31–40 of 48 posts
I love the framing here. However, I think what a lot of people don't realize is the reason a lot of executives and business users are excited about AI and don't mind developers getting replaced is because product is already a black box.
They'll start minding when things start breaking. In the mean time I'll work on stuff AI is still not so great at.
If you are a painter, you don't need to know chemical formulas for the pigments you're using to have a direct touch to your creation. For me, that material conciousness in computers was always in grasping the way system works holistically. To feel the system. To treat it as almost a living organism.
The gist ("product becomes a black box") applies to any abstraction. It could apply to high-level languages (including so-called "low-level" languages like C), and few people criticize those. But LLMs are particularly insidious because they're a particularly leaky abstraction. If you ask an LLM to implement something: - First, there's only a chance it will output something that works at all - Then, it may fail on edg…
Here's what "spaghetti" looks like:
https://github.com/ctoth/Qlatt/blob/master/public/rules/fron...
One thing I want to point out. Before I started, I gathered and asked Claude to read all these papers:
https://github.com/ctoth/Qlatt/tree/master/papers
Producing artifacts like this:
https://github.com/ctoth/Qlatt/blob/master/papers/Klatt_1980...
Note how every rule and every configurable thing in the synthesizer pipeline has a citation to a paper? I can generate a phrase, and with the "explain" command I can see precisely why a certain word was spoken a certain way.
I love the framing here. However, I think what a lot of people don't realize is the reason a lot of executives and business users are excited about AI and don't mind developers getting replaced is because product is already a black box.
They navigate such complex decision spaces, full of compromises, tensions, political knots, that ultimately their important decisions are just made on gut feelings.
Replace the CEO with an LLM whose system prompt is carefully crafted and vetted by the board of directors, with some adequate digital twin of the company to project it's move, I'm sure it should maximize the interest of the shareholders much better.
Next up: apply the same recipe to government executive power. Couldn't be much worse than orange man.
I really like the framing here (via Richard Sennett / Roland van der Vorst): craft is a relationship with the material. In software, that “material consciousness” is built by touching the system—writing code, feeling the resistance of constraints, refactoring, modeling the domain until it clicks. If we outsource the whole “hands that think” loop to agents, we may ship faster… but we also risk losing the embodied unde…
The risk of making the source in a compiler a black box is pretty high.
Because of your program is black box compiled with a block box, things might get really sporty.
There are many platform libraries and such that we probably do not want as black boxes, ever. That doesn't mean an AI can't assist, but that you'll still rewrite and review whatever insights you got from the AI.
If latest game or instagram app is black box nobody can decipher, who cares? If such app goes to be a billion dollar success, I'll feel sorry for engineers tasked with figuring why the computer says no.
The gist ("product becomes a black box") applies to any abstraction. It could apply to high-level languages (including so-called "low-level" languages like C), and few people criticize those. But LLMs are particularly insidious because they're a particularly leaky abstraction. If you ask an LLM to implement something: - First, there's only a chance it will output something that works at all - Then, it may fail on edg…
I built a Klatt formant synthesizer with Claude from ~120 academic papers. Every parameter cites its source, the architecture is declarative YAML with phased rule execution and dependency resolution. Here's what "spaghetti" looks like: https://github.com/ctoth/Qlatt/blob/master/public/rules/fron... One thing I want to point out. Before I started, I gathered and asked Claude to read all these papers: https://github.co…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I built a Klatt formant synthesizer with Claude from ~120 academic papers. Every parameter cites its source, the architecture is declarative YAML with phased rule execution and dependency resolution. Here's what "spaghetti" looks like: https://github.com/ctoth/Qlatt/blob/master/public/rules/fron... One thing I want to point out. Before I started, I gathered and asked Claude to read all these papers: https://github.co…
Well - I've learned what a "formant" is today. Looking at the repo, it's not obvious to me what .md is authored by you vs system-generated. This is an observation, not a criticism. I was looking for the prompts you used to specify the papers summarization, which is very nice.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well - I've learned what a "formant" is today. Looking at the repo, it's not obvious to me what .md is authored by you vs system-generated. This is an observation, not a criticism. I was looking for the prompts you used to specify the papers summarization, which is very nice.
I can do ya one better! https://github.com/ctoth/research-papers-plugin