Hacker News Reader

Comment by bitpush | Hacker News Reader

You say "probabilistic" as if some kind of gotcha. The binary rigidness is merely an illusion that computers put up. At every layer, there's probabilistic events going on.

- Your hot path functions get optimized, probabilistically

- Your requests to a webserver are probabilistic, and most of the systems have retries built in.

- Heck, 1s and 0s operate in a range, with error bars built in. It isnt really 5V = 1 and 0V = 0.

Just because YOU dont deal with probabilistic events while programming in rust, or python doesnt mean it is inherently bad. Embrace it.

View on HN

We’re comparing this to an LSP or intellisense type of system, how exactly are these probabilistic? Maybe they crash or get a memory leak every once in a while but that’s true of any software including an inference engine… I’m much more worried about the fact that I can’t guarantee that if I type in half of a variable name, that it’ll know exactly what i’m trying to type. It would be like preparing to delete a line in vim and it predicts you want to delete the next three. Even if you do 90% of the time, you have to verify its output. It’s nothing like a compiler, spurious network errors, etc (which still exist even with another layer of LLM on top).

>> Introducing probabilistic codegen ...

> Just because YOU dont deal with probabilistic events while programming in ...

Runtime events such as what you enumerate are unrelated to "probabilistic codegen" the GP references, as "codegen" is short for "code generation" and in this context identifies an implementation activity.

The scheduler that puts your program on a CPU works probabilistically. There are no rigid guarentees of workloads in Linux. Those only exist in real time operating systems.

> The scheduler that puts your program on a CPU works probabilistically. There are no rigid guarentees of workloads in Linux. Those only exist in real time operating systems.

Again, the post to which you originally replied was about code generation when authoring solution source code.

This has nothing to do with Linux, Linux process scheduling, RTOS[0], or any other runtime concern, be it operating system or otherwise.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_operating_system

(eyeroll)

Apples and oranges. It's frankly nonsense to tell me to "embrace it" as a phantom / strawman rebuttal about a broader concept I never said was inherently bad or even avoidable. I was talking much more specifically about non-deterministic code generation during implementation / authoring phase.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com