<p>I posit that LLMs admit neither the strict nor colloquial sense of programmability. The former could be argued formally in terms of the number of states that can be explored, using the busy beaver numbers, but that would be original research well beyond the scope of a few toots.</p><p>Practically speaking, LLMs fail even the TV remote sense of programmability — if there is some desired behavior you wish for an LLM to exhibit, there&#39;s no a priori way to decide what actions to take to achieve that.</p>

<p>Let me step back, though, and be careful about what I mean by &quot;programmability.&quot;</p><p>Traditionally, in computer science, that&#39;s meant that the device or software in question can be made to emulate arbitrary Turing machines; in its strongest form, it even requires no worse than polynomial overhead.</p><p>Colloquially, though, one can program a TV remote or similar — that doesn&#39;t mean you can run DOOM on it (well, some of you can). It means you can intentionally affect its behavior.</p>

<p>I&#39;ve said what I can about &quot;prompt engineering,&quot; why the idea is facile nonsense, the complete lack of theoretical and empirical basis, and the organizational impact of promoting on the basis of &quot;prompt engineering&quot; skills.</p><p>But there&#39;s something else to be said, I think, about the underlying fallacy that makes &quot;prompt engineering&quot; appear to be real: namely, the incorrect assumption that LLMs can be &quot;programmed&quot; at all.</p>

<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@wingo" class="u-url mention">@<span>wingo</span></a></span> <a href="https://infosec.exchange/@dymaxion/112200742199385332" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">infosec.exchange/@dymaxion/112</span><span class="invisible">200742199385332</span></a></p>

<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@whitequark" class="u-url mention">@<span>whitequark</span></a></span> DAMN YOU FOR MAKING ME ENJOY SOMETHING JAVA RELATED!</p><p>(Seriously though, good stuff.)</p>

<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://duckpon.de/@0x47df" class="u-url mention">@<span>0x47df</span></a></span> it&#39;s kind of the llvm tradeoff</p><p>&quot;compile-time resources do not matter, run-time resources do&quot;</p><p>it&#39;s not the only one possible but it&#39;s the one llvm picked. for the longest time they didn&#39;t even track resources i think</p>

<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mathstodon.xyz/@ohad" class="u-url mention">@<span>ohad</span></a></span> <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://hci.social/@chrisamaphone" class="u-url mention">@<span>chrisamaphone</span></a></span> <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://types.pl/@wilbowma" class="u-url mention">@<span>wilbowma</span></a></span> Yes, right, this is very apposite.</p>

<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mathstodon.xyz/@ohad" class="u-url mention">@<span>ohad</span></a></span> <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://types.pl/@disconcision" class="u-url mention">@<span>disconcision</span></a></span> <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://hci.social/@chrisamaphone" class="u-url mention">@<span>chrisamaphone</span></a></span> I&#39;m not sure he&#39;s been tagged properly? <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://types.pl/@edwinb" class="u-url mention">@<span>edwinb</span></a></span> might work…</p>

<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://social.coop/@jsbarretto" class="u-url mention">@<span>jsbarretto</span></a></span> <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://transfem.social/@puppygirlhornypost2" class="u-url mention">@<span>puppygirlhornypost2</span></a></span> <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://fosstodon.org/@avghelper" class="u-url mention">@<span>avghelper</span></a></span> <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://fops.cloud/users/thcrt" class="u-url mention">@<span>thcrt</span></a></span> then don&#39;t use stale bots. if you do i *will* do this</p>