Viewing profile — lsy

Yeah, claiming “product-market fit” on coding assistants for this multi-trillion dollar capital expenditure seems premature. Anthropic will post one and only one quarter of “operat…

There's a very real possibility that AI proponents completely lose the next generation of adults. The output is not enjoyable to consume, the people who rely on it are not cool, an…

AI coding isn’t an abstraction, though. You can’t treat a prompt like source code because it will give you a different output every time you use it. An abstraction lets you offload…

At what point do LLMs enable bad engineering practices, if instead of working to abstract or encapsulate toilsome programming tasks we point an expensive slot machine at them and g…

It's easy to get this way with enough scrolling, try to focus on the things around you in real life. If you aren't reading LinkedIn or HN, how much do you actually hear about AI in…

It’s notable that just the English “implementation” of FizzBuzz here is longer and more ambiguous than the naive Python implementation, never mind the boilerplate (which itself is …

LLM coding isn't a new level of abstraction. Abstractions are (semi-)reliable ways to manage complexity by creating building blocks that represent complex behavior, that are useful…

I think the analogy to high level programming languages misunderstands the value of abstraction and notation. You can’t reason about the behavior of an English prompt because Engli…

It's disheartening that a potentially worthwhile discussion — should we invest engineering resources in LLMs as a normal technology rather than as a millenarian fantasy? — has been…

Going to a popular restaurant that accepts app delivery orders (or a grocery store in a neighborhood where people prefer to pay for delivery) is an objectively bad experience. The …

I feel like this needs an editor to have a chance of reaching almost anyone… there are ~100 section/chapter headings that seem to have been generated through some kind of psychedel…

It's interesting to call this a pre-mortem as it seems mainly organized around thinking positively past the imperfections of the technology. It's like a pre-mortem for the housing …

I think this leaves out what is probably the most likely future for this technology, having a similar destiny to most technologies as a tool . Both of these visions assume (I think…

No doubt it's a profit margin game, but I wish the big e-reader companies (Kindle, Kobo) would take a foray into this form factor. The friction of navigating through an Android int…

I'm sure it's nearly an academic distinction, but: > Basically, for any given region, we find its highest point and assume that there is a perfectly placed sibling peak of the same…

Impressive that this was done in 3 days at all, but to anyone who is familiar at all with System 7's appearance, the screenshot is almost comically "off" and gives away that this i…

Fixing "theoretical" nondeterminism for a totally closed individual input-output pair doesn't solve the two "practical" nondeterminism problems, where the exact same input gives di…

A world model itself, in its particulars, isn't as important as the tacit understanding that the "world model" is necessarily incomplete and subordinate to the world itself, that t…

There are two additional aspects that are even more critical than the implementation details here: - Typical LLM usage involves the accretion of context tokens from previous conver…

I think the wide variance in responses here is explainable by tool preference and the circumstance of what you want to work on. You might also have felt "behind" not knowing or wan…

If you have a decent understanding of how LLMs work (you put in basically every piece of text you can find, get a statistical machine that models text really well, then use contrac…

The example given for inverting an embedding back to text doesn't help the idea that this effect is reflecting some "shared statistical model of reality": What would be the plausib…

I think two things can be true simultaneously: 1. LLMs are a new technology and it's hard to put the genie back in the bottle with that. It's difficult to imagine a future where th…

Typically debugging, e.g., a tricky race condition in an unfamiliar code base would require adding logging, refactoring library calls, inspecting existing logs, and even rewriting …