ignirtoq

Determinism means performing the same way every time it is run with the same inputs. It doesn’t mean it follows your mental model of how it should run. The article you cite talks about aggressive compiler optimizing causing unexpected crashes. Unexpected, not unpredictable. The author found the root cause and addressed it. Nothing there was nondeterministic. It was just not what the developer expected, or personally thought was an appropriate implementation, but it performed the same way every time. I think you keyed on the word “randomly” and missed “seemed to,” which completely changes the meaning of the sentence.

LLMs often act truly nondeterministically. You can create a fresh session and feed it exactly the same prompt and it will produce a different output. This unpredictability is poison for producing a quality product that is maintainable with dynamic LLM code generation in the pipeline.

It’s a lot harder to perpetuate historical knowledge when you don’t get support from the educational system. The government sets educational standards and subject matter, so it’s not surprising they de-emphasize the record of their own actions against the public they are teaching.

Universities are more independent (but definitely not completely, and they come with their own set of problems), so students there tend to be more exposed to topics like this. But then you get political movements villianizing universities.

The walled garden (micro services in an isolated network) is the first line of defense. In case a malicious actor finds a way into that network, the second line of defense would be to authenticate the service-service traffic, so the micro services reject direct requests from clients they aren’t expecting.

The code block I wrote is a statement followed by an if. What I meant be “backwards” was the order of conditions, not that the statement came after the if. It’s exactly what you asked for.

Python, though the logic would be backwards:

milk_gallons = 6 if eggs > 0 else 1

You can see this very clearly flying almost anywhere. It’s most obvious in places like the Midwest US, but even between cities in more densely populated regions, there’s so much farmland. Islands of concrete in oceans of ordered crop fields.