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Gas Town Decoded

alilleybrinker.com

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Re: Gas Town Decoded

#121

Post by JumpCrisscross »

wongarsu wrote: post #120
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you show them two colors and ask them if they are different, they will tell you no The experiments I've seen seem to interrogate what the culture means by colour (versus shade, et cetera ) more than what the person is seeing. If you show me sky blue and Navy blue and ask me if they're the same colour, I'll say yes. If you ask someone in a different context if Russian violet and Midnight blue are the same colour,…

If you asked me if a fire engine and a ripe strawberry are the same color I would say yes. Obviously, they are both red. If you held them next to each other I would still be able to tell you they are obviously different shades of red. But in my head they are both mapped to the red "embedding". I imagine that's the exact same thing that happens to blue and green in cultures that don't have a word for green. If on the…

> in my head they are both mapped to the red "embedding"

Sure. That's the point. These studies are a study of language per se. Not how language influences perception to a meanigful degree. Sapir-Whorf is a cool hypothesis. But it isn't true for humans.

(Out of curiosity, what is "embedding" doing that "word" does not?)

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#122

Post by [deleted] »

bkolobara wrote: post #117
BrenBarn wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If in a langauge there is one word for 2 different colors, speakers of it are unable to see the difference between the colors. That is quite untrue. It is true that people may be slightly slower or less accurate in distinguishing colors that are within a labeled category than those that cross a category boundary, but that's far from saying they can't perceive the difference at all. The latter would imply that, for…

The point I was trying to make is that the way our brain works is deeply connected to language and words, including how fast and how accurate you perceive colors [0][1]. And interacting with an LLM could have unexpected side effects on it, because we were never before exposed to "statistically generated language" in such amounts. [0]: https://youtu.be/RKK7wGAYP6k?si=GK6VPP0yoFoGyOn3 [1]: https://youtu.be/I64RtGofPW8?…

[deleted]

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#123

Post by windward »

soulofmischief wrote: post #79
ares623 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We were promised supersonic jets today or very soon though and our economies have been held hostage waiting for that promise.

The first recorded supersonic flight was in 1947.

Supersonic passenger planes failed commercially.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#124

Post by wongarsu »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #121
wongarsu wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you asked me if a fire engine and a ripe strawberry are the same color I would say yes. Obviously, they are both red. If you held them next to each other I would still be able to tell you they are obviously different shades of red. But in my head they are both mapped to the red "embedding". I imagine that's the exact same thing that happens to blue and green in cultures that don't have a word for green. If on the…

> in my head they are both mapped to the red "embedding" Sure. That's the point. These studies are a study of language per se . Not how language influences perception to a meanigful degree. Sapir-Whorf is a cool hypothesis. But it isn't true for humans. (Out of curiosity, what is "embedding" doing that "word" does not?)

Word would imply that this only happens when I translate my thoughts to a chosen human language (or articulate thoughts in a language). I chose embedding because I think this happens much earlier in the pipeline: the information of the exact shade is discarded before the scene is committed to memory and before most conscious reasoning. I see this as something happening at the interface of the vision system, not the speech center.

Which is kind of Sapir-Whorf, just not the extreme version of "we literally can't see or reason about the difference", more "differences we don't care about get lost in processing". Which you can kind of conceptualize as the brain choosing a different encoding, or embedding space (even though obviously such a thing does not exist in the literal sense in our brains)

Edit: in a way, I would claim Sapir-Whorf is mistaking correlation for causation: it's not that the words we know are the reason for how we can think, it's that what differences we care about cause both the ways we think and the words we use

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#125

Post by yetihehe »

dchuk wrote: post #98

I’m very bought in to the idea that raw coding is now a solved problem with the current models and agentic harnesses. Let alone what’s coming in the near term. That being said, I think we’re in a weird phase right now where people’s obvious mental health issues are appearing as “hyper productivity” due to the use of these tools to absolutely spam out code that isn’t necessarily broadly coherent but is locally impress…

If you give every idiot a worldwide heard voice, you will hear every idiot from the whole world. If you give every idiot a tool to make programs, you will see a lot of programs made by idiots.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#126

Post by bonesss »

jamestimmins wrote: post #109
tptacek wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do too, but you can take things too far, which I'd argue has happened the moment "figuring out what the names mean" becomes enough of an intellectual challenge to provide a dopamine hit; at that point, you've (intentionally or otherwise) germinated a cult. It's human nature: people will support the design not on its merits but rather as loss aversion for the work they put into decoding it.

