841–850 of 870 posts
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Whatever happened to just typing "apt install qrencode"? It's definitely "fast, reliable, free of surveillance economy bullshit, and doesn't employ URL shorteners".
Users can't use command–line tools. They just can't. It has to be user–friendly or it doesn't exist.
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Sure, but that's entirely different from vibe-coding a tool, which sounds like a colossal waste of resources.
Having an LLM spit out a few hundred lines of HTML and JavaScript is not a colossal waste of resources, it's equivalent to running a microwave for a couple of seconds.
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This is a very good point. Years ago working in a LAMP stack, the term LAMP could fully describe your software engineering, database setup and infrastructure. I shudder to think of the acronyms for today's tech stacks.
And yet many the same people who lament the tooling bloat of today will, in a heartbeat, make lame jokes about PHP. Most of them aren't even old enough to have ever done anything serious with it, or seen it in action beyond Wordpress or some spaghetti-code one-pager they had to refactor at their first job. Then they show up on HN with a vibe-coded side project or blog post about how they achieved a 15x performance bo…
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When I was in primary school, the librarian used a computer this way, and it worked fine. However, she had to back it up daily or weekly onto a stack of floppy disks, and if she wanted to serve the students from the other computer on the other side of the room, she had to restore the backup on there, and remember which computer had the latest data, and only use that one. When doing a stock–take (scanning every book o…
I think the 'more than one user' alternative to a 'single EXE on a single computer' isn't the multilayered pie of things that KronisLV mentioned, but a PHP script[0] on an apache server[0] you access via a web browser. You don't even need a dedicated DB server as SQLite will do perfectly fine. [0] or similarly easy to get running equivalent
I've seen plenty of those as well - nobody knows exactly how things are setup, sometimes dependencies are quite outdated and people are afraid to touch the cPanel config (or however it's setup). Not that you can't do good engineering with enough discipline, it's just that Docker (or most methods of containerization) limits the blast range when things inevitably go wrong and at least try to give you some reproducibility.
At the same time, I think that PHP can be delightfully simple and I do use Apache2 myself (mod_php was actually okay, but PHP-FPM also isn't insanely hard to setup), it's just that most of my software lives in little Docker containers with a common base and a set of common tools, so they're decoupled from the updates and config of the underlying OS. I've moved the containers (well data+images) across servers with no issues when needed and also resintalled OSes and spun everything right back up.
Kubernetes is where dragons be, though.
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Perhaps. I've had LLMs tell me some code is deeply flawed garbage that should be rewritten about code that exact same LLM wrote minutes before. It could be a sign of deep meta cognition, or it might be due to some cognitive gaps where it has no idea why it did something a minute ago and suddenly has a different idea.
This is not a fair criticism. There is _nobody_ there, so you can't be saying 'code the exact same LLM wrote minutes before'. There is no 'exact same LLM' and no ideas for it to have, you're trying to make sense of sparkles off the surface of a pond. There's no 'it' to have an idea and then a different idea, much less deep meta cognition.
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Fittingly, George Hinton toiled away for years in relative obscurity before finally being recognized for his work. I was always quite impressed by his "tenacity". So although I don't think he should have won the Nobel Prize because not really physics, I felt his perseverance and hard work should merit something.
... The person who embezzled from the SDC in 2018? https://eu.jsonline.com/story/news/investigations/2024/04/19...
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It works for hard problems when the person already solves it and just needs the grunt work done It also works for problems that have been solved a thousand times before, which impresses people and makes them think it is actually solving those problems
Which matches what they are. They're first and foremost pattern recognition engines extraordinaire. If they can identify some pattern that's out of whack in your code compared to something in the training data, or a bug that is similar to others that have been fixed in their training set, they can usually thwack those patterns over to your latent space and clean up the residuals. If comparing pattern matching alone,…
And thats exactly what its good for. It works great if you already solve a tough problem and provide it the solution in natural language, because the program is already there, it just needs to translate it to python.
Anything more than that that might emerge from this is going to be unreliable sleight of next-token-prediction at best.
We need a new architectural leap to have these things reason, maybe something that involves reinforcement learning at the token represention level, idk. But scaling the context window and training data arent going to cut it
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it's meant in the literal sense but with metaphorical hacksaws and duct tape. Early on, some advanced LLM users noticed they could get better results by forcing insertion of a word like "Wait," or "Hang on," or "Actually," and then running the model for a few more paragraphs. This would increase the chance of a model noticing a mistake it made. Reasoning is basically this.
It's not just force inserting a word. Reasoning is integrated into the training process of the model.
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It works for hard problems when the person already solves it and just needs the grunt work done It also works for problems that have been solved a thousand times before, which impresses people and makes them think it is actually solving those problems
> It also works for problems that have been solved a thousand times before So you mean it works on almost all problems?
But if you want to do interesting things, like all the shills keep trying to claim they do. Then this wont do it for you. You have to do it for it
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> It also works for problems that have been solved a thousand times before So you mean it works on almost all problems?
I mean problems not worth solving, because theyve already been solved. If you need to just do the grunt work of retrieving the solution to a trite and worn out problem from the models training data, then they work great But if you want to do interesting things, like all the shills keep trying to claim they do. Then this wont do it for you. You have to do it for it
I don't know where this is coming from. I've seen some over-enthusiastic hype for sure, but most of the day-to-day conversations I see aren't people saying they're curing cancer with Claude, they're people saying they're automating their bread and butter tasks with great success.