actsasbuffoon

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61.
by actsasbuffoon 1y ago
I prefer to go for companies that win me over rather than ones where I start out excited about them. That’s how it was with my current company. The description from the recruiter had me questioning if I even wanted to talk to this company b
62.
by actsasbuffoon 1y ago
Time really does fly. I’ve been doing this long enough to watch several junior developers become staff engineers.
63.
by actsasbuffoon 1y ago
EV batteries degrade more quickly when charged too far above half-way. As a result, your ideal EV might actually have 600 miles of range and you’d just leave it half-charged most of the time.
64.
by actsasbuffoon 1y ago
Soon the AI companies will have different tiers of plan based on carbon output. For $200 per month they’ll only use carbon-free power sources for your prompts. At $100 they’ll use nuclear, then $20 per month for coal, and then there will be
65.
by actsasbuffoon 1y ago
Oh, I don’t think we’re on the verge of super-intelligence. I don’t think LLMs are a pathway to super-intelligence, and I think most of the talk of super-intelligence right now is marketing fluff. In terms of crossing an air gap, that reall
66.
by actsasbuffoon 1y ago
In the context of the topic (could a rogue super intelligence break out), I don’t really see how that’s relevant. Clearly someone who is clever enough has an advantage at breaking out. As for the bit about how limited it is, do you remember
67.
by actsasbuffoon 1y ago
Stephen Russell is an unusually intelligent and persuasive person. He managed to get rich by tricking people. Even now, he was sentenced to nearly 200 years, but is currently out on parole. There’s something about this guy that just… lets h
68.
by actsasbuffoon 1y ago
That has literally happened before. Stephen Russell was in prison for fraud. He faked a heart attack so he would be brought to the hospital. He then called the hospital from his hospital bed, told them he was an FBI agent, and said that he
69.
by actsasbuffoon 1y ago
Two separate doctors have almost killed my wife with incorrect diagnoses over the span of 15 years. She had cancer when she was 18 and the doctor insisted that women just don’t get cancer at that age, and insisted the lump was benign withou
70.
by actsasbuffoon 1y ago
In fairness, Claude loves to find workarounds. Claude Code is constantly saying things like, “This streaming JSON problem looks tricky so let’s just wait until the JSON is complete to parse it.” No, Claude. Do not do that!
71.
by actsasbuffoon 1y ago
I had one the other day where the AI search engine gave me a very odd result that got several important details blatantly wrong, and then started getting into weird right-wing conspiracy territory. I checked the sources and it turns out tha
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by actsasbuffoon 1y ago
It may not be winner-takes-all. Study after study shows that the models are converging as they get bigger; their results are getting more similar to one another. The models themselves are becoming interchangeable commodities. We can use Ope
73.
by actsasbuffoon 1y ago
I decided to experiment with Claude Code this month. The other day it decided the best way to fix the spec was to add a conditional to the test that causes it to return true before getting to the thing that was actually supposed to be teste
74.
by actsasbuffoon 1y ago
Seriously. Last Thursday I experimented with making a prototype. I showed it at standup the following day. Literally five minutes after standup an executive PM’d me and said, “Can you show me what you just showed to the other engineers?” An
75.
by actsasbuffoon 1y ago
A tax on all import statements.
76.
by actsasbuffoon 1y ago
You have to be careful because they will sometimes make mistakes they do that. I’ve had Claude decide to “simplify” my code by removing a fix that took hours to chase down.
77.
by actsasbuffoon 1y ago
The curse of being an experienced developer is watching good things go away, and then get re-invented and everyone hails them as a major innovation without any awareness that this has existed for a long time. Someone will steal the good ide
78.
by actsasbuffoon 1y ago
I absolutely loathe that. State is the source of most bugs. If the page crashes then refreshing it should clear out the state and let me try again. Anecdotally, it seems like I encounter a lot more web apps these days where refreshing doesn
79.
by actsasbuffoon 1y ago
Because if we go down this path of replacing employees with LLMs then you are going to end up being the one who faces consequences. Let’s say that 5 years from now ACME Airlines has replaced all of their support staff with LLM support age
80.
by actsasbuffoon 1y ago
Sure, I may be responsible, but you’d still be dead. I’d prefer to live in a world where people just didn’t go around making poison cakes.
81.
by actsasbuffoon 1y ago
As far as responsibility goes, sure. But when companies push LLMs into decision-making roles, you could end up being hurt by this even if you’re not the responsible party. If you thought bureaucracy was dumb before, wait until the humans ar
82.
by actsasbuffoon 1y ago
Exactly this. 70% of CEOs say that they hope to be able to lay people off and replace them with an LLM soon. It doesn’t matter that LLMs are incapable of reasoning at even the same level as an elementary school child. They’ll do it because
83.
by actsasbuffoon 1y ago
And even then, there are appropriate and inappropriate times to bring up certain pieces of information. For example, I’m not embarrassed about the fact that my mom died when I was young. But it would be deeply weird to open a job interview
84.
by actsasbuffoon 1y ago
I know this is reductive, but at their core, LLMs really are just very fancy autocomplete. The process they go through bears no resemblance to reasoning. Grab the best model you’ve got access to (o4, Gemini Pro 2.5, Claude Sonnet 3.7, etc)
85.
by actsasbuffoon 1y ago
This misses the point. LLMs will do things like move a knight by a single square as if it were a pawn. Chess is an extremely well understood game, and the rules about how things move is almost certainly well-represented in the training data
86.
by actsasbuffoon 1y ago
Meanwhile even the highest ranked models can’t do simple logic tasks. GothamChess on YouTube did some tests where he played against a bunch of the best models and every single one of them failed spectacularly. They’d happily lose a queen to
87.
by actsasbuffoon 2y ago
It’s a fair point, but I feel like we could take more targeted action on alfalfa without the side effects of the current policies. It feels a bit like celebrating your house burning down because you didn’t like the color of paint in the kit
88.
by actsasbuffoon 2y ago
Though I also think it’s extremely bad for OpenAI’s valuation. If you give me $500B to train the best model in the world, and then a couple people at a hedge fund in China can use my API to train a model that’s almost equal for a tiny fract
89.
by actsasbuffoon 2y ago
I’ve spent the day working in C++ with a popular, well known framework. Both ChatGPT and Claude have been horrible. They hallucinate APIs, they remove things that were already working for no apparent reason, they severely struggle with basi
90.
by actsasbuffoon 2y ago
AI absolutely can’t do the work that I do right now, but if AI keeps advancing then that gap is going to get smaller. And at some point, even if the gap is still pretty big, the never-ending quest to increase profits will drive companies to

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