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Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

If I told you "don't use spin locks, call futex instead", do you think have gained an understanding of the Linux scheduler?

Yes, because I already knew what schedulers are, what spinlocks are, and if I want to know what futex is I can go look it up. Comprehension is within my grasp.

Your original claim, which you’ve repeatedly distanced yourself from (by trying to use comprehensible examples) but won’t admit to, was about incomprehensible stuff. That is, text that no human could possibly understand, ever.

You’re repeatedly engaging in intellectual dishonesty rather than simply admit that “human comprehension probably will continue for the foreseeable future”, which is really not a controversial idea at all.

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Bullshit. Human comprehension will not continue, it will reduced to "when the AI tells us to add Bismuth, strontium, and copper together in this way, we get a superconductor", but that doesn't mean we understand high temperature superconductivity.

For what it's worth, we've known about BSCCO for nearly 40 years, and we still don't have a great physical understanding of how it works, thought we made decent progress in 2022.

That’s still comprehensible. Incomprehensible chemistry instructions simply could not be followed by any human. They would be of no use to anyone.

You're using a very bad definition of incomprehensible. We don't understand the chemistry behind how these things work, it's that simple. If you're going to argue it's comprehensible, you'd better show how it works and go collect your Nobel prize.

All we know is that if we melt the right rocks together, we get a superconductor that works in some mysterious way that we can't explain. We know it's not Cooper pairs.

No, I’m using the right one [1]. You are the one using a bizarre definition for your own purposes.

I can see there is no further productive discussion to be had with you at all. I bid you good day.

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/incomprehensible

Since it's comprehensible, please point me to someone that can comprehend high temperature superconductivity and how it works, and then explain why they didn't explain it.

With the definition you seem to want to use, it's impossible for anything to be incomprehensible, and therefore it's tautological that there's no incomprehensible LLM output: nothing at all is incomprehensible.

Do you have an example of anything incomprehensible? Anything at all? Even the things that Gödel would say are inaccessible could, in theory, become accessible: we just don't know with absolute certainly that the mathematics it was based on got all the axioms right, though we see no errors now.

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