Viewing profile — cgearhart

Zero dependencies should not be the goal. It’s just a modern retelling of “not invented here” syndrome. It’s an anti-pattern because now you own maintenance on something that is no…

This is exactly what I’m talking about. I’m seeing the same pattern. And the most useful proxy I’ve found so far for “we don’t understand the problem” is taking zero dependencies. …

I’m seeing kinda the opposite. At some point it becomes obvious what to build and there’s no friction to building it anymore. So you get a flood of low effort copies of the same th…

This seems very related to a trend I’m seeing as my company goes all in on AI: everyone thinks that every problem is “a couple hours” with AI now, and they all want zero external d…

I like my steam deck and got tired of waiting for the steam machine. I asked one of the AIs for something similar and it told me to install Bazzite. Took me an hour and I got the S…

A few months ago I got tired of waiting for the steam machine and built my own. Geekom box on sale (note: would NOT buy from them again) and then a quick hour or so to get Bazzite …

We used to use this, but it was a broader conversation around tradeoffs to meet different constraints. If the expected array is small, then sort + index is probably fine. If it’s b…

My read has been that a lot of leaders were trying to drive “being early” as the catalyst for future success. At the complexity scale of big orgs you’re mostly fiddling with the in…

Yes, that’s what I think at this point. There is no effect of the study group except as a support group. (That’s all it was for me when I was a student and joined the self-organize…

I used to TA a graduate level CS math class at Georgia Tech. We regularly saw that the students who self-organized study groups did dramatically better in the course than average. …

I’m starting to realize that LLMs are really good at building low-stakes projects. Your questions mostly presume that the stakes are higher. The software will last a long time; the…

I just tested this myself. I wrote “flip the reduce white point toggle accessibility option in the settings app” and it worked perfectly. Run once to set it and run again to disabl…

Spreading out the refusal encoding shouldn’t be effective as a countermeasure. Even if it were smeared across the vector space, as long as it’s in a subspace that doesn’t span the …

A much earlier major win for deep learning was AlexNet for image recognition in 2012. It dominated the competition and within a couple years it was effectively the only way to do i…

I agree, it would be nice if we could prioritize basic human needs rather than treating them like burdens caused by bad luck or poor choices.

Slightly unrelated to this story, but I’m curious if anyone has good resources for learning FreeCAD. I have quite a lot of experience with SolidWorks, AutoCAD, OnShape, and similar…

Eh. I think my point is that the OP is presented as a “how to” (literally: “how to do important research”) and then it immediately dodges the question by saying “have good taste”. …

That seems even less actionable, and somewhat misaligned with the OP article. “Taste” implies an ability to distinguish between a good example and a bad one. If it’s only recogniza…

I often find this kind of advice too vague to really be useful. “Have taste” in the problems you work on isn’t very actionable. (Unless perhaps you list examples of good and bad ta…

Any notes on the problems with MLX caching? I’ve experimented with local models on my MacBook and there’s usually a good speedup from MLX, but I wasn’t aware there’s an issue with …

I think this is the actual “bitter lesson”—the scalable solution (letting LLMs bang against the problem nonstop) will eventually far outperform human effort. There will come a poin…

So…great for prototyping (where velocity rules) but somewhere between mixed to negative for critical projects. Seems like this just puts some mildly quantitative numbers behind the…

“Better than me” != “good” I know approximately nothing about approximately everything. Claude seems pretty good at those things. But in every case I’ve used Claude Code for someth…

I love the way you phrased this.

Best of luck! I hope it’s as amazing for you as it was for me.