derrak

7 ms·

1.
by derrak 5mo ago
In case you’re not familiar, I will point you to the classical program synthesis literature. There the task is to take a spec written in say first-order logic, and output a program that satisfies this spec. I think the biggest barrier to ad
2.
by derrak 6mo ago
Wow! I really enjoyed this. The 2.5D rendering gives a lot of opportunities to visually obscure the insight that’s necessary to solve the maze. It makes me think that a good maze should have a “oh, duh” moment. There were a few times where
3.
by derrak 6mo ago
Makes me think of academic papers that overhype their contribution. Also makes me think about AI hype.
4.
by derrak 6mo ago
How do you define determinism?
5.
by derrak 6mo ago
Lets solidify definitions. A procedure is deterministic iff for all inputs, it always produces the same output on that input. Now, I am going to be pedantic because words matter here. I agree with the author that LLMs have downsides that ca
6.
by derrak 6mo ago
This app runs contrary to one of the most prolific stop smoking guides. https://www.allencarr.com/easyway-stop-smoking/top-tips-to-s... > You’re going to stop naturally so carry on smoking as usual until then. >
7.
by derrak 6mo ago
> As a countermeasure to key disclosure laws, some personal privacy products such as BestCrypt, FreeOTFE, and TrueCrypt have begun incorporating deniable encryption technology, which enable a single piece of encrypted data to be decrypte
8.
by derrak 6mo ago
I like. On the issue of “are LLMs good at lisp” I have a bit of a tangential response/observation. I saw this [paper]( https://ai.meta.com/research/publications/logic-py-bridging-... ) awhile ago. Long story sh
9.
by derrak 6mo ago
> I also thought about pushing more toward Lean and theorem proving instead of a lighter SMT-style direction I think your intuition here is good. For these settings I think you want formal methods that are highly automated. Question abou
10.
by derrak 6mo ago
Happy to help. In general, I think counterexample generation is more important than proofs when it comes to software (most of our software is “trivially” wrong). The world might not be ready for full-blown formal verification, but I think i
11.
by derrak 6mo ago
This looks very interesting. I think the translation from L0 to L1 is going to become more and more important. There have been a lot of discussions here on HN about how natural language specs “aren’t code” and how LLMs provide no formal rel
12.
by derrak 6mo ago
I do use ACL2, although I don’t do many proofs. When I do, the proofs usually go through automatically or require me to state only a few lemmas or tell the tool how to do the induction. This is partially a commentary on how good the automat
13.
by derrak 6mo ago
Noted, thanks. I don’t know what non-computational intelligence would look like but I guess I’ll keep my mind open.
14.
by derrak 6mo ago
> The proofs stop at the language boundary. The bugs don’t. In formal verification, you have to model everything you care about. I suspect we’ll see large fragments of popular languages being more thoroughly modeled in languages like Daf
15.
by derrak 6mo ago
Looks interesting. Anything in particular from it that you think relates to my comment?
16.
by derrak 6mo ago
> Certainly it is much closer to a brick than to a human. I disagree with this premise. A computer approximates a Turing Machine, which puts it far above a brick.
17.
by derrak 6mo ago
> Recently I’ve been thinking about coding with AI in terms of it being a process of navigating a tree of probabilistic outcomes. I think this is the correct way to think about automated coding. The natural question is: why are we using
18.
by derrak 6mo ago
We can keep our discussion about church turing here if you want. I will argue that the following capacities: 1. creating rules and 2. deciding to follow rules (or not) are themselves controlled by rules.
19.
by derrak 6mo ago
As long as agnosticism is the attitude, that’s fine. But we shouldn’t let mythology about human intelligence/computational capacity stop us from making progress toward that end. > unstated assumption that technological progress towa
20.
by derrak 6mo ago
Note that I prefaced my comment by saying the parent might be right about LLMs. > That's irrelevant. My comment was relevant, if a bit tangential. Edit: I also want to say that our attitude toward machine vs. human intelligence does
21.
by derrak 6mo ago
The Church-Turing thesis comes to mind. It would at least suggest that humans aren’t capable of doing anything computationally beyond what can be instantiated in software and hardware. But sure, instantiating these capabilities in hardware
22.
by derrak 6mo ago
> non-deterministic printer. I interpret non-deterministic here as “an LLM will not produce the same output on the same input.” This is a) not true and b) not actually a problem. a) LLMs are functions and appearances otherwise are due to
23.
by derrak 6mo ago
Maybe you’re right about modern LLMs. But you seem to be making an unstated assumption: “there is something special about humans that allow them to create new things and computers don’t have this thing.” Maybe you can’t teach current LLM ba
24.
by derrak 6mo ago
First, I have some advice if you are open to it. Apply a spell/grammar checker to your post before sharing it with other people. Your post has several typos and many people will stop reading after the first or second typo. “The author
25.
by derrak 6mo ago
> AI must control the proof search, not delegate to a black box. Cannot disagree more. Take a look at modern SAT solvers, SMT solvers, and automated theorem provers like ACL2. We should _not_ be letting the AI’s white knuckle any search
26.
by derrak 6mo ago
I think your solution is a good idea. I was just pushing back on why it’s a good idea. Determinism isn’t the crux. The crux is that you’re using a symbolic algorithm with well-defined formal semantics. I was trying to show that determinism
27.
by derrak 6mo ago
> It's deterministic on purpose (doesn't include any Al layer) I wouldn’t use the word deterministic here. I would use the word symbolic. Determinism, meaning that you always get the same output on the same input, isn’t what yo
28.
by derrak 6mo ago
In my mind the most salient difference between code and natural language is that code has a formal semantics. I’m still not entirely sure what people mean when they call a formal/natural language deterministic. As we’ve discussed, it c
29.
by derrak 6mo ago
All compilations do what I intended to do when I wrote the C code. But each compilation does the intended thing in a different way. The point I’m making is that determinism isn’t the key difference between compilers and LLMs. The key differ
30.
by derrak 6mo ago
I don’t know your background, but suspect that if you were given sufficient motivation, you could solve these problems in an esoteroic language. It might be tedious, but I suspect that most anyone with an undergraduate degree in computer sc

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