chpatrick

Docker (and also Nix) exists because it's not trivial to manage the whole environment needed to run an application.

There's a reason everyone uses it for ops these days, and not some Windows thing.

Maybe for desktop use but when you want to deploy something to your server it's a bit more complicated than that.

Does Steam let you control the whole dependency tree of your software, including modifying any part of it and rebuilding from source as necessary, or pushing it to a whole other machine?

Real life software is much more than just downloading a game and running it.

> Humans don't think in tokens or even write in tokens so obviously what you wrote is not a fact.

Doesn't matter what they think in. A token can be a letter or a word or a sound. The point is that the box takes some sequence of tokens and produces some sequence of tokens.

> You wrote "The text that comes out follows some statistical distribution". > At the risk of being over my head here did you mean the text can be described statistically or "follows some statistical distribution". Are these two concepts the same thing? I don't think so. > A program by design follows some statistical distribution. A human is doing whatever electrochemical thing it's doing that can be described statistically after the fact.

Again, it doesn't matter how the box works internally. You can only observe what goes in and out and observe its distribution.

> Regardless my point was pretty simple, I know this will never happen but I wish tech people would drop this tech language when describing humans and adopt neuroscience language.

My point is neuroscience or not doesn't matter. People make the claim that "the box just produces characters with some stochastic process, therefore it's not intelligent or correct", and I'm saying that implication is not true because there could just as well be a human in the box.

You can't decide whether a system is intelligent just based of the method with which it communicates.

That's just a mathematical fact.

You have a big opaque box with a slot where you can put text in and you can see text come out. The text that comes out follows some statistical distribution (obviously), and isn't always the same.

Can you decide just from that if there's an LLM or a human sitting inside the box? No. So you can't make conclusions about whether the box as a system is intelligent just because it outputs characters in a stochastic manner according to some distribution.

I'm not making any claim about how the human brain works. The only thing I'm saying is that humans also produce somewhat randomized output for the same question, which is pretty uncontroversial I think. That doesn't mean they're unintelligent. Same for LLMs.

Ok, so humans are also fallible. Your point being?

Do humans always answer exactly the same way to the same question? No.

Also you could always pick the most likely token in an LLM as well to make it deterministic if you really wanted.

Right now the fully deterministic always correct oracle machine doesn't exist. The most authorative answer we can get on a subject is from a respected human in their field (who is still stochastic). It's unrealistic to hold LLMs to a higher standard than that.

Of course there is. If its training forces it to develop a theory of mind then it will weight the dice so that it's more likely to output "I don't know". Most likely the culprit is that it's hard to make training data for things that it doesn't know.

That's not what I said. What I said is that the claim "LLMs aren't intelligent because they stochastically produce characters" doesn't hold because humans do that too even if they're intelligent and authorative.

It isn't though, the most factually correct human expert is also stochastic. The only question is how the dice are weighted.

I think that's been a lot less true over the last year or so. Gemini 2.5 Pro is the first LLM I actually find pretty damn reliable.

Sure, it's only as good as the training data. But human experts also output tokens with some statistical distribution. That doesn't mean anything.

Nothing to do with dice though.

It is if the weights are sufficiently advanced.

I think they'll have to come up with a less scary name for it though.

If it tastes like great Chinese food (which is a pretty vague concept btw, it's a big country), does it matter?

When you type you're also producing one character at a time with some statistical distribution. That doesn't imply anything regarding your intelligence.

War for the Overworld is the DK revival you're looking for!

I don't think current AIs are too far from walking you through it though.

I think plumbing is an overly high bar. Your friend who lives on a different continent can't fix your plumbing either but they're still generally intelligent. It's only a fair comparison if we compare it to a human also communicating via some channel.

I think that's fair. The stuff that works for other distros won't work for Nix. However I think eventually everything will be nix-ified. Right now for services there's also an easy escape hatch with docker and oci-containers. It's also what I use if I can't be bothered to nixify some server I want to run.

I had the opposite experience. I started using it as a daily driver around 10 years ago and could never to back to anything else. It's just super solid and once you have it configured it just works forever. I agree that the learning curve is pretty steep, especially if you want to use something that's not in nixpkgs but those things are vanishing day by day.

I'm really glad I don't know what any of those things are.

I've heard people say it's basically SAP with some spooky mystique for marketing.

It's not like human code doesn't need review.

Just because they're both hyped doesn't mean they're the same. Blockchain has always (largely) been a solution in search of a problem but LLMs are already being used by everyone and their dog right now.

So because I'm pattern matching that means I'm not thinking right? That's the same argument you have for LLMs.

I'm not sure what your argument is. The common claim that annoys me about LLMs on here is that they're not "really" coming up with ideas but that they're cheating and just repeating something they read on the internet somewhere that was written by a human who can "really" think. To me this is obviously false if you've talked to a SOTA LLM or know a little about how they work.