cplat

I agree with this. LLMs can actuate over capabilities we expose, so the blame isn't only on LLMs for this.

That's not quite how auto-regressive models are trained (the expression of "ideas" bit). There is no notion of "ideas." Words are not defined like we humans do, they're only related.

And on the latent space bit, it's also true for classical models, and the basic idea behind any pattern recognition or dimensionality reduction. That doesn't mean it's necessarily "getting the right idea."

Again, I don't want to "think of it as a probability." I'm saying what you're describing is a probability distribution. Do you have a citation for "probability to express correctly the sentence/idea" bit? Because just having a latent space is no implication of representing an idea.

I don't understand. Deterministic and stochastic have very specific meanings. The statement: "To continue my reply I could say this word, more than the others, or maybe that one, a bit less, ..." sounds very much like a probability distribution.

GeorgiaTech's online Master's in Computer Science has lower costs. About $8k in total. I did it along with a full-time job since I only took one subject per semester.

Which aspects? Foundational textbooks would focus on principles, not necessarily implementations, and don't go "outdated" the same way a snippet does.

To be fair, he never said "every single role at your company requires a secret clearance." He has specifically mentioned that you can get by even without them. You have misquoted.

I think there's merit to both design docs and prototypes.

At the same time, your argument that "you'll be replaced by GPT in no time" is also an opinion that you've not supported with any data; the same thing that you're accusing the OP of.

I mean If I stopped reading opinions, 99% of the HN comments would disappear.

Good for you.

I agree with you. I've wrote very big web applications in Rails, Django, and Java/Spring.

I understand the argument for things being "explicit" in Python, but then I just prefer Java if I'm going to be very verbose about what I want (I'm only talking about backend APIs here). It's just my opinion that whether explicit is good or not depends on the level of abstraction we're interested in, and I don't believe that explicit is always good. (I like the concept of meta-algorithms, for example)

But if there's a one-person project that needs to be scaled quickly, I prefer Rails. (The article mentions how Django makes model fields explicit in the models file, but doesn't talk about schema.rb in Rails which doesn't require you to view each migration to know how the database looks.)

Yes, big projects in any language can get messy, but that's a software engineering problem, not a framework problem.

I recently wrote a FastAPI project that was db-driven, with all the necessary test cases, etc. The amount of lines it took to express the controller, the schemas and models separately, the dependencies for auth and stuff, and especially elaborate test cases was pretty substantial. Yeah, the code was all explicit, but it was not enjoyable.

Yes, which is why the rest of my sentence is important. I said, “I haven’t found a need to use a proprietary language.” I didn’t claim that one will never be needed by anyone. :-)

Yes, I’m aware, which is why it reminded me of PureBasic with which I’m more familiar. :-)

I'm familiar with PureBasic (although didn't use it a lot). I got introduced to it in the 2000s (2000-2007 or something), along with DarkBasic, GameMaker, and the likes.

In today's era, however, I have not yet found a need to use a proprietary language.

This is a very good comment and does reflect my experience. As engineers, we're the only people who can estimate something close enough, and it becomes our job to do that while taking into account the risks.

Our bad assumption is in thinking that only the final output matters, regardless of when and where it is delivered. Like saying that it only matters if the train arrives at the station, regardless of when it does.

The problem is anyone depending on us downstream will get impacted. And yes, estimation is tough, requires foresight, and maybe a lot more things, but that's what being a professional means.

This is it. I'm a hardcore engineer at heart who has a lot of these sales, marketing, and product folks as friends, and can attest to the fact that they also have constraints.

The whole world runs on deadlines and timelines. Even a president is elected for a specific duration. If you're in a B2B setting, the customer demands (sometimes even contractually binding) at least the Quarter when something will be delivered.

Time is the only common denominator by which different activities can be coordinated. Without some heed to time, there will be no coherence.