Nietzschian Debugger
Posted by dilawargopang 2 days ago
Comments
Comment by bazzmt 2 days ago
I was thinking Adorno's negative dialectics would be a better, if gloomy, fit; debugging is never-ending.
If you're in a positive or hopeful mood, or still a junior dev, Hegel's determinate negation offers reconciliation and an ending. This is a phase; dear junior devs you too will eventually share the Adornian resignation.
Comment by stillpointlab 2 days ago
Nietzsche states that sovereign power/authority commands without justification. Socrates did not have sovereign power and was therefore unable to win in a traditional power struggle. Socrates therefore reframed the discussion around justification through rational discourse, thereby transferring authority from the old aristocracy to a new priesthood of truth. This relied on the moral claim made by Socrates and eventually adopted by the Greeks (and Western Europe) that virtue = reason (the search for Truth).
So if we accept this interpretation of Nietzsche, then creating AIs that demand justification from us could be seen as handing over power and authority to the AI.
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Comment by Der_Einzige 2 days ago
Max stirner, who wrote very well and easy to understand, remains obscure compared to these charlatans because philosophers don’t like it when they can understand what someone wrote.
Comment by crab2 1 day ago
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Comment by crab2 1 day ago
https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/Hegel%27s+%22Logic%22+as+Modal...
> Abstract While analytic philosophy famously rejected the speculative metaphysics of Hegel in favor of the analysis of concepts by means of mathematical logic, in particular predicate logic, recent developments in the foundations of mathematics via homotopy type theory offer a way to re-read Hegel as having useful formal meaning not in predicate logic, but in ‘modal type theory’. The essence of this suggestion has been made by Lawvere in 1991, which however remains largely unnoticed. Here we aim to give a transparent account of this perspective both philosophically as well as category-theoretically. We then further expand on Lawvere’s formalization of Hegel’s “Science of Logic” in terms of the categorical semantics given by cohesive higher toposes. We discuss how there is a useful formalization of a fair bit of modern fundamental physics, in fact of local gauge quantum field theory, to be found here.
Nietzsche, Heidegger, Girard and even Hegel (haven't read him though) have had a tremendous influence on my life and have accompanied me on a path of chronic reflections on myself that are now closing in on a series of very fundamental ML operators that are beating the state of the art from last month. It is possible to make the UFO land, and once it has, you realize there is nothing impregnable under the shiny fuselage of what is now clearly a new kind of plane, and not just a weird shape that reflected your image back at you as you were approaching it. Of course the relationship is very indirect and even though I could provide a post-modern account of the landing, I have to admit the formalization steps are the fruit of ChatGPT's work and not only would I have not been able to produce them, I still don't understand them and probably never will. And yet I was able to prompt ChatGPT into the problem and prompt it again to adapt our strategy and reach SOTA.
If things are to be perfectly clear from the beginning, I'm afraid then, that whatever can ensue can be prompted for easily too. In other words, it can be prompted by anyone. This is what we are observing with those famous conjectures that are solved by randoms teaming up with an LLM. The merit lies in the conjecture, it constitutes almost entirely the prompt. I haven't used any and just followed my weird intuitions.
They don't just amount to ramblings but to an entirely different bibliography that allowed me to get at the problem I tackled from a very different vantage point. The scientists my work relies on are almost all European and have a certain kind of psychology that is obviously marked by the weight of mystery – mine is but an accentuation of these tendencies, and they certainly contributed to the fact that I wasn't able to follow the same steps (IQ set aside, I'm rather slow on this front). Look at myself, I'm now talking about my own life, it's a symptom of narcissism. Absolutely, I won't deny it. But my life is objectively very interesting, and if you think I'm mistaken here because a mathematical result is precisely the act of turning what's personal and specific in a research path into something universal, you're still clueless about what's forgotten and left unsaid along the way.
