Fast

Post by tomrod » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 8:32 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

Kinda funny but I think LLM-assisted workflows are frequently slow -- that is, if I use the "refactor" features in my IDE it is done in a second, if I ask the faster kind of assistant it comes back in 30 seconds, if I ask the "agentic" kind of assistant it comes back in 15 minutes. I asked an agent to write an http endpoint at the end of the work day when I had just 30 min left -- my first thought was "it took 10 min…

Post by AIPedant » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 8:35 PM UTC

izzydata wrote: post #31

chamomeal wrote: post #28

Only sorta related, but it’s crazy that to me how much our standards have dropped for speed/responsiveness in some areas. I used to play games on N64 with three friends. I didn’t even have a concept of input lag back then. Control inputs were just instantly respected by the game. Meanwhile today, if I want to play rocket league with three friends on my Xbox series S (the latest gen, but the less powerful version), I…

That may be an issue of going from a CRT tv to an LCD tv. As far as I am aware there was no software manipulation of the video input on a CRT. It just took the input and displayed it on the screen in the only way it could. Newer tvs have all kinds of settings to alter the video which takes processing time. They also typically have a game mode to turn off as much of it as it will allow.

Post by claytonjy » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 8:37 PM UTC

mlhpdx wrote: post #92

ilyakaminsky wrote: post #69

Fast is also cheap. Especially in the world of cloud computing where you pay by the second. The only way I could create a profitable transcription service [1] that undercuts the rest was by optimizing every little thing along the way. For instance, just yesterday I learned that the image size I've put together is 2.5× smaller than the next open source variant. That means faster cold boots, which reduces the cost (and…

Is S3 slow or fast? It’s both, as far as I can tell and represents a class of systems (mine included) that go slow to go fast. S3 is “slow” at the level of a single request. It’s fast at the level of making as many requests as needed in parallel. Being “fast” is sometimes critical, and often aesthetic.

Post by flobosg » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 8:37 PM UTC

adwn wrote: post #85

old-gregg wrote: post #60

Fun story time! Early in my career as a software engineer, I developed a reputation for speeding things up. This was back in the day where algorithm knowledge was just as important as the ability to examine the output of a compiler, every new Intel processor was met with a ton of anticipation, and Carmak and Abrash were rapidly becoming famous. Anyway, the 22 year old me unexpectedly gets invited to a customer meetin…

> "so if we make it execute in 0 seconds, does it mean you're going to make an infinite amount of money?" I don't get it. Wouldn't going from 1 second to 0 seconds add the same amount of money to the yearly profit as going from 2 seconds to 1 second did? Namely, $1M.

Post by kfajdsl » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 8:38 PM UTC

skydhash wrote: post #94

citizenpaul wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing I've found that LLM speeds up my work is a sort of advanced find replace. A prompt like " I want to make this change in the code where any logic deals with XXX. To be/do XXX instead/additionally/somelogicchange/whatever" It has been pretty decent at these types of changes and saves time of poking though and finding all the places I would have updated manually in a way that find/replace never could. Tho…

I supposed you haven’t tried emacs grep mode or vim quickfix? If the change is mechanical, you create a macro and be done in seconds. If it’s not, you still got the high level overview and quick navigation.