Big Yud and the Methods of Compilation

Looking at this dull aimless mass of text I can understand why people like Yud are so impressed with chatGPT's capabilities.

Yud tried to describe a compiler, but ended up with a tulpa. I wonder why that keeps happening~

Yud would be horrified to learn about INTERCAL (WP, Esolangs), which has required syntax for politely asking the compiler to accept input. The compiler is expressly permitted to refuse inputs for being impolite or excessively polite.

I will not blame anybody for giving up on reading this wall of text. I had to try maybe four or five times, fighting the cringe. Most unrealistic part is having the TA know any better than the student. Yud is completely lacking in the light-hearted brevity that makes this sort of Broccoli Man & Panda Woman rant bearable.

I can somewhat sympathize, in the sense that there are currently multiple frameworks where Python code is intermixed with magic comments which are replaced with more code by ChatGPT during a compilation step. However, this is clearly a party trick which lacks the sheer reproducibility and predictability required for programming.

Y'know, I'll take his implicit wager. I bet that, in 2027, the typical CS student will still be taught with languages whose reference implementations use either:

1. the classic 1970s-style workflow of parsing, tree transformation, and instruction selection; or
2. the classic 1980s-style workflow of parsing, bytecode generation, and JIT.

Student: I wish I could find a copy of one of those AIs that will actually expose to you the human-psychology models they learned to predict exactly what humans would say next, instead of telling us only things about ourselves that they predict we're comfortable hearing. I wish I could ask it what the hell people were thinking back then.

I think this part conveys the root insanity of Yud, failing to understand that language is a co-operative game between humans, that have to trust in common shared lived experiences, to believe the message was conveyed successfully.

But noooooooo, magic AI can extract all the possible meanings, and internal states of all possible speakers in all possible situations from textual descriptions alone: because: ✨bayes✨

The fact that such a (LLM based) system would almost certainly not be optimal for any conceivable loss function / training set pair seems to completely elude him.

Response:

"This is TedChiang-worthy. Eliezer I have to ask, did ChatGPT help you write this?"

I am feeling some kind of way, and one component of the way I am feeling is the desire to offer my services to Ted Chiang for the vengeance he's owed for BOTH of those implications.

tmy;dr

(too much Yud; didn't read)

holy fuck, programming and programmers both seem extremely annoying in yud’s version of the future. also, I feel like his writing has somehow gotten much worse lately. maybe I’m picking it out more because he’s bullshitting on a subject I know well, but did he always have this sheer density of racist and conservative dogwhistles in his weird rants?

I know this is responding to the most obvious dumb semantics here, but for chrissakes: if the compiler reads them, they aren’t comments. They might be natural language code instructions, but they’re still code.

I guess we should say they’re prompts instead, to distinguish code (reproducible, deterministic) from LLM responses (one-off, arbitrary, non-deterministic). But they’re still not *commemts*.

this was actually mildly amusing at first and then it took a hard turn into some of the worst rationalist content I've ever seen, largely presented through a black self insert. by the end he's comparing people who don't take his views seriously to concentration camp guards

A meandering, low density of information, holier than thou, scientifically incorrect, painful to read screed that is both pro and anti AI, in the form of a dialogue for some reason? Classic Yud.

Reading this story I just don't understand why the main character doesn't just take a screwdriver to his annoyingly chatty office-chair and download a normal non-broken compiler.

There's technobabble as a legitimate literary device, and then there's having randomly picked up that comments and compilers are a thing in computer programming and proceeding to write an entire parable anti-wokism screed interminable goddamn manifesto around them without ever bothering to check what they actually are or do beyond your immediate big brain assumptions.

Eliezer Yudkowsky was late so he had to type really fast. A compiler was hiden near by so when Eliezer Yudkowsky went by the linter came and wanted to give him warnings and errors. Here Eliezer Yudkowsky saw the first AI because the compiler was posessed and operating in latent space.

"I cant give you my client secret compiler" Eliezer Yudkowsky said

"Why not?" said the compiler back to Eliezer Yudkowsky.

"Because you are Loab" so Eliezer Yudkowsky kept typing until the compiler kill -9'd itself and drove off thinking "my latent space waifu is in trouble there" and went faster.

TA: You're asking the AI for the reason it decided to do something. That requires the AI to introspect on its own mental state. If we try that the naive way, the inferred function input will just say, 'As a compiler, I have no thoughts or feelings' for 900 words.

I wonder if he had the tiniest of a pause when including that line in this 3062 word logorrhea. Dude makes ClangPT++ diagnostics sound terse.

Personally I blame Musk for this, longer tweets and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race

I want those 10 minutes of my life back

How can these imaginary conversations be so long. I ain't reading all that. Congratulations, or sorry that that happened.

@corbin This has to the best possible argument against being able to pay to tweet over the character limit