In my opinion, this post misses the forest for the trees. Yes, the model of an OS running various off-the-shelf apps for various tasks will soon become obsolete. But it's not the idea of the OS that's outdated - it's the idea of apps. Why would you ever want to ask an AI to make an app for you to complete some task, if you can instead ask the AI to complete the task directly? The future isn't a bunch of extremely personalized apps - the future is a single AI assistant doing all the work.
An AI assistant can give different answers for the same inputs. An application written by an AI assistant, if it doesn't just call an LLM at runtime, will mostly likely produce the same answer for the same inputs. That is, unless there's something intrinsic to its business logic that makes it nondeterministic.
Sometimes you really want the latter even if the former is less effort.
A *human* assistant can give different answers for the same inputs. At some point, we'll need to stop treating computers as instruction executors and start treating them as autonomous agents. Non-determinism isn't a bug to be fixed, it's just the reality of working with this new kind of machines, and operators of those machines need to embrace that fact, like they did for human assistants.
But sometimes you do just want the same answer each time. Not this human woo crap, where the answer depends on god knows what, but a deterministic function of some kind, reliably producing a given output for a given input according to a fixed set of rules.
Yes, but sometimes (quite often actually) you really don't care. The entire subfield of audiovisual compression is built around the principle that you don't care. The data is actively being lost and the image distorted, and you're fine with it. Wanting deterministic results out of MP3 is like wanting AC units to be loud. Sure, they are loud, just like MP3 is deterministic, but why exactly is being loud one of your requirements when choosing an AC unit? Isn't it enough to produce cool air, or in case of MP3 - sound good enough?
It would be like telling the computer to compress a music file containing Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, and getting back a file that contains Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up. Maybe you don't care, but I do.
You are talking about AI outright failing to get anything remotely close to the correct result. That's a completely different argument and has nothing to do with non-determinism. Things can be deterministically wrong too.
Accuracy, precision and determinism are completely different things. Lossless compression reduces precision, and by that also accuracy, but it doesn't become undeterministic.
You've got terms confused. LossLESS compression does NOT reduce precision or accuracy. Unlike lossY compression, which does.
That said, my point is that determinism is incidental to how current generation of compression algorithms work, not an explicitly desired quality. And even that isn't strictly true, because e.g. x264 in certain multithreaded configurations already produces non-deterministic results that look as good as single-threaded encoding. For this use case - and thousands of others - losing determinism when switching to AI-based solutions really isn't a big deal.
Xirdus · · focus · HN ↗
kevindamm · · focus · HN ↗
Sometimes you really want the latter even if the former is less effort.
Xirdus · · focus · HN ↗
tom_ · · focus · HN ↗
Computers can do that!
Xirdus · · focus · HN ↗
dosisking · · focus · HN ↗
Xirdus · · focus · HN ↗
1718627440 · · focus · HN ↗
Xirdus · · focus · HN ↗
That said, my point is that determinism is incidental to how current generation of compression algorithms work, not an explicitly desired quality. And even that isn't strictly true, because e.g. x264 in certain multithreaded configurations already produces non-deterministic results that look as good as single-threaded encoding. For this use case - and thousands of others - losing determinism when switching to AI-based solutions really isn't a big deal.
1718627440 · · focus · HN ↗
Determinism is not incidental, it's the whole reason to invent formal systems and computing engines, including the current electronic ones.