Comment by calibas

Comment by calibas a day ago

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I'm sure an LLM knows more about computer science than a human programmer.

Not to say the LLM is more intelligent or better at coding, but that computer science is an incredibly broad field (like chemistry). There's simply so much to know that the LLM has an inherent advantage. It can be trained with huge amounts of generalized knowledge far faster than a human can learn.

Do you know every common programing language? The LLM does, plus it can code in FRACTRAN, Brainfuck, Binary lambda calculus, and a dozen other obscure languages.

It's very impressive, until you realize the LLM's knowledge is a mile wide and an inch deep. It has vast quantities of knowledge, but lacks depth. A human that specializes in a field is almost always going to outperform an LLM in that field, at least for the moment.

mumbisChungo 21 hours ago

It's impressive until you realize its limitations.

Then it becomes impressive again once you understand how to productively use it as a tool, given its limitations.

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logifail 19 hours ago

> Do you know every common programing language?

A long time ago my OH was introduced to someone who claimed "to speak seven languages fluently".

Her response at the time was was "Do they have anything interesting to say in any of them?"

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  • dandellion 14 hours ago

    As a foreign English speaker, it's a huge pet peeve is when people use acronyms without having used the full sentence before. Especially when the acronym is already a word or expression and looking it up just returns a bunch of useless examples (oh!). Eventually I'll find out the meaning (other half), and it always turns out they only saved a total of six or seven letters, which can be typed in less than 0.5 seconds, but in exchange they made their sentence more or less incomprehensible for a large group of people.

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    • dylan604 12 hours ago

      As a native English speaker, I had no idea what OH was either. I’ve seen SO for significant other and not stack overflow, and I’ve seen reference to better half not just other half. By that choice, I am left to assume this person feels they are the better half which says a lot about them.

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      • djtango 9 hours ago

        As a native speaker, you probably scratched your head and worked out what could fit in that gap and eventually worked it out. Then you'll grumble because the other speaker didn't choose your preferred diction.

        As a non native speaker you'll probably just feel upset/hopeless/angry.

        From my experience, "non-native" here includes people who are "fluent".

        So we arrive at the situation where my OH-SO beloved wife is fluent in English and is definitely better than me at writing clearly constructed English essays but when it comes to usage of random idioms/slang or understanding local (and foreign!) English accents I have a very clear advantage.

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        • dylan604 9 hours ago

          actually, no, other half never popped into my head. i only got it from seeing other comments in the thread of people confused by it as well.

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      • daveguy 12 hours ago

        > By that choice, I am left to assume this person feels they are the better half which says a lot about them.

        What a ridiculous assumption.

        Maybe they consider themselves and their partner to be equal halves of a whole. You know, the definition of half.

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    • Shadowmist 12 hours ago

      Paste the comment into an LLM and ask it what it means. Don’t use Google.

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    • glenneroo 13 hours ago

      OTOH we are one of today's "lucky" 10,000? And future searches will possibly lead to this post, further reducing friction to using this acronym. Also newly trained LLMs will also be able to answer quicker. Yay?

      I wonder how acronyms such as OTOH even become so well known that they can be used without fear or not being understood? When is that threshold reached? Is using OH now the beginning of a new well-known acronym? I guess only time will tell...

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      • theelous3 13 hours ago

        the far more common and acceptable-to-use-without-introduction acronym for this is SO (significant other)

        And to answer the question - the threshold is when people stop complaining about the use :)

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      • catigula 12 hours ago

        I've literally never seen "OTOH" in my life. Anyhow, if you really feel your sentence can't do without it you can say "conversely" which is pretty short and clear.

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      • dylan604 12 hours ago

        We are not in a text chat using T9 on a numeric keypad where typing is painful. There’s no need for acronyms now except for the attempt at not looking like an old or just lazy. We’re also not limited to 140 chars, so not an advantage there either.

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timschmidt 21 hours ago

> Do you know every common programing language? The LLM does, plus it can code in FRACTRAN, Brainfuck, Binary lambda calculus, and a dozen other obscure languages.

Not only this, but they're surprisingly talented at reading compiled binaries in a dozen different machine and bytecodes. I have seen one one-shot an applet rewrite from compiled java bytecode to modern javascript.

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  • catigula 12 hours ago

    And herein lies the fundamental power of the LLM and why it can even solve "impressive" problems: it is able to navigate a space that humans can't trivially - massive amounts of information and ability to parse through walls of simple logic/text.

    LLMs are at their best when the context capacity of the human is stretched and the task doesn't really take any reasoning but requires an extraction of some basic, common pattern.

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    • dylan604 12 hours ago

      > it is able to navigate a space that humans can't trivially - massive amounts of information and ability to parse through walls of simple logic/text.

      That’s the very reason we built computers. If an LLM did not also meet this definition, there would be no point of it existing

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      • catigula 12 hours ago

        You're not the first person to suggest that LLMs have no reason to exist.

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  • anthk 19 hours ago

    Binwalk, Unicorn... as if it that was advanced wizardry. Unix systems have file(1) since forever and binutils from and to every arch.

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    • Energiekomin 14 hours ago

      Yes it is and you compare apples with pineapples.

      file can't program in brainfuck while doing basic binary analysis.

      Binwalk and Unicorn can't do that either. And they can't write to you in multiply natural languages either

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yMEyUyNE1 16 hours ago

> There's simply so much to know that the LLM has an inherent advantage.

But do they understand it? I mean, A child used swear words, but does it understand the meaning of the swear words. In other comment, somebodies OH also mentioned about artistic abilities and utility of the words spoken.

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  • ben_w 7 hours ago

    Does a submarine swim?

    It doesn't matter to my employment prospects if the AI "understands" or "thinks", whatever is meant by that, but rather if potential employers recon it's good enough to not bother employing me.

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esafak 21 hours ago

But the LLM can already connect things that you can not, by virtue of its breadth. Some may disagree, but I think it will soon go deeper too.

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anthk 19 hours ago

So impressive that every complex SUBLEQ code I've tried with an LLM failed really fast.

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