6 ms·

The problem is that they are not solving the problem they ought to be solving. I don't want Shakespeare, I want Bob the builder. Half of my work is telling cl

by ericol 24d ago

The problem is that they are not solving the problem they ought to be solving. I don't want Shakespeare, I want Bob the builder. Half of my work is telling claude how to behave. I'm pretty certain they have enough _data_ to realize people do the same thing time and time again. Check this comment of mine for a better explanation of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49413353 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49413353

rowanG077 24d ago
This is really it for me as well. At the heights of complexity AI can do magical things. But really a lot of the time I just want it to do mundane things right. And currently it just cannot. It writes garbage text, consistently ignores something you have told it, makes mistakes a human makes once but the AI remains uncorrectable.
Bolwin 24d ago
They already do, extensively. Its not Shakespeare, in fact, it sucks at prose and creativity, like most newer llms. But people are not as alike as you think. I doubt I share your unique preferences. That said, I don't spend much time telling it how to behave. Are you sure you're not fighting the default system prompt?
- ericol 24d ago
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Barrin92 24d ago
>Half of my work is telling claude how to behave Dijkstra in the Foolishness of Natural Language Programming [...] the "naturalness" with which we use our native tongues boils down to the ease with which we can use them for making statements the nonsense of which is not obvious. It may be illuminating to try to imagine what would have happened if, right from the start our native tongue would have been the only vehicle for the input into and the output from our information processing equipment. My considered guess is that history would, in a sense, have repeated itself, and that computer science would consist mainly of the indeed black art how to bootstrap from there to a sufficiently well-defined formal system. Imagine if only we had languages at our fingertips whose explicit purpose was to precisely and unambiguously tell a machine what to do! https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667...
- nottorp 24d ago
  > Imagine if only we had languages at our fingertips whose explicit purpose was to precisely and unambiguously tell a machine what to do! But that would require people to think! And the marketing is they don't need to do that... Last consumer (ish!) product that required people to learn something to use it was PalmOS with Grafitti, wasn't it?
- evolve-maz 24d ago
  I've spent many years doing work in compliance for airlines. Hundreds of pages of documentation to describe the different rules and regulations which must be followed in specific scenarios. We'd convert those documents into a programmatic definition (rule engine) to alert when rules are at risk of not being followed. This work was fraught with bugs, a large portion of which came down to disagreement of what was coded v/s what was written. Even if you had airlines sign off sentence by sentence exactly what you wrote down in English, that's too open to interpretation. People don't appreciate how the same sentence can be read five different ways by different people (or the same person on different days). We had to structure our documents to be closer to pseudo-code than to English to get any meaningful consensus on the definition.

by ericol 24d ago

rowanG077 24d ago

This is really it for me as well. At the heights of complexity AI can do magical things. But really a lot of the time I just want it to do mundane things right. And currently it just cannot. It writes garbage text, consistently ignores something you have told it, makes mistakes a human makes once but the AI remains uncorrectable.

Bolwin 24d ago

They already do, extensively. Its not Shakespeare, in fact, it sucks at prose and creativity, like most newer llms. But people are not as alike as you think. I doubt I share your unique preferences. That said, I don't spend much time telling it how to behave. Are you sure you're not fighting the default system prompt?

ericol 24d ago
[dead]

Barrin92 24d ago

>Half of my work is telling claude how to behave Dijkstra in the Foolishness of Natural Language Programming [...] the "naturalness" with which we use our native tongues boils down to the ease with which we can use them for making statements the nonsense of which is not obvious. It may be illuminating to try to imagine what would have happened if, right from the start our native tongue would have been the only vehicle for the input into and the output from our information processing equipment. My considered guess is that history would, in a sense, have repeated itself, and that computer science would consist mainly of the indeed black art how to bootstrap from there to a sufficiently well-defined formal system. Imagine if only we had languages at our fingertips whose explicit purpose was to precisely and unambiguously tell a machine what to do! https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667...

nottorp 24d ago
> Imagine if only we had languages at our fingertips whose explicit purpose was to precisely and unambiguously tell a machine what to do! But that would require people to think! And the marketing is they don't need to do that... Last consumer (ish!) product that required people to learn something to use it was PalmOS with Grafitti, wasn't it?
evolve-maz 24d ago
I've spent many years doing work in compliance for airlines. Hundreds of pages of documentation to describe the different rules and regulations which must be followed in specific scenarios. We'd convert those documents into a programmatic definition (rule engine) to alert when rules are at risk of not being followed. This work was fraught with bugs, a large portion of which came down to disagreement of what was coded v/s what was written. Even if you had airlines sign off sentence by sentence exactly what you wrote down in English, that's too open to interpretation. People don't appreciate how the same sentence can be read five different ways by different people (or the same person on different days). We had to structure our documents to be closer to pseudo-code than to English to get any meaningful consensus on the definition.