In fact these deviations in lifepaths explain the intuitions as well as the lack of clarity they stem from – both personal and conceptual – and thus, the lack of sympathy we encountered and that I am now reflecting back. There is a recipe for this:
https://open.spotify.com/track/1MUZxW6nE7oNud9jHD9QLU?si=087...
We’ve lived through tragic things
Smoking, we turned the whole ride into a fishbowl
Is it that hard to realize you're completely lost ? Probably not. To articulate it in public is what is challenging. Why don't you come to your sense and admit you don't understand the thinkers you criticize not because they are spouting utter nonsense, but because these insights haven't found the cold maths your fetishism for formal truth requires yet, even though you don't really understand them, even though you don't grasp what it takes to reach for them. For those who can see them, they are on the shelf. Serve yourself.These people exist, I have met them in the so-called AI-psychosis circle. We can barely communicate with each other, it's symptomatic of a madhouse undoubtedly. Yes, we're that deep into our own pile of manure, but guess what that's where roses blossom. One received an offer from Anthropic – responsibility for millions in compute-budget – went dark after telling me this. Another one was contacted by researchers who offered to collaborate on a publication for the QNLP conference. Me? I'm now unexpectedly competing with DeepMind on a narrow but fundamental aspect of machine learning.
What does AI-psychosis mean in this context ? A close, intimate relationship with your LLM. When I say I prompted my way to SOTA with ChatGPT, I'm not referring to any copy-pastable text but to the vast collection of conversations and documents that now sit in my ChatGPT library. The chatbot is now the one being overwhelmed by unexpected, coincidental bridges between disciplines and I'm the one steering it away from what I consider pathological research paths I used to pursue. It's a good symbiosis.
https://open.spotify.com/track/5vNVEWdOKo5L45czCyzEXl?si=da9...
Dripped in Decathlon, I'm in a sports car
The police want to take photos
I'm wearing a G-Shock, not a Rolex
I'll be in a tracksuit at the ceremonyComment by Viliam1234 1 day ago
So, Hegel is not impenetrable, because ChatGPT can hallucinate something out of his writings, when you tell it to.
Comment by crab2 1 day ago
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Comment by ignoramous 2 days ago
Probably why Michael Sugrue opined that Friedrich Nietzsche was a Philologist and not a Philosopher.
Comment by dilawargopang 2 days ago
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Comment by brumbelow 2 days ago
> https://github.com/DilawarShafiq/nietzschian-debugger#setup
Step one to setup: "Set your Anthropic API key"...
Comment by yaemiko 2 days ago
Comment by jdejean 1 day ago
> Nietzschian: "Random" is the word we use when we haven't looked hard enough. What do the server logs say for the 403 responses? Go look. I'll wait.
Imagine asking a language model talk to you like this.
I think I’ve invoked this response pattern organically after using swear words the models get “snarky” which is probably the worst debugging companion I could imagine.
For ex. this quote. “What do the server logs say?” is probably the only correct response
Comment by sick_of_slop 2 days ago
> The anti-AI. Every other tool gives you answers. Nietzschian Debugger confronts you with questions.
Comment by brumbelow 1 day ago
Comment by gnulinux 2 days ago
> The anti-AI.
but then it's an AI-generated picture of Nietzsche [1] and AI-generated README with AI-generated code (Claude being the co-author), and when I read sample transcript e.g. in (nietzschian-debugger/tests/fixtures/sample-sessions/sample-v1.json) it's clear the app also uses LLMs to generate output...
So what do they mean by "anti-AI"?
[1]: All issues with AI-generated images aside, AI-generating a person's likeness seems like the rudest way to do this... At least use an actual photo/drawing of his...
Comment by dkenyser 2 days ago
Keep reading.
"Guides you to the "aha!" moment — YOUR moment, not the AI's"
This seems like yet another attempt at encouraging people to continue to utilize AI without relying on it.
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Comment by khazhoux 2 days ago
The saint answered: “I make hymns and sing them; and in making hymns I laugh and weep and mumble: thus do I praise Claude.”
