Crazy how Apple is still the only option for this consumer hardware.
My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)
361–370 of 415 posts
Re: My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
What makes you categorically say that "AIs can't"? Based on my experience with present day AIs, I personally wouldn't be surprised at all that if you showed Gemini 2.5 Pro a video of an insect colony and asked it "Take a look at the way they organize and see if that gives you inspiration for an optimization algorithm", it will spit something interesting out.
It will 100% have something in its training set discussing a human doing this and will almost definitely spit out something similar.
That's a good point but all it means is that we can't test the hypothesis one way or the other due to never being entirely certain that a given task isn't anywhere in the training data. Supposing that "AIs can't" is then just as invalid as supposing that "AIs can".
Re: My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)
#363Is probably more correct to say - my 2.5 year laptop can RETELL space invaders. Pretty sure it cannot write a game it has never seen, so you can even say - my old laptop can now do this fancy extraction of data from a smart probabilistic blob, where the original things are retold in new colours and forms :)
I know these models can build games and apps they've never seen before because I've already observed them doing exactly that time and time again. If you haven't seen that yourself yet I suggest firing up the free, no registration required GLM-4.5 Air on https://chat.z.ai/ and seeing if you can prove yourself wrong.
I’m using all major models it a daily driver and none of these can create anything I have not spent excessive amount of time explaining.
It works for me on the architectural level, but does not change the fact that your expounding on prior information and not a new one.
Not sure though why I’m getting downvoted.
Re: My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bingo, it's magical but the learning curve is very very steep. The METR study on open-source productivity alluded to this a bit. I am definitely at a point where I am more productive with it, but it took a bunch of effort.
Apologies if I was unclear. The more I've used it, the more I've disliked how poor the results it's produced, and the more I've realised I would have been better served by doing it myself and following a methodical path for things that I didn't have experience with. It's easier to step through a problem as I'm learning and making small changes than an LLM going "It's done, and production ready!" where it just straigh…
My preferred approach to avoid that outcome is to divide & conquer the problem. Ask the LLM to implement each small bit in the order you'd implement it yourself given what you know about the codebase.
Re: My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ChatGPT will get better at chess over time Oddly, LLMs got worse at specifically chess: https://dynomight.net/chess/ But even to the general point, there's absolutely no agreement how much better the current architectures can ultimately get, nor how quickly they can get there. Do they have potential for unbounded improvements, albeit at exponential cost for each linear incremental improvement? Or will they asymptom…
If I had to bet, I'd say current models have an asymptomatic growth converging to a merely "ok" performance (Shrug) People with actual money to spend are betting twelve figures that you're wrong. Should be fun to watch it shake out from up here in the cheap seats.
> People with actual money to spend are betting
... but those "people with actual money to spend" have burned money on fads before. Including on "AI", several times before the current hysterics.
If you're a good actor/psychologist, it's probably a good business model to figure out how to get VC money and how to justify your startup failing so they give you money for the next startup.
Re: My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)
#366Did you understand the implementation or just that it produced a result? I would hope an LLM could spit out a cobbled form of answer to a common interview question. Today a colleague presented data changes and used an LLM to build a display app for the JSON for presentation. Why did they not just pipe the JSON into our already working app that displays this data? People around me for the most part are using LLMs to e…
I scanned the code and understood what it was doing, but I didn't spend much time on it once I'd seen that it worked. If I'm writing code for production systems using LLMs I still review every single line - my personal rule is I need to be able to explain how it works to someone else before I'm willing to commit it. I wrote a whole lot more about my approach to using LLMs to help write "real" code here: https://simon…
I think is the right way to do it. Produce with LLM, debug and read every online. Delete lots of it.
Many people fear this approach for production, but it is reasonable compared to someone with a single course in Coursera writing production JS code.
Yet, we tend to say the LLM wrote this and that which implies model did all the work. In reality it should be understood as a complex heavy lifting machine which is expected to be operated by a very well prepared operator.
The fact I got a Kango and drilled some holes does not make me engineer right? And it takes an engineer to sign off the building even thought it was archicad doing the math.
Re: My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)
#367Crazy how Apple is still the only option for this consumer hardware.
Framework desktop with AMD Strix Halo [1] are getting there as a viable alternative. Offering up to 96 GB of unified RAM at the moment, so still a gap up to the beefiest Mac Studio alternatives though.
Re: My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
The frontier models are always going to tempt you with their higher quality and quicker generation, IMO.
Closed doesn't always win over open. People said the same thing about Windows vs Linux, but even Microsoft was forced to admit defeat and support Linux. All it takes is some large companies commoditizing their complements. For Linux it was Google, etc. For AI it's Meta and China. The only thing keeping Anthropic in business is geopolitics. If China were allowed full access to GPUs, they would probably die.
> The only thing keeping Anthropic in business is geopolitics. If China were allowed full access to GPUs, they would probably die.
Disagree. Anthropic have a unique approach to how they post-train their models and tune it to be the way they want it. No other lab has managed to reproduce the style and personality of Claude yet, which is currently a key reason why coders prefer it. And since post-training data is secret, it'll take other providers a lot of focused effort to get close to that.
Re: My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)
#369Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because it's much, much faster to review a hundred lines of code than it is to write a hundred lines of code. (I'm experienced at reading and reviewing code.)
Simon, don't you fear "atrophy" in your writing ability?
Reading other people's (or llm's) code is one of the best ways of improving your own coding abilities. Lazy people using llms to avoid reading any code is called "vibe coding", and their abilities atrophy no matter who or what wrote the code they refuse to read.
Re: My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because it's much, much faster to review a hundred lines of code than it is to write a hundred lines of code. (I'm experienced at reading and reviewing code.)
Absolutely false for anything but the most braindead corporate CRUD code. We hate reading code and will avoid the hassle every time, but that doesn't mean it is easy.
>We hate reading code and will avoid the hassle every time, but that doesn't mean it is easy.
Speak for yourself. I love reading code! It's hard and it takes a lot of energy, but if you hate it, maybe you should find something else to do.
Being a programmer who hates reading code is like being a bus driver who hates looking at the road: dangerous and menacing to the public and your customers.