It isn't clear to me why these are so different? The alternative mindset to deterministic software is to use probabilistic models. The common mentality is that deterministic software takes developer knowledge into account. This becomes less effective in the big data era, that's the bitter lesson, and that's why the shift is taking place. I'm not saying that the article is the bitter lesson restated, but I'm saying that this is a realisation of that lesson.

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adidoit 4 days ago | parent [-]

Ah ok yes that makes more sense to me. Thank you for clarifying - I agree this new philosophy of building on probabilistic software is an outcome of the bitter lesson.

And we will over time have even more capability in the model (that is more general purpose) than our deterministic scaffolds...

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ath3nd 3 days ago | parent [-]

> And we will over time have even more capability in the model (that is more general purpose) than our deterministic scaffolds...

Who is "we" in that case? Are you the one building the model? Do you have the compute and data capacity to test every corner case that matters?

In a deterministic system you can review the code and determine what it does under certain conditions. How do you know the ones that do build non-deterministic systems (because, let's face it, you will use but not build those systems) haven't rigged it for their benefit and not yours?

> And we will over time have even more capability in the model (that is more general purpose) than our deterministic scaffolds...

Our deterministic scaffolds sounds so dramatic, it sounds like you think of them like the chains that keep holding you, if only those chains were removed, you'd be able to fly. But it's not you who'd be able to fly, it's the ones building the model and having the compute to build it. And because of its non-deterministic nature, a backdoor for their benefit is now simply plausible deniability. Who is we. You are a user of those models, you will not be adding anything to it, maybe only circumstantially by your prompts being mined. You are not we.

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hodgehog11 3 days ago | parent [-]

This is a genuine concern, which is why it is a very hot topic of research. If you're giving a probabilistic program the potential to do something sinister, using a commercial model or something that you have not carefully finetuned yourself would be a terrible idea. The same principle applies for commercial binaries; without decompilation and thorough investigation, can you really trust what it's doing?

	▲	ath3nd a day ago \| parent [-]
		> The same principle applies for commercial binaries; without decompilation and thorough investigation, can you really trust what it's doing? I have been using OSS libraries for the last 20+ years where there are signatures and one can actually check the source. I think the industry mostly moved away from using magic binaries? With LLMs a lot of what you get out is based on the data they are trained on (black box), a dash of extra refinement and fine tuning (black box) and if it's not running on your device, maybe even shadow prompts. I dont want to build anything with LLMs for the same reason I don't want an Alexa in my home. To me, GenAI slop is the ultimate dumbing down of society and the ultimate control mechanism. People don't wanna bother read 5 lines of text, bam, summarize it for them into a one liner. People don't wanna bother to learn to draw: bam, some shitty model generates a picture of a cat for you. People don't wanna learn some syntax and think about their codebase: bam, Claude to the rescue. We are collectively dumbing down an already progressively dumb society using increasingly sophisticated tools atrophying our already atrophied brains (doomscrolling and brainrot didn't help). If experience has shown anything, it's that when our reliance of these tools increases, thats when the people who control them will start forcing ads and change public opinion with them, along with continuous surveillance. Why are we doing this to ourselves, just so we can create a webapp 5 min faster that won't be maintainable in 2 months?