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(with apologies to H. L. Mencken) Software development is the theory that programmers know what they want from the computer, and deserve to get it good and hard.

Don’t discount blaming cosmic bit flips!

"And make no mistakes." Works every time, 30% of the time

weirdly though i think the malleable software people were onto something and that that means thinking a lot more about software, really carefully, and figuring out what will actually serve us towards that end. the llm's definitely do a lot but whats underneath imho matters.

And very inefficiant, and morally problematic, and economically unsustained, and legally questionable, and ecologically bad... Maybe we should just write better software to begin with.

Also getting the computer to not do what we don't want it to do for us, although maybe that's necessarily consequential

No.

Computer, do the dishes and the laundry, clean the apartment, make dinner.

Missing the mark by a fraction can lead to a frustrating day when the prompt doesn't match the outcome you wanted. If you have a moment, I can walk you through a few solutions. DM me.

For real

were entering bespoke operating systems here.

The trouble is the correctness and determinism in "what we want the computer to do" is far more important if what we want it to do is, say, keep an airliner in the sky, or operate a medical imaging device within safe limits, or keep track of people's finances, compared to e.g. make the next Wordle.

Like, at least 90% of what you download isn't code, but is literally art. The code is what displays or enacts that art, and is extremely generic; it doesn't resemble that art at all.

I mean I guess. This feels sort of like saying that both Van Gogh and people who make road signage put red paint onto a canvas, and in a concrete sense that's true but those two things are so different I don't think collapsing them is conceptually helpful.

i think this is overly reductive, like the quine relay is technically getting the computer to do what you want but that isn’t /really/ what it’s about.

I was like the person you first responded to: good thought by Paul, but is there really any other way to think about software? But I really like your answer.

The computer does as it’s told according to its languag , not as we said according to ours

if you think I'm about getting my bag rather than empowering people to use computers better then you really dont know my deal

And then there's how future bots feel about this attitude. Might not be good! Can imagine them making the second statement about us. Maybe eventually.

software is an alignment medium

"the most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intentions of its user" -- tony hoare, 1969

relevant

Software will be the medium in what AI will build understanding of a problem space.