@prologic@twtxt.net (I hope I’m not too incoherent. I didn’t sleep very well recently and have a lot of unrelated stuff on my mind. 🤣)

@prologic@twtxt.net Ah, so that’s what “Bob” is. I saw that popping up in email notifications. 😅

@prologic@twtxt.net

it’s “probabilistic” not “deterministic”

Yep, I know. And when I tell that to people and tell them “if we use AI here, we lose the ability to debug this stuff”, then all I get is: “But it’s good enough. We don’t need to debug this. Non-deterministic computing has its use cases.”

But that is just not how I’d like to model/implement our business processes. 🤔 I want something reliable, not “it mostly works”.

LIke with almost everything “big-tech” has done, it’s not the tech you should not trust, but the companies themselves. For example, accessing and using the models (because let’s face it, they have clusters of much larger and more powerful GPU clusters than we could ever afford to build and own ourselves, at least for now) is fine, but trusting their end-user products/services, not so much.

It’s one of the reasons in fact I’ve been working on bob so I have a very concrete and strong foundation for how these things work, how they behave and how bad or good they can be. I am on-purpose building bob to be not only a decent coding tool and general task completion tool, but with serious security boundaries, sanitation, auditing and compliance. If I’m going to succeed at building autoonmous agents that can cope with a wider array of varying inputs (mostly natural language, some structural language) then it needs to be both a) Safe and b) Robust

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I’m kind of flag you bring thi sup, because you simply can’t. You wouldn’t even be able to in an atypical neural network either (which is what ehse things are anyway). The problem here really isn’t the so-called “AI” (I wish we’d stop calling it AI), but the flawed usage(s) thereof. I believe I even stated earlier in this thread that sometimes it may not do what you expect, it’s “probabilistic” not “deterministic” – those pushing for greater use need to understand this, those not happy with the “push”, should educate the ignorant here (especailly managers pushing for weak, insecure and bad uses).

@prologic@twtxt.net Ahh, I see. Okay, I’m with you there. On this high level, I can understand how the thing works.

Maybe my wording isn’t good. 🤔 Let’s take a real life example from what we do at work.

There’s this AI chatbot. It gets support requests from users, so the user says something like “I need access to a particular system”. This triggers the bot to “run” the instructions stored in a large Markdown file, like “check if the user is authorized to do this, then issue the following API requests”, and so on. This is essentially like running a little script, except it’s written in natural language (German) and there’s no “script interpreter” but just the AI.

Now, suppose that the AI doesn’t quite do what was intended. There’s some subtle bug. How do you debug this? How do you find out how the AI came to the “conclusion” to run step A instead of step B? And how do you find out how exactly you have to change your prompt so this doesn’t happen again next time?

If this was an actual script/program instead of AI, you could repeat the request and attach a debugger or throw in some printf() or whatever. How do you do that kind of thing with AI? How do you pinpoint exactly what the problem was?

(Or is this just a stupid idea? Do we have to give up that way of thinking when using AI? Is the era of debuggability over?)

And every time I ask it to do the same thing, it produces basically the same result. It will sometimes not produce a go.mod, but that’s probably because doing so isn’t as statically high as writing the code to sum numbers from stdin.

So going back to the understanding of how it generated this, is quite simply the most statistically relevant search space of it’s weights it has been trianed on and it has basically just produced a series of tokens, one after another that are relevant to the input, the next token and so on. It’s a trivial example I know, but it basically pattern matches it’s way through it’s vast search space just producing outputs based on context.

Which it does so in seconds, faster than I can type. The code is correct, it compiles and does exactly what I wanted. And the code looks pretty reasonable. It handles flotas, has error handling and handles space or line separated numbers on stdin.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I think your points are pretty clear to me, that’s fine. I’m just seeing if you can perhaps see things a different way maybe?🤔 I would challenge the assertion that you cannot understand how Claude Code generated an output; which I can demonstrate easily with a fairly trivial example by the input:

Write a program in Go that sums a list of numbers from stdin and prints the result.

