Automation normally implies deterministic outcomes.

Developers all over the world are under pressure to use these improbability machines.

Does it though? Even without LLMs, any sufficiently complex software can fail in ways that are effectively non-deterministic — at least from the customer or user perspective. For certain cases it becomes impossible to accurately predict outputs based on inputs. Especially if there are concurrency issues involved.

Or for manufacturing automation, take a look at automobile safety recalls. Many of those can be traced back to automated processes that were somewhat stochastic and not fully deterministic.

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necovek 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Impossible is a strong word when what you probably mean is "impractical": do you really believe that there is an actual unexplainable indeterminism in software programs? Including in concurrent programs.

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nradov 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I literally mean impossible from the perspective of customers and end users who don't have access to source code or developer tools. And some software failures caused by hardware faults are also non-deterministic. Those are individually rare but for cloud scale operations they happen all the time.

	▲	necovek 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks for the explanation: I disagree with both, though. Yes, it is hard for customers to understand the determinism behind some software behaviour, but they can still do it. I've figured out a couple of problems with software I was using without source or tools (yes, some involved concurrency). Yes, it is impractical because I was helped with my 20+ years of experience building software. Any hardware fault might be unexpected, but software behaviour is pretty deterministic: even bit flips are explained, and that's probably the closest to "impossible" that we've got.

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intended 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes, yes it does. In the every day, working use of the word, it does. We’ve gone so far down this path that theres entire degrees on just manufacturing process optimization and stability.