hippo22

I think you’re missing my point: we’re only able to predict large numbers of coin flips because we have an accurate model.

We don’t have an accurate model for weather, so we can’t predict it well.

I don’t see a reason to assume our model for climate is accurate, either.

You can’t predict a coin flip because it is random. However, we have an accurate understanding of the random process producing coin flips and therefore, we can make accurate predictions about large quantities of flips.

Weather may or may not be random. It could be entirely deterministic for all we know. However, we lack the ability to fully model all the factors that contribute to weather and therefore our predictions are inaccurate.

Now let’s consider long term climate predications. Do you think these predictions are more like coin flips, where we have an extremely accurate model of the process, or more like weather, where unknown unknowns have outsized impact on accuracy?

That’s not to say climate change isn’t real, but your analogy doesn’t make sense.

If you weight papers by some measure of impact, e.g. by citation count, this is not true.

I guess you’re not a big fan of Plato then?

It’s fine to disagree with my analogy. But I find it a little ironic your dismissal of the analogy is a non sequitur. The invalidness of the analogy doesn’t directly follow, logically, from the fact that the written word and the spoken word are both mediums.

Isn’t a better question: why would they migrate off COBOL? Their business is working. What’s the impetus to change? It’s not like they need to use COBOL for every new project.

> Are you proposing that an LLM can extract some meaning from your initial prompt that a human being couldn't?

No, I’m asserting that an LLM can help formulate ideas in a coherent, understandable way. You can give it a brain dump with a rough outline for an argument and it fill in the details. If the argument isn’t to your liking, you can try again. But the end result is basically equivalent to the human-written equivalent.

I disagree. The purpose of writing is to convey ideas. If written language had just been invented, I’m sure you’d be saying “IMO any important stories you expect others to know should be communicated orally. It’s kind of disrespectful to convey stories as if they were hearing you speak.”

But a query optimizer only matters once you have an established business with large customers.

You seem to be implying Salesforce’s business is successful because they have their own query optimizer. But the causality is reversed. Salesforce has their own query optimizer because they’ve built a successful business.

Your friends don’t produce much content yet people had a need for frequent entertainment. Also, people realized that posting things to social media meant that it was there forever. This led to a bifurcation: friends / family updates are mostly relegated to temporary formats like stories while “feed” content is professional produced.

It's not really that hard to make a Salesforce clone now though. Writing the software was never the hard part of building a business.

You should feel that C’s longevity is insane. How many languages have come and gone in the meantime? C is truly an impressive language that profoundly moved humanity forward. If that’s not insane (used colloquially) to you, then what is?