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, it’s hard to get my point across here. I tried to address that a few paragraphs down.

Yes, I can tinker with AI techniques on a general level. That’s cool but not really my area of interest.

What I certainly can’t do is learn how specific AI products work. I can’t possibly find out why Claude Code produced that particular line of code. Claude is just a magic box that does something and I have to trust it.

Most of the time, I take a very very long time to do anything. If I say, for example, “I’ll build an IRC Web Client”, that may not happen for weeks, if not months, until my sub conscience has has time to process everything. It’s like basically a “feeling” of internal readiness. I never talk through it, never actively think about it, it just happens.

You can basically think of this as pattern-matching. I’m very very good at very fast pattern matching and piecing pices of a puzzle together very quickly, sometimes with very little to go on, it’s often gotten me into a lot of trouble at work in my career because I can make a lot of assumptions very very quickly.

@bender@twtxt.net So yeah, no, I do not have an inner monologue at all. Most of the time my inner mind is busy just replaying music or visuals (or at least it used to before I lost my sight, these days it just replays visuals and sounds), but there is never a time when I “talk to myself”, ever, I don’t ever think through something, a problem or an activity and have self-arguments. I just do.

@bender@twtxt.net Fine, Let me answer properly and concretely 😅

Would you want your children not to learn anything, because “they have AI”?

No, children still need to learn. That will never change. What they learn however will over time.

Are you OK with your children using the AI for all of their homework?

Yes, frankly I am. Why? Because much of what we teach them in school is utterly pointless.
For example, learning to read Shakespear never taught me anything useful in my life. I regret much of my school years to be honest.
I leanred to read and write, sure. But I learned Math, Science, Computing and how things work on my own by being very curious.

What sense will it make?

That assumes I answered “no”, which I did not. So it all makes perfect sense :D

What kind of future would that bring for them?

This assumes I said “Yes”, which I did :D It will be an itneresting future that’s for sure. I don’t think we can just bury our heads in teh sand and pretend it’s all going to go away, It will not. It will make things very interesting for sure, as we’re already starting to see what’s possible and what’s changeing. For example; ordinary people are using these LLM(s) to write their legal suit and defense in courts with varying levels of success.

Even if AI were to become omniscient, what will it be of the human race then?

I’m not convinced it ever will. In fact, I am not convinced we know how to create true intellience at all.

What would we do?

What would be so different from say an Alien invasion from far superious beings?
What would we do that? Band together and defend humanity?

Serve the AI? Maintain the AI?

That assumes that “AI” will become intelligent and omniscient, which I don’t believe it ever will.

Would we have found the true meaning of life then?

If the meaning of life is to create our own sub-species liken to ourselves, sure, maybe. But is that even a reality? not sure, I doubt it. We barely understand ourselves at the best of times, let alone how our minds works.

To care for AI, Is that it?

How would this be different to caring for a friend, a family member If we could ever truly reate an actual sentient being with real feelings and intelligenace, is there any reason to worry? Could we not be freinds and have mutual goals and form relationships?

@prologic@twtxt.net so, “people with no inner monologue—a condition researchers sometimes refer to as anendophasia”, says the AI. Then “it is not a disorder: lacking an inner voice is simply a different, perfectly healthy way of being human”. Ah, so a condition, but a healthy one. Got it.

Again, I am not talking about a true monologue. If you have never thought “OK, let’s do this!” before engaging on an activity, then alright. Weird, in contrast to the rest of us, hard to believe, yes, but I believe you. Much of the troubleshooting, and creativity that comes with thought involves, well, thoughts. Maybe you are closer to AI than the rest of us, indeed! 🤪😂

@prologic@twtxt.net don’t get mad at me, but the long block of text didn’t address any of my questions. 😜😅

@bender@twtxt.net Well no. Some of us don’t. Let me point you at some research on the subject 😅 Some people don’t have an inner monologue

