141–150 of 156 posts
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Regarding the changes to your grading weights: https://acbart.github.io/2026/04/19/proctored-grades/ Sounds like 50/50 for the distribution? That means you are okay with a student getting a 40% across all your quizzes and then passing the class with a C-?
What an odd bit to latch onto. What ratio would you find more appropriate?
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I've vibe coded multiple apps that I now use regularly throughout the day. I doubt I could sell them, but they are very useful to me.
Curious, what have you built? I just wibe coded a packing/checklist app, a llm-powered meal planner and a very specialised app for tracking LAN party network building.
I built an AllTrails equivalent (iOS app and all). It allows me to scan my backpacking gear to load it into a library (with metadata attached), build a weight profile for my trip, has offline maps, and more. I wanted to make something that was more suited to long backpacking trips and will eventually add itinerary planning. I was originally planning on trying to monetize it but I don't know how to sell software and honestly the QA process is so time consuming (hike, fix bugs, hike more, fix those bugs) that I just gave up. I plan on redeploying it to my homelab since I previously ran it on Hetzner.
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Yep, I'm fairly certain that general learning algorithms acting upon an ANN (which is fairly general too, see the universal approximation theorem) can reach and surpass performance of the human brain. As we have approximately zero evidence that the human brain contains "magic," that is something that can't be modeled by an ANN of a practically feasible size. (I know about chaotic processes that can't be modeled preci…
I think it's a giant leap of faith to go from "there's no evidence that the human brain contains magic" to "ANNs will achieve AGI and we just need to monkey with the parameters to get there." You've ruled out the supernatural, but don't account for mundane limitations like energy, training data, memory or the architecture. That theorem you referenced tells us a sufficiently wide network can (quoting from Wikipedia) "…
Or, at least, I don't tend to postulate existence of such mechanisms in the brain after hearing about every empirical ANN deficiency.
BTW, I'm not talking about supernatural. The "magic" could be unknown physical processes, unknown quantum algorithms, unknown physics.
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Having started using Claude Code at work, I think coding as we now know it will probably no longer be a career path in 5 years at the outside. I’m old. If I had to, I could retire tomorrow, albeit on a restricted budget. But I worry about the younger folks (like my 25-year-old nephew) who haven’t built up the resources to survive without working who are in the field right now. There’s going to be a mega disruption an…
It's a race to retool. If he can retool to an agentic coding environment quickly he will be OK. Might have to build up the skills outside of work if the current job doesn't allow for it, but I'm less worried about younger people realigning quickly. They're used to it, and younger people are so much more resilient/used to disappointment than we are (economic prospects have been so fucked for Zoomers for so long by so…
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1. A Mac menu-bar app to make it easier to know when I need to either do a PR or look at someone’s feedback on my own PR. Clicking the icon shows a list of all open PRs that I’ve created or that my review has been requested on (and clicking an item there will open the PR so I can act on it). If there’s a PR that I’ve not left comments on or approved, or if there are unreplied/unclosed comments on my PR or it’s been approved, a badge is added to the menu bar icon.
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Metamathematics, by Kleene, is programming in maths. Theoretical computer science is maths. A lot of foundations work is programming. Coding itself is like an extended problem set from a maths class. LaTeX itself is programming. The difference to me is one of directionality - maths research is seeing a far off island and getting there by hook or by crook; bridge, draining the swamp, inventing an airplane or boat, wha…
> Metamathematics, by Kleene, is programming in maths. Ookay. Back in the day i was confused by 'Linear programming', which is optimisation and has nothing to do with coding. > every feature is ultimately filled in and the underlying beauty is obscured by a fractal of complexity required by the ever growing requirements. Right. I would say Mathematics tries to unobscure (patterns in) nature. Engineering is creating t…
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Curious, what have you built? I just wibe coded a packing/checklist app, a llm-powered meal planner and a very specialised app for tracking LAN party network building.
I vibe coded a battery monitor for my wireless mouse. It doesn't have Linux support and I wanted to know when to charge it. I built an AllTrails equivalent (iOS app and all). It allows me to scan my backpacking gear to load it into a library (with metadata attached), build a weight profile for my trip, has offline maps, and more. I wanted to make something that was more suited to long backpacking trips and will event…
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I vibe coded a battery monitor for my wireless mouse. It doesn't have Linux support and I wanted to know when to charge it. I built an AllTrails equivalent (iOS app and all). It allows me to scan my backpacking gear to load it into a library (with metadata attached), build a weight profile for my trip, has offline maps, and more. I wanted to make something that was more suited to long backpacking trips and will event…
That's so cool. I also thought a bit what it would mean to monetise the checklist/packing list app, but I just don't see much business case with it, with all the QA and support requirements.
The idea would be that you would scan all of your gear in and then create a map (or select one) and then Gemini would tell you whether or not you were prepared for that trip - does your sleeping bag insulate well enough, do you have the right shoes, etc. You could even do neat tricks like calculate expected route completing time based on assumed weight. I was also planning a "ask a human" feature that would snapshot all that data and post it to an internal forum.
Ultimately though, outdoor people hate AI (understandably). Selling it as "AI powered" is a no-go.
And I genuinely do not understand how to distribute software. Getting people to use your software is extremely hard unless it is very polished and has no bugs. The feature set was too similar to AllTrails so people will expect AllTrails quality. And something that I'm struggling with for all software that I make is I don't know how to get beta testers to get a better feedback loop. Going "hey my software isn't perfect but can you try it out and let me know what you think" is genuinely met with disdain for bothering the person, apathy, blank stares, or whatever. Doesn't really matter if it's offered for free or not - or even if the person expressed a desire for a solution. A person can say "wow that is a great idea I would love to try that" and I would follow up with them with practically no success.
At the end of the day I think I just want to give up and go back to big tech and optimize ad distribution pipelines to deliver weight loss ads to children or whatever tech is up to these days.
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What format do you have it build? PNG? Svg? Open document drawing? I am interested.
I mostly use HTML, but it is much more flexible than what you would assume if you leverage some standard formats instead of building everything from scratch. Mermaid, Graphviz and friends but in HTML pages. Sometimes it is turning other things into perfetto.dev format for multi-machine tracking (like turn a build process into the same format as Chrome traces). If you need more flexibility, you end up reaching for p5.…
What is your thought on D2 compared to those? GIven the WebGL mention (The one I'm familiar with), I suspect this is a matter of interactive vs static/diagrams. I assume the latter due to my own project which falls in that category!
Nice balanced perspective there at the end: "as such [LLM-coded interactive] supplements are not mission-critical to the core of the paper, I again feel that the downside risk of using guided interaction with LLM agents to generate such visualizations is acceptable." It's a tool. Good for some things but not others and generally not to be trusted.
I don't understand what trust means in this context. Even if I were able to hire Donald Knuth to write all my code, I wouldn't "trust" it to be bug-free, let alone to be the right fit for my needs.
Donald Knuth's code would be much more likely to meet my standards during a code review than some LLM output.