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Comment by mfabbri77 | Hacker News Reader

In my experience, the further you move away from the user and toward the hardware and fundamental theoretical algorithms, the less true this becomes.

This is very true for an email client, but very untrue for an innovative 3D rendering engine technology (just an example).

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An email client is highly nontrivial, due to the complexities of the underlying standards, and how the real implementations you have to be compatible with don’t strictly follow them. Making an email client that doesn’t suck and is fully interoperable is quite an ambitious endeavor.

The point was to answer the question: "Can every piece of software be viewed as a permutation of software that has already been developed?" In my opinion, an email client is a more favorable example than a 3D engine. In fields where it is necessary to differentiate, improve, or innovate at the algorithmic level, where research and development play a fundamental role, it is not simply a matter of permuting software or leveraging existing software components by simply assembling them more effectively.

Actually, in the specific case of a 3D program it's the current generation of LLM's complete lack of ability in spatial reasoning that prevents them from "understanding" what you want when you ask it to e.g. "make a camera that flies in the direction you are looking at".

It necessarily has to derive it from examples of cameras that fly forward that it knows about, without understanding the exact mathematical underpinnings that allow you to rotate a 3D perspective camera and move along its local coordinate system, let alone knowing how to verify whether its implementation functions as desired, often resulting in dysfunctional garbage. Even with a human in the loop that provides it with feedback and grounds it (I tried), it can't figure this out, and that's just a tiny example.

Math is precise, and an LLM's fuzzy approach is therefore a bad fit for it. It will need an obscene amount of examples to reliably "parrot" mathematical constructs.

> "make a camera that flies in the direction you are looking at"

That's not the task of a renderer though, but its client, so you're talking past your parent comment. And given that I've seen peers one-shot tiny Unity prototypes with agents, I don't really believe they're that bad at taking an educated guess at such a simple prompt, as much as I wish it were true.

You're right. My point was more that LLMs are bad at (3D) math and spatial reasoning, which applies to renderers. Since Unity neatly abstracts the complexity away of this through an API that corresponds well to spoken language, and is quite popular, that same example and similar prototypes should have a higher success rate.

I guess the less detailed a spec has to be thanks to the tooling, the more likely it is that the LLM will come up with something usable. But it's unclear to me whether that is because of more examples existing due to higher user adoption, or because of fewer decisions/predictions having to be made by the LLM. Maybe it is a bit of both.

What complexities specifically? Implementing SMTP (from the client’s perspective) that other SMTP servers can understand is not very hard. I have done it. Does it follow every nuance of the standard? I don’t know, but it works for me. I haven’t implemented IMAP but I don’t see why it should be much harder. Is there a particular example you have in mind?

I would be surprised if there are more working email clients out there than working 3D engines. The gaming market is huge, most people do not pay to use email, hobbyists love creating game engines.

Idk, a working basic email client is just not that hard to write though. SMTP and IMAP are simple protocols and the required graphical interface is a very straightforward combination of standard widgets.

I don't mean to be contrarian, but this is completely false.

IMAP _seems_ to be a straightforward (but nasty and stateful) protocol, until you find out that every major provider ignores RFCs and does things slightly differently.

It's a hellscape.

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