In today’s episode, Yud tries to predict the future of computer science.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      This is imho not a dumb semantics thing. While programming these things are important. And even more important is the moment where you are teaching new people programming and they use the wrong terms. A Rationalist should know better!

    • zogwarg@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      In such a (unlikely) future of build tooling corruption, actual plausible terminology:

      • Intent Annotation Prompt (though sensibly, this should be for doc and validation analysis purposes, not compilation)
      • Intent Pragma Prompt (though sensibly, the actual meaning of the code should not change, and it should purely be optimization hints)
      • self@awful.systemsMEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        a dull headache forms as I imagine a future for programming where the API docs I’m reading are still inaccurate autogenerated bullshit but it’s universal and there’s a layer of incredibly wasteful tech dedicated to tricking me into thinking what I’m reading has any value at all

        the headache vastly intensifies when I consider debugging code that broke when the LLM nondeterministically applied a set of optimizations that changed the meaning of the program and the only way to fix it is to reroll the LLM’s seed and hope nothing else breaks

        and the worst part is, given how much the programmers I know all seem to love LLMs for some reason, and how bad the tooling around commercial projects (especially web development) is, this isn’t even an unlikely future

          • self@awful.systemsMEnglish
            2·
            1 year ago

            fucking hell. I’m almost certainly gonna see this trash at work and not know how to react to it, cause the AI fuckers definitely want any criticism of their favorite tech to be a career-limiting move (and they’ll employee any and all underhanded tactics to make sure it is, just like at the height of crypto) but I really don’t want this nonsense anywhere near my working environment

            • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
              1·
              1 year ago

              I’ve seen a few LLM generated C++ code changes at my work. Which is horrifying.

              • One was complete nonsense on it’s face and never should have been sent out. The reviewer was basically like “what is this shit” only polite.
              • One was subtly wrong, it looked like that one probably got committed… I didn’t say anything because not my circus.

              No one’s sent me any AI generated code yet, but if and when it happens I’ll add whoever sent it to me as one of the code reviewers if it looks like they hadn’t read it :) (probably the pettiest trolling I can get away with in a corporation)

              • blakestacey@awful.systemsMEnglish
                1·
                1 year ago

                I’m pretty sure that my response in that situation would get me fired. I mean, I’d start with “how many trees did you burn and how many Kenyans did you call the N-word in order to implement this linked list” and go from there.

            • zogwarg@awful.systemsEnglish
              1·
              1 year ago

              Possible countermeasure: Insist on “crediting” the LLM as the commit author, to regain sanity when doing git blame.

              I agree that worse doc is a bad enough future, though I remain optimistic that including LLM in compile step is never going to be mainstream enough (or anything approaching stable enough, beyond some dumb useless smoke and mirrors) for me to have to deal with THAT.

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      FR: I originally thought this tweet was some weird, boomer anti-snowflake take, like:

      In good old days:

      Student: Why my compiler no read comment

      Teacher: Listen to yourself, you are an idiot

      Modern bad day:

      Student: Why my compiler no read comment

      Teacher: First, are your feelings hurt?

      It took me at least a few paragraphs to realise he was talking about talking to an AI.

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        It took me at least a few paragraphs to realise he was talking about talking to an AI.

        can’t expect the 'ole yudster to not perform his one trick!

    • 200fifty@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      yeah, my first thought was, what if you want to comment out code in this future? does that just not work anymore? lol

  • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Eliezer Yudkowsky was late so he had to type really fast. A compiler was hiden near by so when Eliezer Yudkowsky went by the linter came and wanted to give him warnings and errors. Here Eliezer Yudkowsky saw the first AI because the compiler was posessed and operating in latent space.

    “I cant give you my client secret compiler” Eliezer Yudkowsky said

    “Why not?” said the compiler back to Eliezer Yudkowsky.

    “Because you are Loab” so Eliezer Yudkowsky kept typing until the compiler kill -9’d itself and drove off thinking “my latent space waifu is in trouble there” and went faster.

  • corbin@awful.systemsOPEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    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:

    1. the classic 1970s-style workflow of parsing, tree transformation, and instruction selection; or
    2. the classic 1980s-style workflow of parsing, bytecode generation, and JIT.