Determinism require formality (enactment of rules) and some kind of omniscience about the system. Both are hard to acquire. I’ve seen people trying hard not to read any kind of manual and failing to reason logically even when given hints about the solution to a problem.
Management is used to nondeterminism, because that’s what their employees always have been.
Re:Karpathy on Programming
by bryanrasmussen on Tuesday December 30, 2025 @02:54AM
(#46430672)
hmm, OK good point. But programs that are not deterministic would seem to have a bug that needs fixing. And it can't be fixed, but I guess the employees can't be fixed either.
I think that for some people it is harder to reason about determinism because it is similar to correctness, and correctness can, in many scenarios be something you trade off - for example in relation to scaling and speed you will often trade off correctness.
If you do not think clearly about the difference with determinism and other similar properties like (real-time) correctness which you might be willing to trade off, you might think that trading off determinism is just more of the same.
Note: I'm against trading off determinism, but I am willing to think there might be a reason to trade it off, just I worry that people are not actually thinking through what it is they're trading when they do it.