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.
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.
> The more practical question is though, does that matter?
I think it matters quite a lot.
Specifically for knowledge preservation and education.
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)
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.
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.
"Computers are deterministic!"
If I wanted to plumb together badly documented black boxes, I'd have become an EE.
Underrated comment - computers can be decidedly non-deterministic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metastability_(electronics)
> 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.