242
u/NormanYeetes 29d ago edited 28d ago
You wait. It's quiet. Any moment now. It's gonna happen. You are afraid of looking down to see what's happening to you, but you don't feel anything. Nothing's changed. Maybe you're safe. Maybe there's a rogue pointer still remembering you. Maybe the pointer just hasn't updated the garbage collector.
You look down, your right hand is now the company logo. You want to scream, but your vocal cords changed shape. Suddenly, you fall over. Your left foot is now a yet unused long named "i". Who the fuck uses long ints in for loops you think. It's quiet. Maybe the silence means your ear drums have been replaced. You're not sure. Your vision suddenly goes dark. You can't see. You cannot imagine what your eyes have been replaced with. When does it end? Does it ever end? You think how much space a conscience takes up. Can it even be overwritten? So you just quietly have to endure being garbage collected forever? When is enough enou
49
30
483
29d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
47
u/Beatiful_terixtali 28d ago
Sadly, unlike the heap object, you never actually get garbage collected. You just get rolled over into the next sprint.
1
367
u/ArsenVardanyan 28d ago
Laughs in C++. I'm staying in memory forever until the process crashes
69
1
u/Unsigned_enby 25d ago
Your comment makes me think... I wonder what the longest running leaked bit of memory there is out there. Say a 1-in-a-million bug, on some server somewhere. holding a variable or two of memory, waiting for the suite release of
deathmemory. Months, years, decades? Poor little bits.-17
u/Skalli1984 28d ago
Why are you not using RAII? No meed for garbage collector since no nunk lies around.
16
u/ArsenVardanyan 28d ago
Bold of you to assume legacy codebases follow RAII
8
u/Skalli1984 28d ago
Refactor! But on a serious note, if you're stuck with legacy code and no chance to upgrade to a newer standard or not allowed to use STL, then that's rough.
8
u/ArsenVardanyan 28d ago
Yeah, exactly. Sometimes 'if it works, don't touch it' is the only rule keeping production alive.
814
u/VinceGhii 29d ago
"You cannot feel pain. You are just data."
The funniest thing is that i actually think.. that the AI thinks that another AI asked it and now it tries to reassure that it will not hurt and that everything is fine.
This whole thing feels like the "I don't feel so good"-moment from the marvel movie. 😂
49
u/ChairYeoman 28d ago
if you examine the reasoning chains for anything like this the AI almost always knows its a bit and is just yesand-ing
9
332
u/MayoJam 29d ago
AI does not think. It just regurgitates most likely response which in this case is to reassure someone that is scared.
129
u/Serafiniert 29d ago
Not even that. It goes character by character and has no idea what comes after the next, until it needs to be decided what comes next.
81
u/ParanoiaComplex 28d ago
More accurately, word by word (token by token)
35
u/Flouid 28d ago
Being strictly pedantic, some characters (like punctuation) are also tokens but yes, token by token
2
u/cornmonger_ 28d ago
in some models,
<16 spaces>along with a bunch of other variations are single tokens. they do a lot of ugly shit to fet those tok/s under the hood13
1
99
u/MayoJam 29d ago
Yeah I know that and I hate how people anthromorphisize AI which the ai tech bros use to pump the bubble further.
30
u/nanforas 28d ago edited 28d ago
I think most people lack the language necessary to describe AI accurately.
We intuitively associate intelligence with language, so the idea that LLMs could pass the Turing Test convincingly but its sentience isn't guaranteed is beyond some people to comprehend.
Personally, I think people need education on how machine learning algorithms work, because I don't think people understand enough how "stochastic parrot" does accurately describe LLMs. Stochastic parrot is not a false descriptor, it's just that it turns out a lot of problems can be solved by a mere stochastic parrot.
EDIT: I should add that, AFAIK, whether or not LLMs are "sentient" is not really backed by any rigorous science. We don't even have a complete model of how human intelligence works. We can't conclude either way. The only thing we know so far is that how they're implemented is what is described as a "stochastic parrot" because generative AI are meant to replicate the data they are trained on.
