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Comment by salawat | Hacker News Reader

There's no fucking training to mitigate a slot machine.

that analogy is so boring now with so many real world examples of actual LLM work.

people still can't get over the unreasonable effectiveness of algorithms.

There have also been winners of a slot machine gamba, so the analogy quite holds. I would even argue that there are considerably more slot machine gamba winners than the real world examples of actual LLM work.

nondeterminism will always be anathema to the engineering mind

There’s actually been a ton of research on how to optimize “slot machines,” at least in a generalized sense. For more reading, check out the literature on multi armed bandits.

Games like Diablo are basically a whole bunch of slot machines, and there are strategies you can follow to optimize your run.

Yes, because in video games there is always a chance to win so you can optimize your strategy around that chance. If you have a 1% chance to drop a legendary weapon, the question becomes how do I manufacture 100 chances for a weapon drop in the shortest possible time. With agentic coding there is no such guaranteed chance - in a way it's worse than a slot machine that is guaranteed to pay out eventually. You could spend hundreds of millions of tokens and still not get what you asked for.

> If you have a 1% chance to drop a legendary weapon, the question becomes how do I manufacture 100 chances for a weapon drop in the shortest possible time.

Sidenote but I hope everyone realizes that 100 is kind of arbitrary here and does not mean the total chance to to get something is 100%.

you don't have to do the math unless it's on the exam, lol.

You’re right, the arpg analogy isnt great, it’s too simplistic. I was trying to come up with something heavily stochastic where people are coming up with strategies to get the odds in their favor. Maybe closer to speculating on the real estate market? But even that feels too simplistic compared to LLMs. Even the definition of a win isn’t well defined.

Actually it’s really its own thing, I don’t think the slot machine analogy works too well, you also have fixed odds (and you know they aren’t in your favor), and a binary output

The analogy to slot machine is that you're spending your own resources in hope of a reward. So you're ultimately bound by your resources and your strategy doesn't count for much in the grand scheme of things.

With employees, there's a lot of punishments in place for people to not want to mess up. Loss of wages and reputation, prison time,... Startup do not fail because they have a bug-ridden product, they fail because of the market.

With AI, all bets are off. They're not aligned with your goals and it's very hard to discern when they go off unless you're an expert. And if you are one, at best it's just a slight boost in typing especially with all the works involved in software development.

Odd, I train teams (at large companies) to use harnesses effectively. So some training does exist.

I get the anti/skeptic sentiment. I've been called a lot of horrible things by a vocal contingent when they hear that I help train folks to learn software engineering best practices and then apply AI to that.

LOL, that's a sophisticated and sometimes slightly unpredictable multitool.

If this is the "analogy" you go for, you don't seem to be suited to make that comparison.

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