In today’s episode, Yud tries to predict the future of computer science.
Looking at this dull aimless mass of text I can understand why people like Yud are so impressed with chatGPT’s capabilities.
Yud tried to describe a compiler, but ended up with a tulpa. I wonder why that keeps happening~
Yud would be horrified to learn about INTERCAL (WP, Esolangs), which has required syntax for politely asking the compiler to accept input. The compiler is expressly permitted to refuse inputs for being impolite or excessively polite.
I will not blame anybody for giving up on reading this wall of text. I had to try maybe four or five times, fighting the cringe. Most unrealistic part is having the TA know any better than the student. Yud is completely lacking in the light-hearted brevity that makes this sort of Broccoli Man & Panda Woman rant bearable.
I can somewhat sympathize, in the sense that there are currently multiple frameworks where Python code is intermixed with magic comments which are replaced with more code by ChatGPT during a compilation step. However, this is clearly a party trick which lacks the sheer reproducibility and predictability required for programming.
Y’know, I’ll take his implicit wager. I bet that, in 2027, the typical CS student will still be taught with languages whose reference implementations use either:
- the classic 1970s-style workflow of parsing, tree transformation, and instruction selection; or
- the classic 1980s-style workflow of parsing, bytecode generation, and JIT.
I can somewhat sympathize, in the sense that there are currently multiple frameworks where Python code is intermixed with magic comments which are replaced with more code by ChatGPT during a compilation step. However, this is clearly a party trick which lacks the sheer reproducibility and predictability required for programming.
He probably just saw a github copilot demo on tiktok and took it personally.
@corbin You missed the best bit: one of the current INTERCAL compilers, CLC-INTERCAL (for a superset of the language which adds a bunch more insanity) is implemented IN INTERCAL! It’s self-compiling. Also object-oriented, has quantum-indeterminate operators, and a computed COME FROM statement (also with quantum indeterminacy).
I think we should organize a fundraiser to pay CLC-INTERCAL’s developer @Uilebheist to visit Yud and melt his brain.
@MeiLin @cstross @corbin @Uilebheist What’s so hard to understand? https://esolangs.org/wiki/Quantum_INTERCAL 🤣
@datarama @corbin The Go compiler requires reproducible builds based on a small set of well-defined inputs, if the LLM cannot give the same answer for the same question each time it is asked, then it is not compatible with use in the Go compiler. This includes optimizations – the bits should be identical. #golang
Indeed, this is also the case for anything packaged with #Nix; we have over 99% reproducibility and are not planning on giving that up. Also, Nix forbids network access during compilation; there will be no clandestine queries to OpenAI.
This reads like a PCJ comment, bravo. I’ll do one for rust:
If an LLM cannot insult the user for having the tremerity to try and compile code, it’s not compatible for use with the Rust compiler.
@corbin Probably still 5 years too soon but I would hope the 2027 CS student will be taught the usual engineering flow of specification, formal verification and safety analysis, design, some coding and what should be tiny bit of debug during validation at the end.
Reproducability is everything. If your binary isn’t an exact match for the previous tested copy you are doing QA not production.
@corbin anyone looking for a two hour podcast about INTERCAL (and who ISN’T?) can find one here https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/064
Student: I wish I could find a copy of one of those AIs that will actually expose to you the human-psychology models they learned to predict exactly what humans would say next, instead of telling us only things about ourselves that they predict we’re comfortable hearing. I wish I could ask it what the hell people were thinking back then.
I think this part conveys the root insanity of Yud, failing to understand that language is a co-operative game between humans, that have to trust in common shared lived experiences, to believe the message was conveyed successfully.
But noooooooo, magic AI can extract all the possible meanings, and internal states of all possible speakers in all possible situations from textual descriptions alone: because: ✨bayes✨
The fact that such a (LLM based) system would almost certainly not be optimal for any conceivable loss function / training set pair seems to completely elude him.
tmy;dr
(too much Yud; didn’t read)