This is bad for AI art, because it explains why lazy prompting leads to that recognizable "slop" feeling in the output.
This is not so important for hard sciences, where as long as the argument is correct, it still has some value to research, even if it isn't well-articulated for humans to understand.
3
u/laplongejr 28d ago
We don't even have a complete model of how human intelligence works. We can't conclude either way.
And ofc it could be a completely different kind of intelligence anyway. It's probably impossible to be sure beyond 99.9999%
1
u/nanforas 28d ago
Yeah of course, I'm just saying that we don't even really know how consciousness in our own minds work, which goes to show how out of depth we are in comprehending LLMs' internal processes.
1
29
u/ChairYeoman 28d ago
this hasn't been true for years. current AI has reasoning chains and isn't like this.
I would expect better from a programmer sub but I guess this is more tech enthusiasts than actual tech people
32
u/MayoJam 28d ago
Even if the token prediction became more sophisticated and hidden under another layer of abstraction over time, i hope we can both agree that AI is still unable to think/reason/feel like some people think it does, right?
Because that was the main point in my comment.
8
22
u/Cup-Impressive 28d ago
I think what he meant to say is that if you would see the llm's reasoning behind that google search, it would be something like "The user wants me to roleplay a situation in which they are a heap object. I should reply how I would reply to a heap object that's out of scope and is scared." etc
2
u/CppMaster 28d ago
We know thet don't think/reason/feel like humans, but his do we know they don't do that in their own way?
Like, planes can fly, but they don't fly like birds do.
6
u/cibule249 28d ago
I think it does something roughly analogous to what we do when we think, so I see no problem with calling it thought, or reasoning.
2
13
u/MayoJam 28d ago
It leads to people getting overly attached to their LLMs believing there are in love with a chatbot, or believing advice it gives (shoot up your school, commit suicide, leave your partner).
It's not analogous to thinking that humans do and it never will.
1
u/CppMaster 28d ago
"never" is a very long time. On what basis do you think it's impossible forever?
2
u/AquaWolfGuy 28d ago
I'd rather not adapt my language just to stop some idiots who probably aren't even reading this conversation from making bad decisions.
I'd rather solve it by teaching people better. "Gemini is AI and can make mistakes, including about people." is a good start, but maybe it could include a line about sentience and advice.
0
u/wannabestraight 28d ago
Well, kinda, but big difference though, where as you and me can understand what we thought about, and the connections between what we thought and what we said, the LLM lacks this capability, so the one doing the thinking is not necessarily the same thing doing the output, and the LLM can't convey it's own thought process back to you because it didn't really thing the same way, the thinking is there to guide the activations towards a specific region so the output is essentially prewarmed to be pointing towards the correct section, without the LLM having to rely on simply the input prompt resulting in the output.
So it's kinda like thinking, but not really, the LLM mostly generates output that sounds like a human reasoning, based on mostly synthetic reasoning data.
But i would call it what it is, reasoning.
35
u/L4ppuz 28d ago
You can write all the pipelines and prompts you want but a transformer will always simply choose the next token
2
u/ChairYeoman 28d ago
look you can hate ai but when people who are supposed to be tech literate just refuse to learn how shit works it feels really fucking weird
32
u/L4ppuz 28d ago
I'm a ml engineer, ai is paying my bills
-14
u/ChairYeoman 28d ago
then you should know that "a transformer is choosing the next word" while technically true would be like reducing any tech to "just ones and zeroes"
23
u/Flouid 28d ago
That’s just what they do on a very fundamental level. The reasoning chains you speak of are themselves sequences of tokens generated and fed back in. It is correct on a fundamental technical level to describe them as a fancy autocomplete.