Yes at some point innovative software and naming are at cross purposes, and if your naming gets too extreme ultimately that will get all of the attention.

Anthropomorphizing chunks of your system is kinda weird given interactive chat as the UI to the LLM.

Akka and others have standardized names for all this stuff (and seem to fully know that a code ‘actor’ is code). These wheels don’t need reinventing (much less as ‘the Marvin’s’, a lovable set of bi-racial quadruplets who always get you where you’re going ).

In fact, I dare say a lot of LLM fascination for orchestration is people unfamiliar with actor models and the level of elegance a properly expressive language lets them have.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#127

Post by chrisjj »

nl wrote: post #56
chrisjj wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How rich do you have to be not care about the environmental cost?

I think Andrew Ng wrote a great piece on this. For example, in the US, which do you think uses more water: Golf Courses or Data Centers? a) Gold Courses use twice as much water as Data Centers b) About the same c) Data Centers use twice as much water as Gold Courses The answer is "None of the above": "Golf courses in the U.S. use around 500 billion gallons annually of water to irrigate their turf [snip] data centers…

... computation produces dramatically less carbon than alternatives. Google had estimated that a single web search query produces 0.2 grams of CO2 emissions. In contrast, driving from my home to the local library to look up a fact would generate about 400 grams

So, how much less carbon is produced by a Gas Town run than the equivalent number of drives to the library?

/i

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#128

Post by bonesss »

alexjurkiewicz wrote: post #89
fdr wrote: post #33

I use beads quite a bit, but not as steve intended. And definitely the opposite of "Gas Town," where I use the note-taking capability and integration with Git (that is, as something of a glorified Makefile and database) to debug contexts, to close the loop and increase accuracy over time. Nevertheless, it has been useful for large batch runs over my code base: the record has been processing for thirty hours straight…

His latest post is endorsing a crypto exchange because they paid him $50k. https://steve-yegge.medium.com/bags-and-the-creator-economy-...

I’m pro LLM and use them, but crikey: if they’re so good at code why aren’t these people with all the attention, branding, and connections in the world unable to capitalize them?

I believe Google that uses their internal Gemini trained on their internal infrastructure to generate boiler plate and insights for older, less mature, code in one of the worlds biggest and most complicated anythings, ever. But I don’t see them saying anything to the effect of “neener neener, we’re using markov chains so 10x our stock ‘cause of the otherwise impossible face melting Google Docs 2026.”

OpenAI is chasing ads, like Reddit, to regurgitate Reddit content. If this stuff is worth the squeeze I need to see the top 10 LLM-fluencers refusing to bend over for $50K. The opposite is on display.

So hypotheses: Google’s s-tier geniuses and PMs are already expressing the mature optimum application. No silver bullets, more gains to be had ditching bad tech and extraneous vendor entanglements (copilot, 365).

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#129

Post by GrowingSideways »

dchuk wrote: post #98

I’m very bought in to the idea that raw coding is now a solved problem with the current models and agentic harnesses. Let alone what’s coming in the near term. That being said, I think we’re in a weird phase right now where people’s obvious mental health issues are appearing as “hyper productivity” due to the use of these tools to absolutely spam out code that isn’t necessarily broadly coherent but is locally impress…

> raw coding is now a solved problem

Surely this was solved with fortran. What changed? I think most people just don't know what program they want.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#130

Post by ben_w »

dchuk wrote: post #98

I’m very bought in to the idea that raw coding is now a solved problem with the current models and agentic harnesses. Let alone what’s coming in the near term. That being said, I think we’re in a weird phase right now where people’s obvious mental health issues are appearing as “hyper productivity” due to the use of these tools to absolutely spam out code that isn’t necessarily broadly coherent but is locally impress…

Mm.

I'd agree, the code "isn’t necessarily broadly coherent but is locally impressive".

However, I've seen some totally successful, even award-winning, human-written projects where I could say the same.

Ages back, I heard a woodworking analogy:

  LLM code is like MDF. Really useful for cheap furniture, massively cheaper than solid wood, but it would be a mistake to use it as a structural element in a house.
Now, I've never made anything more complex than furniture, so I don't know how well that fit the previous models let alone the current ones… but I've absolutely seen success coming out of bigger balls of mud than the balls of mud I got from letting Claude loose for a bit without oversight.

Still, just because you can get success even with sloppy code, doesn't mean I think this is true everywhere. It's not like the award was for industrial equipment or anything, the closest I've come to life-critical code is helping to find and schedule video calls with GPs.

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