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Comment by bluefirebrand | Hacker News Reader

> even in the 70s people recognized that supersonic travel had real concrete issues with no solution in sight. I don't think LLMs share that characteristic today

I think they pretty strongly do

The solution seems to be "just lower your standards for acceptable margin of error to whatever the LLM is capable of producing" which should be concerning and absolutely unacceptable to anyone calling themselves an Engineer

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99% or more of software developers behave in ways that would be inconceivable in actual engineering. That's not to say there aren't software engineers, but most developers aren't engineers and aren't held to that standard.

Code is not physical. While computation errors can have real effects, a lot of orgs and people are resilient about them.

“Increasing Success by Lowering Expectations” That is from Despair Inc. This was obviously meant to be funny by them, now it looks like the state of play.

> absolutely unacceptable to anyone calling themselves an Engineer

Isn’t that exactly what engineers do? Even very strong bridges aren’t designed to survive every possible eventuality.

I'm talking about engineering a bridge for 50 cars that collapses at 51, not engineering a bridge for 500 cars that is only expected to get 50

Engineering does require tradeoffs of course. But that's not what the minimum possible quality is

That's what a "margin of error" is. The margin of error of a bridge is predictable thanks to well-established techniques of physical analysis.

An LLM system, on the other hand, can fail because you moved some punctuation around.

> An LLM system, on the other hand, can fail because you moved some punctuation around

An LLM system can fail without changing anything, it could just fail more or less randomly without any way to diagnose why it happened

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