[HN Gopher] Tabloid: A clickbait headline programming language (...
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       Tabloid: A clickbait headline programming language (2021)
        
       Author : ko_pivot
       Score  : 199 points
       Date   : 2024-07-15 00:12 UTC (22 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (tabloid.vercel.app)
 (TXT) w3m dump (tabloid.vercel.app)
        
       | trulyhnh wrote:
       | Cute
        
       | georgf wrote:
       | Reminds me of ArnoldC[1] from a few years ago.
       | 
       | [1] https://lhartikk.github.io/ArnoldC/
        
       | ChrisArchitect wrote:
       | Some more discussion from 2020 with author input:
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24578749
        
       | rob74 wrote:
       | I really think the "please like and subscribe" that ends the
       | program should also be printed out (with a link to the project's
       | GitHub page to make it more... actionable).
        
       | cowsaymoo wrote:
       | Now this is truly the programming language that we should be
       | using to benchmark LLM code gen in a private hold out set. There
       | is no substantial datasets on the internet or github, and no
       | documentation except the one provided. And that's all the model
       | should need.
       | 
       | I asked GPT-4 to write a mat mul function, but that was too
       | ambitious and it spit out outrageous nonsense.
       | 
       | To be more fair, I gave it in-context access to the documentation
       | in prompt, along with the fibonacci example function; aka
       | everything humans have access to. I then asked it to do the
       | simpler task of converting a base 10 integer to binary. It was
       | unable to write something error free even after 4 rounds of
       | supplying it the error messages.
       | 
       | I repeated this 5 times in case it generates something
       | grammatical in the Top-K@5.
       | 
       | I suspected there was some confusion it couldn't surmount about
       | string manipulation. So I changed the question to something
       | challenging, yet something that only used function calls,
       | conditional logic, basic math ops, and numbers. First, I asked
       | for an nth root approximator using newton's method. Didn't work.
       | Asked for just the square root. Didn't work. Finally, I asked for
       | a function that prints a student's grade given their integer
       | percentage. Not even.
       | 
       | GPT-4 also persistently hallucinated the keyword BREAKING NEWS,
       | which I think sounds like a pretty good keyword if Tabloid were
       | to ever get error handling.
       | 
       | The spooky part is that the almost all the solutions at face
       | value would get partial credit. They had the right abstract
       | approach, being familiar with reams of example approaches in
       | natural language or programming languages. However, in each case,
       | GPT-4, 4o, Claude all failed to produce something without syntax
       | errors.
       | 
       | I suspect this is the case because transformers do subgraph
       | matching, and while on one end there are rich internal
       | connections for all the problems I requested, on the other end
       | there is nothing similar enough for it to even get a foothold,
       | hence the biggest struggle being syntax. If the only barrier to
       | executing Tabloid code (or other unseen languages) is more basic
       | syntax training, then it excitingly suggests it just needs to
       | learn the abstract concepts from leetcode scrapes once for every
       | syntax it knows. Prior research has shown that grammar is easy
       | for language models. When GPT-2 was made large enough, it went
       | from babbling to grammatical sentences very early in it's
       | training, and at that moment its loss plummeted.
       | 
       | All tests conducted in temporary data mode so that this eval
       | stays dark.
        
         | silentdanni wrote:
         | Claude managed to write code successfully.
         | 
         | ```
         | 
         | DISCOVER HOW TO square_root WITH x, iterations RUMOR HAS IT
         | EXPERTS CLAIM guess TO BE x DIVIDED BY 2 DISCOVER HOW TO
         | improve_guess WITH current_guess RUMOR HAS IT SHOCKING
         | DEVELOPMENT (current_guess PLUS (x DIVIDED BY current_guess))
         | DIVIDED BY 2 END OF STORY                   DISCOVER HOW TO
         | iterate WITH current_guess, remaining_iterations         RUMOR
         | HAS IT             WHAT IF remaining_iterations SMALLER THAN 1
         | SHOCKING DEVELOPMENT current_guess             LIES! RUMOR HAS
         | IT                 EXPERTS CLAIM new_guess TO BE improve_guess
         | OF current_guess                 SHOCKING DEVELOPMENT
         | iterate OF new_guess, remaining_iterations MINUS 1
         | END OF STORY         END OF STORY                  SHOCKING
         | DEVELOPMENT iterate OF guess, iterations
         | 
         | END OF STORY
         | 
         | EXPERTS CLAIM number TO BE 16 EXPERTS CLAIM num_iterations TO
         | BE 5
         | 
         | YOU WON'T WANT TO MISS 'The square root of' YOU WON'T WANT TO
         | MISS number YOU WON'T WANT TO MISS 'is approximately' YOU WON'T
         | WANT TO MISS square_root OF number, num_iterations
         | 
         | PLEASE LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE
         | 
         | ```
        
           | cowsaymoo wrote:
           | Ah bravo! What was the prompt and Claude model?
        