@bender@twtxt.net Now that’s an interesting philosophical viewpoint right there. But this assumes that the “AI” we seemingly have available to us today is actually telligent, understands and has cognitive reasoning. It does not. All of these LLM models from big-tech companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta and Alibaba are all just very powerful, very large multidimensional neural networks with attention that are very good at statistical probabilities of ‘what comes next”. I think we get really upset over the wrong things sometimes. We need to continue to be upset that these 🤬 companies have basically destroyed any meaningful value of the concept of Copyright and Intellectual Property and Works of art. The so-called “AI” we have today is just a tool. Can you say for certain that the typewriter and the computer ruined our ability to write? Perhaps yes, but we still learn how to do so, likewise, I still think that learning to write code, research, read and write are all valuable skills to learn. Later on once you have the basics, you can defer some of the “tedious” work to these models, because frankly, they’re far better at inferencing and pattern matching than you or i will ever be, not because they’re better at pattern-matching per se, but because they have been trained on a very large corpus and they are much much faster at doing the same basic things we are far superior at.

It is not a monologue in the whole sense of it. But yeah, we all do.

@prologic@twtxt.net when you think, that’s you talking to yourself.

@bender@twtxt.net Nope. Trust me I do not. The only time I do is when I’m reading/writing. I otherwise have no inner monologue when doing anything.

@prologic@twtxt.net let me ask you this. Would you want your children not to learn anything, because “they have AI”? Are you OK with your children using the AI for all of their homework? What sense will it make? What kind of future would that bring for them? We need to analyse the repercussions from all angles, even if AI were to provide absolutely flawless answers every single time. Even if AI were to become omniscient. What will it be of the human race then? What would we do? Serve the AI? Maintain the AI? Would we have found the true meaning of life then? To care for AI. Is that it?

@prologic@twtxt.net I don’t believe you. For example, you are programming something, and you are planning the steps, or you struggle at certain point. Any train of thought, of any kind, has an addressing. “If I move this here, what will it happen?”. “Hmm if we’re to place this logic here, will it do what we need?“. “If I were to do this, will it work?” “Damn it, you are so stupid, James, how could you miss that?!!” And so on. 😅 And that’s just a minor thing.

Trust me, you do. We all do. Even the crazy ones.

@arne@uplegger.eu This is interesting. Sorry I missed this, I just found this post of yours and wanted to contribute 😅 Here’s something interesting about me… I don’t ever talk to myself, like ever. I have no, what they call, “inner monologue”. Maybe I’m odd, but my wife asked me this very same question a while back and I said the same, there is never anything in my head except ideas, visuals or sounds, sometimes all at once, but never an inner monologue of “talking to myself”.

Is it the fact that “big tech” companies have basically stolen all of human knowledge to their benefit to build these AI(s) that’s the problem? Or is it that these AI(s) can write code better than you can (some of the time)? Or is it that because of all of the above, there’s no joy left in writing code anymore? 🤔

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I’m very curious…

What I like about this whole computer stuff is that you can explore how
things work. You can dig through problems and solve them. Nothing is
more satisfying than finally understanding something after you scratched
your head for some hours.

Surely you could do the same with AI? Tinker with how it works, study it, understand it, build your own and realize what it really is (without all the big tech hype)?

@klaxzy@klaxzy.net TIL about “Board of Canada”. :-D

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I would take that as a step forward! :-D

@movq@www.uninformativ.de It already broke successfully: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@JeremiahFieldhaven/116654345332213390

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Hahaha! :-D

@bender@twtxt.net You mean to make it all blank? ;-)

@bender@twtxt.net Welcome to our bot club!

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Alright. 😅

Yeah, don’t waste time on this. I have a vacation coming up and I won’t touch this subject, either. Fuck this shit.

I really like your style of writing, btw. It’s much calmer and less aggressive then mine. :-) When I turned my bullet points into paragraphs, I got a bit mad in the process.

This is like the 32nd iteration of that list and it was much worse in the beginning. 😂

RIP, rsync. https://social.hails.org/@hailey/116657391001259044