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Comment by sitzkrieg | Hacker News Reader

ego? LLMs goof on basic math and cant even generate code for many non public things. theyre not useful to me whatsoever

This... for my most important use case (applied numerical algorithms) it is in fact beyond not useful, it is negative value - even for highly available methods’ codes.

Sure, I can ask for it to write (wrong) boilerplate but it is hardly where work ends. It is up to me to spend the time doing careful due diligence at each and every step. I could ask for it to patch each mistake but, again, it relies on a trained, skillful, many times formally educated domain expert on the other end puppeteering the generative copywriter.

For the many cases where computer programming is similar to writing boilerplate, it could indeed be quite useful but I find the long tail of domain expertises will always be outside the reach of data-driven statistical learners.

LLMs aren't supposed to do basic math, but be chat agents. Wolfram Alpha can't do chat.

Math is a major part of programming. In fact programming without math is impossible. And if you go all the way down to bare metal it’s all math. We are shifting bits through incredibly complex abstractions.

No, math is major part of writing good code, but when was the last time you've seen somebody put effort into writing O(n) algorithm? 99% of programming is "import sort from sort; sort.sortThisReallyQuick". Programming is mostly writing code that just compiles and eventually gives correct results (and has bugs). You can do a lot of programming just buy copy-pasting results from stackoverflow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Npm_left-pad_incident

https://old.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/35prfv/designer...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC-0tCy4P1U

In any real-world application you'll sooner than later run into optimization challenges where if you don't understand the foundational challenges, googling "fastly do the thing" won't help you ;)

Much like asking an LLM to solve a problem for you.

Most optimization you do as a software engineer is about figuring out what you do not need to do, no math involved.

You aren't going around applying novel techniques of numerical linear algebra.

No, math can describe programming, but that's also true of everything. You wouldn't say "Playing basketball without math is impossible" even though it's technically true because you don't need to know or use math to play basketball. You also can do a ton of programming without knowing any math, although you will more than likely need to learn arithmetic to write enterprise code.

Has never been true in my experience, almost all programming can be done without any mathematics. Of course very specific things do require mathematics, but they are uncommon and often solved by specialists.

Btw. I come from a math background and later went into programming.

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