Indeed, I'm reminded of the paper "No Silver Bullet" by Fred Brooks (the guy who write "The Mythical Man-Month"). In the paper, he lays out the distinction between inherent complexity and accidental complexity.

Most AI coding tools at present appear to be able address accidental complexity (but imperfectly). When you creep into trying to get them to address inherent complexity, they're lack of reasoning skills seems to become more apparent.

I don't know of anyone having made an argument for LLMs or something like them or something like ChatGPT's new reasoning models being able to address inherent complexity well without as much human review effort needed as would be required to just have a human do the task from the start.

That's just today. It's going to be interesting to see how things develop over the next 1-2 years.

OK, that's just fricking hilarious. I wish I had a mod point for you. Clearly we've experienced some of the same pain in the past.

a brand new flavor of kool-aid!

Even if he were right, maybe it'll be more like one of Stanislaw Lem's stories: we turn on the giant, near-omniscient machine, and it just goes silent and won't talk. So we build a slightly lesser machine to try to communicate with it.

Or maybe it'll just turn out to have been a "bad ideas"(tm).

Thank you. That says it very well.

Maybe he means "suffering" in a much more abstract sense, as in something more like "cognitive dissonance", but that wasn't the impression I took from the post.

There's the idea of "productive struggle" in learning, but that's more along the lines of growth from being challenged, as you said.

On the other side of the coin, complete lack of suffering, or even privilege, tends to lead to expectation, whereas adversity tends to lead to adaptation. But trying to find the adaptable people by subjecting everyone to suffering would be sick and cruel.

Suffering does not, apparently, necessarily lead to empathy.

Sorry to self-reply here, but for clarification: I meant "essential complexity" where I wrote "intrinsic complexity" but you probably knew what I meant if you've read the paper.

Addressing accidental complexity in a definitive manner would be, I admit, a big deal.

Also, for the busy who never read the paper, the Wikipedia summary is decent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Dear everyone (almost): please calm down.

Are you calm? Good.

Now please (re)read "No Silver Bullet" by Fred Brooks. Done? Good.

Now explain to me how AI is addressing intrinsic complexity and not just accidental complexity. I'll wait.

These things are not good at (real) math and not good at (real) reasoning. If you build something out of statistical patterns in large text corpora of various kinds, you get something that appears to reason sometimes but is actually the world's most extensive stochastic parrot.

... coming from the "I can't believe we have to say this, but..." department.

"You are in a maze of twisty long chain molecules, all alike."

...will come from attempts to use this product for pornographic purposes, in accord with the immutable law that all new technologies are used first for porn, then for other things later.

This will give rise to rule 35: if you can think of it, there is porn of it in your dreams.

... seems to relate to Fred Brooks's paper "No Silver Bullet", in which he distinguishes accidental complexity from essential complexity. The low-code and no-code tools seem like they'll still only address accidental complexity, which could be helpful but probably wouldn't yield a directly or indirectly decisive advantage in writing software. Automating the remediation of essential complexity might very well require (at least) general-purpose human-scale intelligence.

Yeah, you raise a good point.

The people you hire for this kind of work need to be mature developers (as in: self-discipline and self-restraint). They should be people who can keep themselves from rewriting code because it's hard to read it. They absolutely, positively, must understand the importance of functionally neutral code transforms (they should understand that phrase, which I think I made up, without having it explained). They must be people who never, ever boil the ocean and start over, thus trading unknown bugs for known ones.

The deck may get dusty, but code doesn't rust.

But another question: what about testing code and protecting the integrity of code in the care of VISS? That seems like a sizable effort as well... maybe they'd just download "SWAMP-in-a-box" (https://continuousassurance.org/) or something?

It's a short story that seems apropos in light of this news.

Also, if you go to time index 1:32:22 and play the audio backwards, it says "Huang is dead".

That was a joke. Please don't go check or I'll cry. With laughter.

You're probably right.

It was already done with radio back in the 70s. Simon and Garfunkel had an accidental hit that way:

Kodachrooo-oooo-ome. Gives us the nice bright colors; gives us the dree-ee-eeams of summer; makes you think all the world's a sunny day.

No doubt, someone will discover that the pattern of wrinkles around peoples's buttholes is unique and the next step will be paying by sphincterprint: "Just step over here, drop your pants, and sit on the sensor please."

The following fall, kilts are the fashionable, must-have item.

There is no limit, none at all, to how far people will push user acceptability limits in order to make more money.

...can someone please now start an "Irish" wikipedia where the whole thing reads like "Finnegan's Wake"? That's the logical next step.