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224 sats \ 1 reply \ @SimpleStacker 1 Aug \ on: Vibe physics science
Wanna know how to sound smart in almost any setting? Ask "how will we know when we've succeeded?"
Evaluation is the hardest part, of almost anything. A similar adage: the secret to success is good taste.
This is well known enough that it's put into corporate practice. I've heard that Amazon, before engaging on a project, has the proposers write up what the press release should look like when the hypothetical project is complete.
Thus, the main difference between vibe physics and vibe coding is ease of evaluation. Vibe coding is easy to test: you know what the program needs to do and you can fairly easily see if it can do it. Even coming up with edge case tests isn't too hard. Testing a physical theory is much harder. Even testing its conformity to existing theories is no trivial task, let alone testing it in experimental reality.
how will we know when we've succeeded?
I should keep this in mind whenever I want a student to self-assess if he completed the task at hand, or not.
I like the way you highlight the main difference.
I haven't done in-depth production-level coding, but another way to assess their difference is that a lot of coding involves applying the same principles in different settings. My colleague dismissively calls it monkey-coding, but ever since I tried my hand at it, I don't quite agree, as it is not easy and requires a lot of complex thinking to do it properly. I remember @k00b calling out the AI-slop open-source contributions they were getting, qualifying it as spam.
But with this logic in mind, I guess vibe coding can still be qualified as correct if it carries out the task, as dirty as the code may be. However, vibe physics, at least the way that VC-guy was describing it, would require going into the unknown... something LLMs, in their current implementation, by definition can't really do.
To be fair, for many of the papers that get published, they don't really go into the unknown, and it's often the application of known principles in new materials, for instance. In that case, I guess vibe coding could become a thing, at least in the right hands?
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