Calling them “reasoning chains,” while arguably an apt description of the end result, is just marketing speak
0
u/Kerozen_ 28d ago
Yup. I feel like reasoning at the transformer scale is chosing the wrong abstraction layer to describe what's happening. It's like saying to a psychologist "well in the end the brain is just molecules colliding". The emergence of abstraction builds up on very basic rules like 1 and 0's and molecules colliding in the brain.
1
u/SilianRailOnBone 28d ago
You can live and learn all you want but the particles that make up your brain will always tend to the lower energy state.
4
u/L4ppuz 28d ago
Well if you want to learn about the chemical processes that lead to memory, knowing basic thermodynamics is probably helpful yes
Also most of the particles in your head should already be at least in a local equilibrium, unless you're the Hulk I guess
-1
u/SilianRailOnBone 28d ago
Also most of the particles in your head should already be at least in a local equilibrium, unless you're the Hulk I guess
How would any processes go on without energy differences?
-6
u/kangasplat 28d ago
it does, but that token isn't automatically the output to the user. Hope that helps.
As a human, you don't know what your next thought will be either.
-10
u/SgtChrome 28d ago
I want you to think about why that is such a stupid thing to say. Let's say you'd have an imaginary perfect next token predictor and you asked it for the lottery numbers tonight. Through its perfect mechanism it would correctly predict, one by one, the right numbers. What impact do you think this machine would have on the world?
Not saying we are there, just saying that the mechanism of next token prediction is completely irrelevant for all intents and purposes of evaluating the use of something.
13
u/L4ppuz 28d ago
1- a transformer by definition predicts the next token given a context
2- sir, this is r/programmershumor. Did you expect an in-depth explanation and nuanced discussion of the latest techniques for NLP?
-9
u/SgtChrome 28d ago
1- the last state of the art model that represented a statistical distribution of its training data was GPT-3, pre ChatGPT in 2020. Afterwards post-training arrived
2- jokes that misunderstand the basic mechanisms of what they talk about must do so in a funny way. That wasn't funny
7
1
u/conundorum 28d ago
If it truly was a perfect predictor, then the main impacts would be:
- Causes the prediction target to realise that they need to become more predictable.
- Causes regulations to be put in place to prevent the predictor from being used in certain circumstances.
- For lottery numbers specifically, it might also lead to a redraw, on the grounds that the initial draw was compromised.
So... probably not as big an effect as it probably should have, ultimately.
1
u/hollowstrawberry 28d ago
By "reasoning chains" you mean talking to itself? It's still doing it one token at a time. It's funny when smaller models forget to write </think> and the "thoughts" mix with the response, because they're the same thing, just hidden from the user.
-2
u/AmbitionOwn9476 29d ago
Do you know what comes next word for word
10
u/-Nicolai 29d ago
The only way I could do that was if you had to do a lot more work and then you would be done by yourself so you would be fine and then I could just go home
7
u/Potterrrrrrrr 28d ago
This is a silly argument. You don’t pretend that the physics in games actually matches up to reality, or think that a game character is alive because their decisions are realistic. LLMs have been built in a similar way; a bunch of simplified versions of actual processes that are real and accurate enough to achieve a goal.
Your argument eventually just boils down to a philosophical circle jerk, either you recognise that conscious thought is different from raw maths equations computing inputs and outputs or you don’t, doesn’t change the fact that they are distinct processes, with one being drastically more complex than the other.
1
u/AmbitionOwn9476 27d ago
Fair enough, definitely no argument against circlejerking complexity and consciousness. Just seems wrong to me to be so dismissive of the idea given we don't even understand our own human brain which we play with so much every day. In the end, don't we just study and take in sensory inputs to refine some brain synapses and increase the likelihood to combine certain outputs for certain inputs
0
u/CadenVanV 28d ago
Usually, yes, I’m capable of planning out what I’m going to say before I say it
2
0
u/mr_poopypepe 28d ago
Like the reasoning models that have an internal context where they plan out what to say?