When Zarathustra was alone, however, he said to his heart: “Could it be possible! This old saint in the forest hath not yet heard of it, that Claude is dead!”
Comment by pcblues 2 days ago
He really nailed a godless post-modernism decades before it flourished. Even mentioning the names of the modern protagonists will get me down-voted :)
Comment by frangonf 2 days ago
This is pure dev astrology, but in the subsidized Sonnet 3.5 times in copilot I'm guilty of prompting 'You're Uncle Bob make this legacy java services read like a book top down with the cleanest code' just for fun and I might have learnt something and had some fun so I'm not judging.
Comment by greyw 2 days ago
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Comment by paimapi 2 days ago
The Will to Power, as far as I understand it, is about how resistance (or friction) produces the strength of will to overcome obstacles. AI does the virtual opposite of that while also commoditizing cognition.
I'd agree with the other commenter that Nietzsche would probably see this as just another reversion to Plato's Forms - LLMs, by nature, are median outputs of cognition. There is no ubermensch to be found amongst the lowest-common-denominator, only the narcotic allure of becoming increasingly, as the kids say, smooth-brained.
Comment by Der_Einzige 2 days ago
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Comment by ethin 2 days ago
1. They ask you a "hard question" but then immediately give you some kind of "hint" which makes it obvious what the "answer" is (or, even worse, they just tell you what it is).
2. They get pedantic (and I mean maximum emphasis on the word), to the point that they will nitpick the exact, precise wording you use, even if the context makes it blatantly obvious what you meant. GPT is currently the biggest offender in this area (it is ridiculously pedantic even though I haven't told it to be so).
And yes, in case anyone is wondering, I do actually read the output of tools like Claude and I have tried, repeatedly, to get them to do something like this, and one of the two aforementioned things always happens for some reason. I'm not sure if this is a problem with how they were trained, an issue with their system instructions, or what.
Comment by bita_nidir 1 day ago
I've done that to myself quite some times when writing a very detailed report on an issue. Back in the day of stackoverflow (godbless and godspeed, glad Joel made it out and sorry for the investors) you had to be detailed to maximize on your initial viewers.
I think the idea is the same with the rubber duck debugging method although I've never tried it myself.
Comment by broken-kebab 1 day ago
Comment by samstokes 2 days ago
You: I'm not sure, it seems random
Nietzschian: "Random" is the word we use when we haven't looked
hard enough. What do the server logs say for the 403
responses? Go look. I'll wait.
That move from "I don't know" to "where could I look to find out" is one of the key habits that makes someone good at debugging, and here "Nietzsche" is just doing it for you.It might seem obvious to look at the logs, but in my experience 90% of being stuck debugging something is just not yet having looked at all the available evidence.
It's true you could learn these habits by exposure to them, and this could be a neat alternative to pairing with a more senior engineer for that. But it looks like you could easily just keep saying "it's random", "I don't know", and the model would keep telling you what to do next, without you actually having to think.
I wonder if making it even more Socratic would fix this? E.g. "how do you know it's returning 403s? Oh, logs you say? Is there anything else they could tell you?"
Comment by pcblues 2 days ago
It depends on where the developer is at in their journey too.
For some, "look in the logs" is a challenge just to find out what they are and where to find them and what they are saying. A great piece of advice for a person in this position.
For others, "There are files that hide in the caves of your computer's consciousness. Find what causes the shadows on the walls." is a valid call to dig deeper :)
Comment by andai 2 days ago
Comment by pcblues 2 days ago
And you must have known you were going to be critiqued here on your choice of philosopher :)
If my AI tells me I must overcome myself, reconcile with myself, find truths, and laugh, and do each of these things ten times each day - and tracks it for me so I know when I can stop developing and will sleep well... then we are talking Nietzsche! - Thus Sprach Zarathustra, The Academic Chairs of Virtue (II)
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Comment by vova_hn2 2 days ago
Yes, I hate this usage of the term "AI" too.
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