4 ms·
This is a hilarious article. “It passed all the unit tests, the shape of the code looks right," he said. It's 3.7x more lines of code that performs 2,000 times
by conception 7mo ago
This is a hilarious article.
“It passed all the unit tests, the shape of the code looks right," he said. It's 3.7x more lines of code that performs 2,000 times worse than the actual SQLite. Two thousand times worse for a database is a non-viable product. It's a dumpster fire. Throw it away. All that money you spent on it is worthless.”
“This magic that literally didn’t exist two years ago in more than a toy state is moving at such a rapid rate that it couldn’t even reproduce sqlite three months ago and only got better enough in those weeks to produce a bad version of sqlite! Clearly useless! It has no value, no one is using it to do any work and won’t get better over the next three months or three years!”
An amazing take.
- hyperhello 7mo agoWhy do I want to reproduce sqlite? It’s a library. The point of it is to be already written.
- justinclift 7mo agoMaybe a native rust version of it has value for some people? :)
- Pamar 7mo agoWell... the actual problem is, imho, that it looks like the LLMs seem to have reached (or are close to reaching) a plateau. You might be right about the "three months ago it could not produce a working implementation of a DBMS... but what if in 3 months (or 3 years) it stays stuck at the 20K slower threshold?
- jjk166 7mo agoPeople have been saying, without any evidence at all, it's reached or about to reach a plateau for years now. We are clearly still seeing significant forward progress. While it's reasonable to think it will hit some plateau eventually, there's no reason to think that right now just happens to be as good as it's ever going to get.
- butlike 7mo agoContext is the plateau. It's why RAM prices are spiking. We're essentially throwing heap at the problem hoping it will improve. That's not engineering. It's not improving on a fundamental, technical level.
- jjk166 7mo agoIf a bridge girder isn't strong enough to support a load, you add material in the right places to make a larger, stronger girder. That is engineering. The idea that if you're not making fundamental improvements to your formulation of steel you aren't progressing is absurd. If adding RAM leads to improvements, and we have the engineering ability to add more RAM, then we are still making progress.
- monkaiju 7mo agoRegardless of how true your statement is (just adding metal to a structure is commonly not a way to solve the problem you stated, it just makes the structure heavier which means other systems have more to support) the point is that it isnt exponential/fundamental progress, which is the type that would be needed to avoid the plateaus folks are mentioning. Also adding RAM doesnt give you even linear improvements, its logarithmic.
- jjk166 7mo ago> just adding metal to a structure is commonly not a way to solve the problem you stated, it just makes the structure heavier which means other systems have more to support As a mechanical engineer, that is exactly how you solve that problem. > point is that it isnt exponential/fundamental progress You just stuck the goalpost on a rocket and shot it into space. You'd be hard pressed to show evidence that progress in this field was ever exponential - in most fields it never was. Logarithmic progress is typical; you make a lot of progress early on picking the low hanging fruit figuring out the basics, and as the problems get harder and the theory better understood it takes more effort to make improvements, but fundamentally improvements continue. Incremental progress from increasing scale is, again, perfectly cromulent. It's how we've made advanced computers that can fit in your pocket, it's how clothing became so cheap it's practically disposable, it's how you can fly across the country for less than the price of a nice dinner. Imagine looking at photolithography, textile manufacturing, or aircraft 5 years after they reached their modern forms and saying "this has plateaued".
- dpoloncsak 7mo ago20Kx slower is still faster than my manager could write it.
- conception 7mo agoOpus 4.5/4.6 are definitely not plateaus. Definitely a threshold of quality improvement.
- yladiz 7mo agoYou’re shifting the goalposts. The initial point was that the Rust regeneration of SQLite was wasted money, because it’s unviable due to its slow speed. You’re trying to shift it to be about how it may get better over time. Do you have something that is more specifically refuting the initial quote that doesn’t involve anything about potential improvement?
- conception 7mo agoThe point wasn’t to make better SQLite, it was to make a functioning rust SQLite. Which it did. Badly but you don’t start at race cars. No one was assuming production SQLite.
- fzeroracer 7mo agoWhere are my flying cars?
- conception 7mo agoFlying cars exist? You can get one.