Viewing profile — willj

How can you tell if someone is a polars fan? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you. :)

Fair point. Though I don’t think time without money is really leisure time :)

It’s too bad that, yet again, instead of the productivity gains leading to shorter work weeks, the benefits accrue to the companies. Just once I’d like to see productivity gains le…

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The temperature parameters largely went away when we moved towards reasoning models, which output lots of reasoning tokens before you get to the actual output tokens. I don’t know …

If you’re using a model from a provider (not one that you’re hosting locally), greedy decoding via temperature = 0 does not guarantee determinism. A temperature of 0 doesn’t result…

A temperature of 0 doesn’t result in the same responses every time, in part due to floating-point precision and in part to to lack of batch invariance [1] [1] https://thinkingmachi…

Thanks! That makes sense. I suppose this requires commit messages or PRs to indicate code was AI-generated vs. not, or to assume that commits after a certain time period were all f…

100%. This is what I posted about on Hacker News ([1] where it got no traction) and Reddit [2] (where it led to a discussion but then got deleted by a mod). [1] https://news.ycombi…

Here’s one place where I think proponents and skeptics of agentic coding tools (Claude Code, Codex, etc.) tend to talk past each other: Proponents say things like: - “I shipped fea…

Can you say more about the approach you take for summarization? Are the papers short enough that you just put the whole thing in the context window of the model you’re using, or do…

Thanks! I got some initial ideas from Nano Banana, actually, but then spent a while iterating on different layouts myself.

This is something I built over the holidays to support people having a hard time with the short days and early sunsets: https://sunshineoptimist.com . For the past several years I …

This is something I built over the holidays to support people having a hard time with the short days and early sunsets. For the past several years I would look up the day lengths a…

I think the models are so big that they can’t keep many old versions around because they would take away from the available GPUs they use to serve the latest models, and thereby re…

This reminds me a bit of using LLM frameworks like langchain, Haystack, etc., especially if you’re only using them for the chat completions or responses APIs and not doing anything…

DOOMscroll[1] for sure! I still play it since hearing about it on HN. [1] https://ironicsans.ghost.io/doomscrolling-the-game/

I think this ignores that the monopolies have the power to buy up any new competitors, or to drive them out of business using monopoly power. Regulatory hurdles are only one tool t…

I think that’s different. AlphaGo is using reinforcement learning in a context in which there is a clear evaluation function— did a strategy lead to a win or loss.

Relatedly, the OCR component relies on PyMuPDF, which has a license that requires releasing source code, which isn’t possible for most commercial applications. Is there any plan to…

I’d argue Bitcoin is Obscene Energy Demand.

Where are the happy offices these days? Which companies are the new “Google” who people are very eager to work for?

That makes me think of this: https://nohello.net/en/

I like this idea, but isn’t this a recipe for only ever doing the urgent stuff, not the not-urgent-but-important stuff? For example, if your list had “read 1 chapter of SICP” on it…

One thing with fastai that annoyed me when I built a project with it was that the v1 and v2 APIs are totally different, and if you google or search stackoverflow for help with some…