Define non-essenti

The way I see dependency in office ("knowledge") work:

- pre-(computing) history. We are at the office, we work

- dawn of the pc: my computer is down, work halts

- dawn of the lan: the network is down, work halts

- dawn of the Internet: the Internet connection is down, work halts (<- we are basically all here)

- dawn of the LLM: ChatGPT is down, work halts (<- for many, we are here already)

I see your point. It's nearing essential.

> programming

The programming analogy is convenient but off. The joke has always been “the computer only does exactly what you tell it to do!” regarding logic bugs. Prompts and LLMs most certainly do not work like that.

I loved the parallels with modern LLMs and time sharing he presented though.

> Prompts and LLMs most certainly do not work like that.

It quite literally works like that. The computer is now OS + user-land + LLM runner + ML architecture + weights + system prompt + user prompt.

Taken together, and since you're adding in probabilities (by using ML/LLMs), you're quite literally getting "the computer only does exactly what you tell it to do!", it's just that we have added "but make slight variations to what tokens you select next" (temperature>0.0) sometimes, but it's still the same thing.

Just like when you tell the computer to create encrypted content by using some seed. You're getting exactly what you asked for.

only in English, and also non-deterministic.

Yeah, wherever possible I try to have the llm answer me in Python rather than English (especially when explaining new concepts)

English is soooooo ambiguous

For what it's worth, I've been using it to help me learn math, and I added to my rules an instruction that it should always give me an example in Python (preferably sympy) whenever possible.