I keep seeing lots of people saying "LLMs are like compilers/assemblers for prompts"

[bri7@social.treehouse.systems]

@mntmn @cwebber management types have wanted this since the 1950s. it’s why COBOL and SQL exist; it’s why RAD exists. It’s why so called “4th Generation Languages” exist. Management would like nothing more to be done with needing to think about all those pesky details like “that’s a logical impossibility” or “that’s P=NP”, they want their word to be the word of god

[rosie@0x4d4f5448.systems]

We love it when changes have non-localized and unpredictable results;

[drwho@masto.hackers.town]

@cstanhope @mcc @mntmn @cwebber I like it.

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@ireneista @mntmn @cwebber well it's a general purpose UI *now* but only in a very monkeys paw way

[cwebber@social.coop]

@joeyh I mean real talk that's why I don't play preset seeds in roguelikes, hooked on that RNG juice

[dryak@mstdn.science]

@mcc @mntmn @cwebber speaking of expanding to more users and of assembler:

An argument I've heard is that: in the past high level compiled languages have replaced assembler, and LLMs are the next step.

Well, assembler -- and assembler-adjacent stuff like C's SIMD intrinsics -- are still relied upon (think finely optimised low-lvl libraries in some fields like gaming, video codecs, and number crunching in scientific data analysis).
...

[dryak@mstdn.science]

@mcc @mntmn @cwebber ...
Proper software engineering done by human with brains that can hold an actual mental model of the design implication isn't going away.

At best, what we have is a (very unreliable) tool that will allow people who are utterly allergic to programming languages to still be able to play around code.

[smn@l3ib.org]

@cwebber they're lossy pseudorandom decompression

[octorine@fosstodon.org]

@cstanhope @drwho @mcc @mntmn @cwebber And to bring it full circle, grad students *can* be compilers.

[octorine@fosstodon.org]

@mntmn @cwebber My company is 100% invested in ai. It's all management talks about. Before LLMs, we were all in on no-code or low code languages, web robots and such.

It's basically the same fantasy as before, but this time the whole world is along for the ride.

[alina@girldick.gay]

@cwebber @joeyh the binding of isaac, enter the gungeon and dead cells are worse than a slot machine for my adhd brain

[mirabilos@toot.mirbsd.org]

@cwebber oh, they could… if you operated them yourself. Snapshotting, and saving the PRNG seed.

[rdviii@famichiki.jp]

@cwebber mostly agree, especially about them not being compilers, but some compilers aren't deterministic. You'll get a different result in memory layout or optimization sometimes. Especially for quantum compilers, where the compilation process itself is known to be NP hard, so heuristics are used.

[ckfinite@universeodon.com]

@cwebber I think that the lack of determinism is less important than the lack of a precise mapping between input and output. If we hypothesize a nondeterministic compiler that exposes a precise semantics, you can statistically predict the output based on the input based on the stochastic compilation process. LLMs don't give any such guarantee: you put imprecise natural language in and then the output is vibesy related to the input. Small changes to the input can beget very large changes to the output.

[kkarhan@infosec.space]

@eramdam @cwebber +1

[nobody@mastodon.acm.org]

@cwebber
PGO go brrrrr

[baloouriza@social.tulsa.ok.us]

@cwebber This is more like the Pentium 4 idea of predictive branching, but with even larger pipeline stalls. Except the P4 could still do math.

[osma@mas.to]

For the people who compare an LLM to a compiler, the latter are not deterministic. They can not understand how sometimes* programs work, and sometimes they do not. The fault for this must be in the computer - hence LLMs equal compilers.

*depending on source code input and running conditions.
@cwebber

[cdonat@hostsharing.coop]

@rdviii @cwebber

Heuristics aren't non-deterministic by definition. Of course it is possible to come up with non-deterministic heuristics, just like with any kind of algorithm. But by far most heuristics are very deterministic, just like most algorithms are, heuristic, or not.

[ryanc@infosec.exchange]

@drwho @cstanhope @mcc @mntmn @cwebber Honestly, I would prefer LLM generated code over grad student generated code.