental, trial and error, low stakes, spammy, interactions with dumb-assery, manager replacing instances that are acceptable as being quickly created and forgotten black boxes of temporary barely working trash. (not that people will limit to the proper uses)

[bathtub365]

Yep, LLM’s still run on hardware with the same fundamental architecture we’ve had for years, sitting under a standard operating system. The software is written in the same languages we’ve been using for a long time. Unless there’s some seismic shift where all of these layers go away we’ll be maintaining these systems for a while.

[DSingularity]

In a way this is also a mathematical artifact — after all tokens are selected through beam searching or some random sampling of likely successor tokens.

[whartung]

"Computers are deterministic!"

If I wanted to plumb together badly documented black boxes, I'd have become an EE.

[_mu]

Underrated comment - computers can be decidedly non-deterministic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metastability_(electronics)

[girvo]

> People don’t understand how much is going to be lost if that goal is abandoned.

Ah but you see, imagine the shareholder value we can generate for a quarter or two in the meanwhile!

Editors note: please read that as absolutely dripping with disdain and sarcasm.