Comment by hackyhacky

17 days ago

> You're making several category errors w/ your comparison.

I don't think I am. If you ask an LLM for a burger web site, you will get a burger web site. That's the only category that matters.

> I don't think I am. If you ask an LLM for a burger web site, you will get a burger web site. That's the only category that matters.

If one burger website generated uses PHP and the other is plain javascript, which completely changes the way the website has to be hosted--this category matters quite a bit, no?

  • > which completely changes the way the website has to be hosted--this category matters quite a bit, no?

    It matters to you because you're a programmer, and you can't imagine how someone could create a program without being a programmer. But it doesn't really matter.

    The non-technical user of the LLM won't care if the LLM generates PHP or JS code, because they don't care how it gets hosted. They'll tell the LLM to take care of it, and it will. Or more likely, the user won't even know what the word "hosting" means, they'll simply ask the LLM to make a website and publish it, and the LLM takes care of all the details.

    • Is the LLM paying for hosting in this scenario, too? Is the LLM signing up for the new hosting provider that supports PHP after initially deploying to github pages?

      Feels like the non-programmer is going to care a little bit about paying for 5 different hosting providers because the LLM decided to generate their burger website in PHP, JavaScript, Python, Ruby and Perl in successive iterations.

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  • > this category matters quite a bit, no?

    No. Put yourself in the shoes of the owner of the burger restaurant (who only heard the term "JavaScript" twice in his life and vaguely remember it's probably something related to "Java", which he heard three times) and you'll know why the answer is no.

    • I put myself in the shoes of the burger restaurant owner. I vibe coded a website. Sweet. I talk to my cousin who's doing the web hosting and he says he can't host a "Pee Haich Pee" site. I don't know what that is. Suddenly the thing that didn't matter actually really fucking matters

      This is like saying it doesn't matter if your pipes are iron, lead or PVC because you don't see them. They all move water and shit where they need to be, so no problem. Ignorance is bliss I guess? Plumbers are obsolete!

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I think you are b/c you lack actual understanding of how compilers work & what it would mean to compile the same C code w/ two different conformant C compilers & get semantically different results.

  • > you lack actual understanding of how compilers work

    My brother in Christ, please get off your condescending horse. I have written compilers. I know how they work. And also you've apparently never heard of undefined behavior.

    The point is that the output is different at the assembly level, but that doesn't matter to the user. Just as output from an LLM but differ from another, but the user doesn't care.

    • Undefined behavior is a edge case in C. Other programing languages (like JavaScript) goes to great lengths in defining their standards such that it is almost impossible to write code with undefined behavior. By far majority of code written out there has no undefined behavior. I think it is safe to assume that everyone here (except you) are talking about C code without undefined behavior when we mean that the same code produces the same results regardless of the compiler (as long as the compiler is standards conforming).

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    • You don't sound like you have written any code at all actually. What you do sound like is someone who is pretending like they know what it means to program which happens a lot on the internet.

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