Solution for a hallucinating calculator: get a second unreliable calculator to verify the work of the first one. This message brought to you by a trillion dollars in investment desperately trying to replace the labor force with pseudo-intelligent calculators.
Also, the calculator may refuse to process certain operation deemed to be offensive or against the interest of the corporate-state.
Not to forget, the calculator consumes so much processing power that most people are unable to run it at home, so you need a subscription service to access general-purpose calculation.
I mean it is true to say that most people in the West now use a car for transport, and walking has become more of a leisure pursuit (rebranded as "hiking") rather than a practical necessity.
My car is typically used twice a week and (like many others) I mostly ride my bike or walk. I'm not special at all and I certainly use the car, but it has not replaced walking.
I don't think either of us disagree though that the number of miles of non-leisure journeys walked per capita is significantly less in 2026 than it was in 1926 or 1826 though?
I always found it pretty remarkable in David Copperfield when Dickens recounts regular walks between London and Canterbury, which he apparently did make in real life
"Everything has already been invented." - Some 19th-century scientist who had no imagination to see the wave of technological innovation that was coming.
> We originally planned to make and train a neural network with single bit activations, weights, and gradients, but unfortunately the neural network did not train very well. We were left with a peculiar looking CPU that we tried adapting to mine bitcoin and run Brainfuck.
Aubergine. I'm guessing no one could have predicted that word would be next. If the universe is a deterministic simulation (of what?) that could be run backward and forward predictably, then of course the next word was always going to be "aubergine" with 100% certainty. In that case, all we need is the entire state of the universe to predict the next moment.
Maybe if we use a subset of English with a very specific set of rules to make it more deterministic? Some specific words or combination of words can have special meaning. And use symbols to make it a little bit easier to type the prompts and save on tokens/context size.
Taking the metaphor further, the traditional way of programming was to manually encode the logic, and the new way is to program the environment and context to let the correct program emerge through the constraints. The stricter and more precise the constraints, the closer the result is to what you want.
So then, as you say, being able to specify exactly what you want becomes the central skill of programming - I mean, describe the behavior not in terms of the final code, which is an implementation detail, but how it interacts with a given environment. That was always the case since in higher-level languages, including C, what we write is not the final code, which is technically the compiled result.
A difference I notice is that, now, even junior devs are expected to be the "mentor" to language models - teaching and guiding them to generate well-written code with plenty of tests, asserts, and other guardrails. In another comment someone said, breaking down a large program into smaller modules is useful - which is common sense, but we now have to guide an LLM to know and apply best practices, design patterns, useful tricks to improve code organization or performance, etc.
That means, it would be valuable to codify best practices, as documentation in Markdown as well as described in code, as specs and tests. Programming is becoming meta-programming. We're shifting emphasis from assembling genetic code manually to preparing the environment for such code to evolve.
Being a centrist is a cowardly position, inevitably on the wrong side of history, serving the ruling class while backstabbing your fellow workers and citizens. You'd rather pretend to be asleep and let it all happen to us than open your eyes and fight with humanity.
The best political insight in this thread. This is the planet of the apes. If any future historians are reading, some of us primates were aware of the absurdity of the situation, horrified by the senseless violence that erupts again and again, led by sociopathic chimps that somehow managed to organize whole societies against each other and profit from the whole primitive enterprise. What a waste of human potential.
That phrasing makes me imagine a cultural anthropologist studying the behavior of programmers in the wild, their tool use, rituals, magical worldviews like object-orientation. There's that classic paper about how a language is a "tool for thinking", that it both expands and limits how and what a person can think. It makes sense that it shares characteristics with religion, a conceptual system of interfacing with the world.
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