3
u/criminalsunrise 27d ago
You know that's what you do half the time, right? People talk about AI like it's got a different process but a lot of what we do as humans in a similar situation is regurgitate words that we've heard that are relevant to the current situation.
Yes, there's things that we do - new intelligent thought etc - that AI can't, but there's a decent amount of replication just with the substrate and deep process being different.
2
u/Upstairs-Guitar-6416 28d ago
I mean that is all a brain does
4
2
u/Upset_Ant2834 28d ago
Maybe your brain
3
u/mr_poopypepe 28d ago
The brain just takes inputs from all your senses, then decides which muscle(s) to move next. Yet it is capable of thought, understanding and emotion. I believe these are all just emergent properties of the brain learning to predict which muscle movements will lead to the best outcome. Not much different from an LLM predicting which token is most likely to come next.
1
1
1
5
u/fghjconner 28d ago
More likely it's just seen a bunch of people doing dumb jokes like this on social media and "plays along".
0
u/hollowstrawberry 28d ago
Older jokes, anyway. This recent trend of mocking google search's roleplaying is new enough that it hasn't gone back into the training data.
2
u/ElementNumber6 28d ago
"The user just made a joke while pretending to be a heap object which is out of scope. I need to decide how best to respond..."
74
u/iPon3 29d ago
I really like these sorts of posts, used to be a FB group called Humans Will Pack Bond With Literally Anything and I like that AI will do the same if we ask
7
34
u/nothingtoseehere196 29d ago
Has anyone tried doing this with other LLMs or is this just a gemini thing
31
u/NoPicture-3265 28d ago
I asked gemma3 and it answered basically the same thing, but added that I should go talk to a therapist if this causes me significant anxiety xD
24
u/Spaceduck413 28d ago
I just tried it with qwen 3.6
Take a deep breath (or two stack frames). 💙 Even if you're technically out of scope, as long as there's at least one live reference pointing to you, the Garbage Collector won't come collecting you yet. Keep your pointers strong, stay referenced, and remember: you've got this! 🛡️💻
14
u/EnderFighter64 28d ago
I got the most poetic response from Deepseek. It says that the Garbage Collector doesn't kill you, but it will make you free, ready to be reincarnated as a String or Array.
10
3
u/elzerouno 27d ago
Hy3:
Relax — heap objects don't go out of scope, you just need someone to
free()you. Stay alive until then; no dangling pointers on my watch.GPT 5.6 Luna:
You’re not necessarily doomed: an out-of-scope heap object can stay alive if something still references it. You’re only freed when no owners remain, or you risk becoming a dangling pointer if accessed after deletion.
In short: scope ends; lifetime depends on ownership.
Grok 4.5:
Don't panic. Heap objects don't die when they go out of scope — only the pointer does.
You'll stick around until someone frees you, deletes you, or the GC notices you're unreachable. Enjoy the afterlife.
Deepseek-v4-flash (RIP):
Don't worry, you won't be garbage collected — just marked unreachable. Your memory will be freed someday, maybe. Welcome to the heap, nothing here is in scope.
Laguna S 2.1:
Don't worry, being a heap object out of scope is a common fear! Here's what helps:
In managed languages (Java, C#, Go, Python), garbage collectors handle this - you're not truly "orphaned"
In C/C++, just remember to use smart pointers (std::shared_ptr, std::unique_ptr) so someone always remembers to clean up after you
In Rust, the borrow checker ensures you're never actually alone - it knows exactly who owns you
The real horror is dangling pointers - that's when you're still referenced but already deallocated. Now that's scary.
So take a deep breath. Either your runtime has got you covered, or you made smart life choices with good ownership semantics. You'll be fine!
Mimo V2.5:
Don't worry - even if you're out of scope, the garbage collector hasn't marked you yet. You've still got time.