           | CapeTheory wrote:
           | This is consistent with my own experience that Claude is just
           | downright better than ChatGPT.
        
             | cowsaymoo wrote:
             | Same, I've been pretty impressed as well and typically give
             | Claude a shot. Sometimes I even pass their results back and
             | forth in an LLM collab so they generate more diverse
             | perspectives. However, this paper from 4 days ago shows
             | that Claude can fall apart quickly in out of distribution
             | tasks. If you ask opposite day questions, GPT-4 is weirdly
             | strong at it (figure 2).
             | 
             | https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.02477
        
         | carterdmorgan wrote:
         | Great idea here. I wonder if there's potentially more demand
         | for new programming languages now purely as benchmarks for
         | LLMs, like you said?
        
           | cowsaymoo wrote:
           | Maybe they will take on that role too one day
        
       | can16358p wrote:
       | This seems like a both fun/humorous and an educative project on
       | programming language and interpreter design.
       | 
       | Motivating, lovely.
        
         | fjfaase wrote:
         | That is exactly what I did for the 'A practical approach to
         | parsing' workshop I gave at MCH2022 [1]. You can give it a try
         | with the online IParse Studio [2], which has a simple build in
         | interpreter, and if you are lazy or getting stuck, you can have
         | a look at the grammar I wrote myself [3], which does not
         | specify operator precedence yet.
         | 
         | [1] https://fransfaase.github.io/MCH2022ParserWorkshop/
         | 
         | [2]
         | https://fransfaase.github.io/MCH2022ParserWorkshop/IParseStu...
         | 
         | [3]
         | https://github.com/FransFaase/MCH2022ParserWorkshop/blob/mai...
        
       | Cthulhu_ wrote:
       | I couldn't believe and was SHOCKED to find out that this was a
       | computer language! Please like and subscribe to learn more.
        
       | bincyber wrote:
       | Whoever built this is a bloody genius
        
       | blackbaze wrote:
       | Looks like FORTH!
        
       | dools wrote:
       | > Before making Tabloid, I also created a ... boring and
       | unpopular programming language, called Ink.
       | 
       | That line killed me.
        
       | xbar wrote:
       | Compiler developers hate him.
        
       | velcrovan wrote:
       | I wrote the Racket implementation, in case you want to be able to
       | compile your Tabloid programs:
       | https://github.com/otherjoel/tabloid
        
       | abtinf wrote:
       | I would change BEATS/SMALLER THAN to "DESTROYS" and "HUMILIATED
       | BY"
        
         | boredemployee wrote:
         | hahaha laughed hard on this one.
        
         | 6510 wrote:
         | and functions: WHY YOU SHOULD foo WITH bar
        
       | greasegum wrote:
       | Software engineers don't want you to know this one weird trick()
        
       | pnut wrote:
       | https://codewithrockstar.com/
        
       | akasakahakada wrote:
       | This is cursed as shit lol
        
       | jollyllama wrote:
       | I miss the old headlinese. Slam, pan, rip.
        
       | olebedev wrote:
       | Reminds me of aussue++[1] from a few years ago.
       | 
       | [1] https://github.com/zackradisic/aussieplusplus/
        
       | stcredzero wrote:
       | I'm very disappointed that (Number four will shock you) wasn't
       | some kind of break statement or event handling.
        
       | red-iron-pine wrote:
       | For-Loops should be something like
       | 
       | [n] GOOD REASONS WHY [i =< n]
       | 
       | [thing] HATES THIS THING <----- exception handling
       | 
       | ITS TIME WE TALK ABOUT [x] <----- while-loop
        
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       (page generated 2024-07-15 23:01 UTC)