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Comment by Eufrat | Hacker News Reader

The fact that this is an account with a username specifically focused on this specific concern that was created 5 hours ago is real weird/suspicious.

Also, are these even actual decompiles? Sure, playing Wheel of Fortune with a LLM model that at some undetermined point spits out what seems to be a working example is sorta useful, but also…how exactly do you debug this nonsense? Don’t tell me we’ll just have the LLM thrash around a bunch again. What I’m asking is does anyone understand what is going on here other than “lol, it works, shut up”?

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You must be new here. Lurkers posting under an apt username then disappearing is a feature, not a bug. He doesn't need to argue with anyone online - he said his piece and we're free to take it or leave it.

Usually, green username are a sign of "leave it", I'll agree. But this one seems very informative.

LLMs work great at decompilation, I'm not sure what you are trying to suggest. Outside of game compilation disassembly is useful for debugging various crashes in 3p code where you don't have the source. And yes LLMs do the debugging here.

I’m suggesting that having a model wander around stochastically is not necessarily a great way to gain any insight or understanding. LLMs do not think, they cannot really debug anything. Attaching intelligence or intent to them is a non sequitur, it’s not happening. A cloud that looks like a toaster does not imply anything beyond the human obsession with pattern matching, why do we keep doing this with LLMs? They can randomly wander around and sometimes produce useful output.

I don’t doubt they help by randomly permuting around in a way that people cannot do at scale, but I question the economics of this approach and I think it needs to be used judiciously. Sometimes you just have to do that especially like you said, when you do not have the source or the code is intentionally obfuscated, this can be useful, but a lot of people seem like they’re just vibe coding crap and blowing money on tokens until they get a useful result and I have no idea what the value of that is.

I mean, do you understand the systems you work on? Down to the ISA? The transistors? The electrons?

The stack gets taller and more complex, as it ever as. People who understand one part of the stack in great depth rarely understand the entire stack. Those who understand its full shape don’t have complete depth at any one part. This is how computing has worked for a few decades at least.

You don’t have to shut up, you’re free to dive in and learn. But you’ll have to balance breadth and depth like the rest of us.

I think most people with even a bachelor's in anything STEM know it down to the transistors. That's also been true for decades. Every time I hear this line of argument I cringe. Computers aren't that deep compared to other engineering topics.

> Every time I hear this line of argument I cringe.

Because it’s the same kind of fatuous logic that intelligent design proponents use. This thing is so complex so we can’t possible understand it. Therefore, it’s magic.

People specialize for sure, but it’s not like the average person can’t figure this stuff out with some motivation.

I really, really don’t think so.

Before you get to transistors you need to understand memory types (heap, stack, etc). You need virtualization, interrupts, and threading. You need CPU vs GPU, character encoding, and memory mapping. At least ipv4 and layers 1-3 of OSI. And much more.

Do you really think anyone with a bachelors in STEM has all that, or are you saying full stack knowledge is satisfied by knowing a high level language plus the fact that transistors switch passing or blocking current based on a signal?

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