In the USA they already take passport photos. Being able to receive mail addressed to a name is the closest thing to a national ID the USA has. They're already depended on for identity verification quite a lot.
Some post offices in the US also function as a so called notary public. Basically, they can verify your identity and attest that it's you who sent/did something.
This is used quite often for important things that don't have offices themselves.
No, I'm annoyed that they submit their sloppy code to me as some value and then I have to deal with it. Happened in our org.
You are a programmer yourself, that is different. You can review AI output, understand and explain it. I won't get a response from you "I don't know, AI said so".
I said favorable circumstance, not favorable conditions. I mean the person in front of you doesn't stop quickly or veer into your lane very often regardless of whether there is e.g. fog or some confusing signage. Knowing what to do in a confusing situation is a hard problem, but avoiding a crash when someone stops abruptly with full visibility requires mostly safe management of speed, distance, and lane exit options, which people are terrible at.
The amount of non-determinism in compiler and LLM output is so vast that even comparing them is silly.
Tests are not a one time thing. They need to be maintained, and if you use same LLM to do it, it will happily delete failing ones, so better use a seaparate agent, and be prepared for the bill.
> The amount of non-determinism in compiler and LLM output is so vast that even comparing them is silly.
What is that supposed to mean? Yes, LLMs are often considered to be non-deterministic because, in practice, they rely on systems with unstable floating point rounding. Likewise, compilers are often considered non-deterministic because, in practice, they often rely on systems with unstable thread execution order. Of course, those are both just implementation details. You can, albeit at the cost of things like performance, remove the hidden inputs. Computers are fundamentally deterministic! Anything that runs on computers must also be deterministic.
If you were to run a compiler or LLM on a Turing machine, they would both be 100% perfectly deterministic. We only see them as being non-deterministic because, in the real world, we run them on hardware that plays tricks with computation by introducing inputs via hidden side channels. But, again, those are implementation details. Compilers and LLMs are not defined by any particular implementation.
LLM inference can, with a bit of know-how, made 100% deterministic.
Of course tests need to be maintained. They have always been. And the test plan you write determines what and how it needs to be tested, just like it has always been.
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