Comment on Is this sufficiently advanced technology?

• ramble81@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Nah man. I’ve been a programmer and it’s very much doing exactly what you told it to. The issue is you (general you) did not do a good job of telling it what to do. It’s like speaking to a five year old realizing the instructions you give it are going to be literally executed, loopholes and all.

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  • rethnor@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I’ve been a profession Dev for 20+ years. I generally agree with you, but I have experienced what appears to be non-deterministic behavior. One room me it was a multi threaded algorithm and would return slightly different results each time. My theory for mult threaded apps is an environment effects each thread differently. What other tasks the user is doing effected the thread execution order and would give different results based on which thread finished.

    While I still think the orocess is deterministic, but with enough factors it becomes indistinguishable from non-deterministic.

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    • ramble81@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I don’t want to be pedantic, as I understand what you’re saying, but they way I interpret that is it’s still deterministic, we just don’t know all of the factors that are currently contributing to the outcome. It’s not magical, it’s just lack of full understanding of all variables.

      I get how it can be thought of as non-deterministic, but I think the reason why that bothers me is I’ve seen it used as slippery slope territory into “see, so god must exist!”. I think I was just triggered more by the eventuality and not your specific statement.

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      • TootSweet@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Sometimes we purposefully make computers do nondeterministic things on purpose. Hardware random number generators, for instance.

        But not counting those situations, speedrunners often call some of the “other factors that just absolutely cannot be accounted for” kind of stuff that rethnor is talking about “RNG”.

        But even aside from that, there are some even less deterministic cases. Also from speedrunning, there’s the famous SM64 upwarp that my have been, but probably wasn’t a cosmic ray, but very likely was some kind of hardware failure that wouldn’t be accounted for by only considering how the N64 is supposed to work (given processor architecture and such).

        But an example I find even more interesting. There was a Defcon presentation where someone registered domain names that were one bit different from very frequently used domain names, kindof like typosquatting, but these were for domain names that no human was typing. These were domain names that computer programs were hitting, and the domain names weren’t derived from user input. But his one-bit-off domain names got a significant amount of traffic. Just from random memory corruptions and such due to some variety of weird hardware failures.

        I’d be skeptical of anyone I know claiming that they’d actually personally encountered something they knew to be truly non-deterministic in hardware that wasn’t in some way temporarily or permanently faulty or damaged in some way, but I think it is a thing that can happen in computers. And some of that nondeterminism comes from sources that actually do act at quantum scales were true nondeterminism isn’t unlikely to have sway.

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      • rethnor@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        That seams to be what I said in my last sentence.

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  • Zos_Kia@jlai.lu ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Yeah that’s a bit aspirational to my taste. Sure a script is just a list of instructions but when you start adding complex data and network hops and async work there are definitely “non-deterministic” behaviors that will emerge. Ultimately yes everything is ones and zeroes and there is probably an explanation but it will be something stupid and contrived.

    As a developer you lay out a plan for what should generally happen but there’s no way you can anticipate all the micro variations that happen in production. It’s like any kind of real life plan, really.

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