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by didericis 55 days ago
> you didn't think through how to manipulate the bits on the hardware, you just allowed the interpreter to do it

If you are thinking through deterministic code, you are thinking through the manipulation of bits in hardware. You are just doing it in a language which is easier for humans to understand.

There is a direct mapping of intent.
2 comments
lmm 54 days ago
> If you are thinking through deterministic code, you are thinking through the manipulation of bits in hardware.

No I'm not. If I want the machine to evaluate 2+2, I don't know or care what bits in hardware it uses to do that (as long as it doesn't run out of memory), I just want the result to come back as 4.

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didericis 54 days ago
When you press the 2 button, the plus button, the 2 button and the equals button, you are translating your question into bits and operations which are logically guaranteed to yield bits that represent your answer.

When you think through what will happen as a result of deterministic code, you are also thinking through what the bits will do, albeit at a higher level of abstraction.

When you ask an LLM to do something, you have no guarantee that the intent you provide is accurately translated, and you have no guarantee you’ll get the result you want. If you want your answer to 2+2 to always be 4, you shouldn’t use a non deterministic LLM. To get that guarantee, the bit manipulation a machine does needs to be logically equivalent to the way you evaluate the question.

That doesn’t mean you can’t minimize intent distortion or cognitive debt while using LLMs, or that you can’t think through the logic of whatever problem you’re dealing with in the same structured way a formal language forces you to while using them. But one of my pet peeves is comparing LLMs to compilers. The nondeterminism of LLMs and lack of logical rigidity makes them fundamentally different.

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lmm 54 days ago
> When you press the 2 button, the plus button, the 2 button and the equals button, you are translating your question into bits

I am not. 2 is 2, + is +, I don't care whether the machine chooses to represent them as ASCII or EBCDIC or semaphore flags.

> If you want your answer to 2+2 to always be 4, you shouldn’t use a non deterministic LLM.

Right. Determinism and locality are important. But bit-banging isn't (as long as the higher level abstractions are good).

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raincole 55 days ago
Most programmers who write reasonably deterministic code don't even know how many bits it allocates.
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