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they probably mean deterministic in the sense of traditional computer programs consisting of if-else decision points and ordinary cpu logic, as opposed to numerical models (which can of course be deterministic too, as you pointed out)

Model inference is just that same logic but faster.

I think the point is determined. No-one can determine what the LLM might do.


> Model inference is just that same logic but faster.

This statement is nonsensical.


> JetBrains, a major player in developer tools, recently completed a study of junior and novice developers

The article links to this as the study: https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3632620.3671116. It doesn't appear to be related to JetBrains in any way?


I originally found the paper through this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTUh0OO6Kmo

The video seemed to indicate it was a study they ran (she refers to the examples as "our subjects were two of twenty four participants"). It seems they are just citing the study. While it doesn't change the study or the takeaways, I'll update the post for clarification!


> backing up the brinks truck

now that's a phrase I have only heard in one other context: as an alleged quote from former Boston Celtics player Isaiah Thomas (who was really about 5'7 despite his official listed 5'9; yes, professional basketball player in NBA). This was around 2017 when he had just come off a career year and was soon due for a contract extension in the low 9 figures. He got injured and bounced around for a few years before eventually leaving the league, and never got that payday.


It’s commonly used in college sports where one school’s fan base argue for poaching a coach at another school. “Back up the Brinks truck” == throw money at him.

https://shnatsel.medium.com/do-not-run-any-cargo-commands-on...

> any command starting with cargo can run arbitrary code when operating on an untrusted repository, and should be treated the same as cargo run.


This comment is both true and entirely irrelevant. The context of this subthread is not running a Cargo command in a checkout of a malicious git repo, it's alleging that `cargo add foo` runs the build script of the crate `foo`, which is false.

just to clarify, by "horrible practice" you mean macros?

No, they probably mean tiny libraries.

in that case, I would assume tiny libraries can be created in any language.

Yes, that's what I meant.

> The genuine arrayref and append-only-vec crates are maintained by droundy, whose account appears to have been compromised.

That name looked familiar to me; I believe it's the same David Roundy who was an academic at Reed College who wrote DARCS, which is version control software. I used DARCS when I started grad school around 2010 before switching to git.


> They are based on the premise that an educated person should be able to argue convincingly for or against any idea, regardless of whether they believe in it.

In many situations, people doing this, skillfully even, has had quite pernicious consequences.


There are at least two uses of "declare": one the colloquial english usage that has been around for at least hundreds of years, which roughly means "announce" or "state". The other use of declare is the much more specific programming language version which you're referring to.

Here's what the comment you're responding to said:

> They should have to declare to the browser what it is they want done instead.

Arguably it's pretty clear they meant declare in the first sense.


I'm the one who wrote the sentence you are quoting, and I most definitely meant it in the sense of "declarative language, where you say what you want and the runtime figures out how to do it internally".


> You are not writing dead text; you are conversing with a living system.

There it is again.


"conversing with a living system" aka "using a common debugging tool"


Lisp debuggers are uncommonly powerful, but there's more to "living systems" than debuggers. I suck at using debugging tools, lisp or otherwise, yet I still love the living system aspect of Lisp or OCaml.

In mainstream languages, the closest thing to the "living system" part of lisp that I personally grasp and love is not debbuggers; it's Jupyter Notebooks, SQL sandboxes in DBMS UIs, and scripting, as in shell scripting. Still, given the choice, I prefer the Emacs+lisp experience over these great tools.

Also, live programming is not something lisp overspecialize in, like could be argued for most of the aforementioned tools. Rather, it incorporates it seamlessly. In visual studio, I can run a program line by line or with breakpoints. In lisp, I can select which s experession(s) I want to compile or execute, while an LLM agent is connected to the same image and doing stuffs in the background.

I do not merely get any single potential benefit of dynamic languages, I get all of them at once, even when working on a source file perfectly suited for punchcard programming (read compile execute).


Only if your debugging tool supports hot code reloading without changing execution context, updating live references, and is able to save the session across executions.


I don't understand. Are you saying that you think that writing Common Lisp is akin to using a debugger in other programming languages?


REPLs aren't debuggers.


The problem is that people think 'python-like' repl is equivalent to CL's repl.


Can python properly reload an import yet? I complained about the lack of ability to do that about a decade ago, and was told that people were "working on it."


I think it will hit up the cache.

If it exists, Python simply returns the existing module object from memory. It completely ignores the file on disk.


More like, debuggers are a subset of what a proper REPL can do.


you're getting downvoted by others because of tone but I had the same thought


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