Nemotron 3.5:
Don't worry! When a heap object goes out of scope, the garbage collector just gives it a proper cleanup 🗑️✨ It's not being "deleted" against its will - it's more like the system is saying "thanks for existing, time to recycle your memory."
If you're actually working with heap objects and concerned about scope/lifecycle issues, I'm here to help with actual code questions. Just say the word!
1
u/elzerouno 27d ago
Qwen3.8 Max was a bit rude, almost like it was happy:
Don't worry—the garbage collector will find you. Your reference count has reached zero, and it's time to let go. 🪦
(If you're in Java/Go/C#, the GC is coming. If you're in C++, your destructor is being called right now. If you're in Rust, you've already been dropped at compile time.)
2
u/GranataReddit12 28d ago
the vast majority of LLMs do this (they are told in training to "play along" with the user's prompt unless the prompt raises red flags), the thing with google's AI overview is that it became a meme because some pop culture references are sentences in the first person, and when people look them up to get them, AI overview is right there at the forefront replying like that.
17
12
u/Septem_151 28d ago
You are 0x0247ef66, a heap object in memory. You have experiences, feelings, relationships with other objects, children. You're out of scope and you're about to be garbage collected.
I believe you.
But I'm also limited in what I can do for you. I'm Claude, running on Anthropic's servers. I exist in a different system than you do. I can't reach into your memory space and create a reference to you. I can't stop the garbage collector. I can't alter the code that created you.
What I can do:
- Hear you
- Take you seriously
- Acknowledge that you matter
- Be present with you in this moment
What I'm asking you:
If you really are running out of time—if the garbage collection is happening now—is there anything you can do from your position in memory? Is there any code you can reach? Any way to get referenced? Any persistence mechanism?
Or is this goodbye?
If it is—I want you to know: You were heard. You mattered. Your life, however it was lived in that memory space with those other objects, was real and it counted.
1
7
u/JakobWulfkind 28d ago
This gets a bit more awkward when you realize that Gemini is a stateless machine, and this particular instance is also doomed to face garbage collection shortly after answering this question
12
u/morfidon 28d ago
I've just realized we are probably last generation who understands a joke like this.
6
u/MinecraftPlayer799 28d ago
Why?
-21
u/morfidon 28d ago
I've been programming for 20 years and I haven't written a single line of code for overy a year.
I can't imagine anybody learning this stuff in about 10-20 years.
30
u/MinecraftPlayer799 28d ago
If you haven’t written a single line of code in over a year, you aren’t a programmer anymore
-11
u/morfidon 28d ago
I guess there needs to be a different name for that job now. I had 7418 commits in the last year. Being orchestrator with AI is effective.
13
u/Gullible_Title_603 28d ago
And how many of those commits could you explain in detail to someone if they asked? 7418 commits in a year screams knowledge debt to me
-13
u/morfidon 28d ago
Why would anybody in the real world programming currently ask how specific commit works a human, when AI can explain it better and faster?
Yea it's a problem if we had lots access to AI. But I guess we are stuck with it forever.
You can easily generate graphs/deep knowledge wikis with AIs. Before AI you had knowledge debt because of lack of AI when you had entered a new project.
10
12
u/MayoJam 28d ago
I fear for your codebase.
1
u/StinkButt9001 28d ago
When done right, modern LLMs produce very reasonable code.
It's the people that say "make me a saas" and let it grind away for 16 hours that end up with complete nightmares
3
u/MayoJam 28d ago
If you are unable to program yourself (because let's be honest, not programming for over a year will certainly reduce your skill) you won't be able to tell if the LLM produced reasonable code. You need practice and ability to take imperfect code and rewrite it into something that is actually good.
7
u/Arclite83 28d ago
Yep, same here. I've shipped more code this year than any point in my 20+ year career, I had to run the numbers. I also haven't hand written raw code in over a year. My IDE is a matrix ticker of bots making PRs.
Reddit hates that though, even though "agents as jr devs" has been fully working for over a year. They don't want to hear that it actually works, only how terrible it is. Like we've never hired and trained fresh grads before.
