481–490 of 527 posts
Most surprising thing about this article is discovering that 'mathstodon' exists and Terence is active on it!
So we've been up for over 7 years, and have just over 19K accounts.
Most surprising thing about this article is discovering that 'mathstodon' exists and Terence is active on it!
Most surprising thing about this article is discovering that 'mathstodon' exists and Terence is active on it!
We started Mathstodon, an instance of Mastodon-the-Platform, on April 12, 2017. So we've been up for over 7 years, and have just over 19K accounts.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A couple days ago I saw a tweet that described how to remove an element from an array in O(1) time instead of O(n). The key to it was identifying that for the purpose the given array was being used for, it could be unordered / not fully ordered, and it would not be an issue. This way, it was possible to simply replace the element with the last array element, then decrease the size of the array by one. I'd say that's…
> whoever came up with this was able identify what can be traded off to make the previously impossible, possible, unlocking new scales and possibilities. In fairness, that is an extremely standard trick so it's reasonably unlikely that the author came up with it themselves.
I don't understand why this is news? This could have been said by any one particular contributor from HackerNews but just because it's from Terence Tao it hits the front page? I understand that the guy is a great mathematician, but why is his input on this any more valuable than the myriad of discussions about o1 from other professionals on here?
I don't understand why this is news? This could have been said by any one particular contributor from HackerNews but just because it's from Terence Tao it hits the front page? I understand that the guy is a great mathematician, but why is his input on this any more valuable than the myriad of discussions about o1 from other professionals on here?
(* I think one could very legitimately view him as the top researcher in harmonic analysis in the world - he is a great mathematician - but it's not clear to me how people go from that to Epochal Genius and his extreme celebrity status across STEM)
I don't understand why this is news? This could have been said by any one particular contributor from HackerNews but just because it's from Terence Tao it hits the front page? I understand that the guy is a great mathematician, but why is his input on this any more valuable than the myriad of discussions about o1 from other professionals on here?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The programmers who will find LLMs most useful are going to be those who prior to LLMs were copying and pasting from Stack Overflow, and asking questions online about everything they were doing - tasks that LLMs have precisely replaced (it has now memorized all that boilerplate code, consensus answers, and API usage examples). The developers who will find LLMs the least useful are the "brilliant" ones who never found…
It's very much the opposite. LLMs free me from the nuts and bolts of the "how", for example I don't have to manually type out a loop. I just write a comment and the loop magically appears. Sometimes I don't have to prompt it at all. With my brain freed from the drudgery of everyday programming, I have more mental cycles to dedicate to higher concerns such as overall architecture, and I'm just way more productive. For…
This is obviously the critical point. It's not whether the LLM can do something, i.e. give it a go, but whether that actually saves you time. If it takes longer to verify the LLM code for correctness than to write it yourself, then there is no productivity gain.
I guess this partly also hinges on how much you care about correctness beyond "does it seem to work". For a prototype maybe that's enough, but for work use you probably should check for API "contractual correctness", corner cases, vulnerabilities, etc, or anything that you didn't explicitly specify (or even if you did!) to the LLM. If you are writing the code itself then these multifaceted requirements are all in your head, but with the LLM you'll need to spell them all out (or iterate and refine), and it may well have been faster just to code it yourself (cf working with an intern with -ve productivity).
If you fail to review the LLMs code thoroughly enough, and leave bugs in it to be discovered later, maybe in production, then the cost of doing that, both in time and money, will far outweigh any cost saving in just having written it correctly yourself in the first place. Again, this is more of a concern for production code than for hobbyist or prototype stuff, but having to fix bugs is always slower than getting it right in the first place.
For myself, it seems that for anything complex it's always the design that takes time, not the coding, and the coding in the end (once the detailed design has been worked out) just comes down to straightforward methods and functions that are mostly simple to get right first time. What would be useful, but of course does not yet exist, would be an AGI peer programmer that operated more like a human than a language model, who I could discuss the requirements and design with, and then maybe delegate the coding to as well.
I don't understand why this is news? This could have been said by any one particular contributor from HackerNews but just because it's from Terence Tao it hits the front page? I understand that the guy is a great mathematician, but why is his input on this any more valuable than the myriad of discussions about o1 from other professionals on here?
Someone at the top of their field discussing the capability of models in their field is much more interesting than someone mediocre in their field making trite observations about capabilities outside their field.