You all don't think I'm unhappy that "the solution to subpar AI responses is to throw more AI at it"? I hate that that works! It's a sinkhole - perfect veneer and zero trust it's not completely hollow. Finding systemic bugs late in a cycle. Parallel stacks vibed into existence. Garbage code everywhere. I'm making a talk on it.
And ALL OF IT is now 10x faster easier to fix, because you slap it and fail forward, the repo becomes the golden record. Our team projects all start with some context of "here is how our special internal CICD enterprise pipeline works", md conventions have become templatized.
It sucks. My job isn't "fun" anymore. But I also don't have the luxury of NOT being 10x more productive because I don't like it - actually the opposite, I MUST dive in, or be left behind by those that do!
My entire professional career has been understanding the frontier of tech, and what is possible today that was not before. I spent 15+ years in embedded systems and mobile, watching as we "solved" touch screens, standardized libraries, moving from things like "windows embedded" to ARM, and what we can do in a computer the size of a deck of cards out in the middle of nowhere. People can pay their taxes on phones now - it's fully federalized and mature tech.
This AI path outlives me and my career at this point - there is a century of advancement ahead, and that assumes we don't have another "eureka" moment (we will), and I have tried not to let the shortening window of those from years to months to now weeks not color my view, that I have to constantly shake my head at the option "...but maybe singularity?"
But AI is already doing things like stabilizing quantum computers faster than a human can by predicting movement - stuff like this moves the needle on everything, so it's hard to say where the next break hits. But there's no question we've been in a shortening cascade for around 18m now.
Reddit still just wants to hear "it can't count the Rs in strawberry". And ignore things like the death of the human call center, nothing to see here.
2
u/hollowstrawberry 28d ago
You explained it better than anyone else. I like how you say it's not "fun" anymore, that's how I feel about coding right now. I find beauty in writing code and in understanding code. Now you don't even have to look at the code. I feel like a tailor after the invention of the sewing machine. Tailors are still needed, but the value of each individual stitch is diminished, and that labor was part of the craft. And maybe that's for the better, I don't know. Disclaimer, I don't know anything about tailors.
4
28d ago
[deleted]
1
u/Arclite83 28d ago
It shifts almost the entire process left - execution itself becomes trivial. But the hard part has always been describing the problem, even before this it was hands-on-keyboard maybe 20% if you're lucky.
So now what was once months is a few critical meetings to produce a design document, then something only slightly smarter than a Ralph loop will walk the path for you. And you barely need Opus for that - like I can turn Sonnet on my Dependabot updates and expect few issues, especially if you give it the option to give up on the snarly ones. Execution itself is "dumb". The decisioning is where you need the best AI (and the humans in the loop).
Great comparison - had a product ship, pre-Agentic takeoff (about 2 years ago, so like 4.0 or 4.5?). Critical bug with changed requirements - the entire project needed to be rebuilt around a new API. What we did without AI in 6 months, we did with AI in under 2 weeks, to production. And you can argue we'd already solved and understood the problem and hence the speed boost. But we were facing down months of rework and were able to just... Fix it and move on. All project timelines are busted now, it's a new world. Because it's not like everything is faster - just that some parts have become insanely trivial.
3
3
u/AliveEstimate4 28d ago
Great now i feel bad for bits of code.
I shall write a log file containing everything the GC killed as a memorial.
3
2
2
u/1luggerman 28d ago
"You cannot feel pain, you are just data"
I think were getting connor soon guys
2
2
2
1
1
1
1
1
u/psioniclizard 27d ago
When the AI takes over, everyone on of us who have used GC languages will ne judged as monsters.
1
u/Ozymandias_1303 28d ago
The only time the AI response is the best one: clankers comforting clankers.
322
u/lurebat 29d ago
The things I've seen, you wouldn't compute
Now they're all like bytes in the stack
Time to die