jebarker

7 ms·

91.
by jebarker 9mo ago
I don't really buy into the setup here. Bash is Turing complete. How is calling os.walk in Python more "code-only" than calling find in bash? Would it be more authentically "code only" if you only let the LLM use C?
92.
by jebarker 9mo ago
No, it doesn't. For example, you could use an AI agent just to aid you in code search and understanding or for filling out well specified functions which you then do QA on.
93.
by jebarker 9mo ago
This is kind of brilliant. Both the blog post and the idea of managing CBT as a debugging process. There’s some great insights here, e.g. > As you fix your poverty, you discover the ennui of abundance. and the idea that the software is r
94.
by jebarker 9mo ago
I’m find nutritional guidelines for pasta too sad to live by. It’s just not enough to satisfy me and overall detracts from my enjoyment of the meal.
95.
by jebarker 9mo ago
I'm definitely not a classicist, but I think it's unfair to criticize his writing abilities too much. He wasn't writing a book for others as I understand it, it was his personal diaries. EDIT: also most people are reading a t
96.
by jebarker 9mo ago
You know Marcus Aurelius was emperor of Rome right? It's not startup founder successful, but it's definitely moderately successful.
97.
by jebarker 9mo ago
The ones I used for the first couple of years of my math PhD had solutions. That's a sufficient level of "advanced" to be applicable in this analogy. It doesn't really matter though - the point still stands that _if_ sol
98.
by jebarker 9mo ago
> LLM coding is like reading a math textbook without trying to solve any of the problems. Most math textbooks provide the solutions too. So you could choose to just read those and move on and you’d have achieved much less. The same is tr
99.
by jebarker 9mo ago
Based on the post I was under the impression they’re a current CS student. So this is probably a part time job whilst studying
100.
by jebarker 9mo ago
Highly recommend the book "How to tame a fox" about the Russian fur farm fox domestication experiment
101.
by jebarker 9mo ago
I guess the counter-argument is that the world is slowly going to shit and it's only by paying attention and getting involved that we can prevent that. But I don't think that justifies daily news reading.
102.
by jebarker 9mo ago
Is it the Napeoleon Technique or Ostrich Effect to decide not to read the news? I’ve been doing this for the past ~1 year and I’m much happier for it. I’m torn whether I’m just being a bad citizen/selfish or genuinely just not paying a
103.
by jebarker 9mo ago
> if I don't see something, I forget it exists. To some extent this seems like a feature, not a bug. I have many tabs open that I find myself resistant to closing but I'm pretty sure if they just got closed and I forgot they ex
104.
by jebarker 9mo ago
I feel similarly. I am happiest and healthiest all round when I focus on the one thing I have chosen to do at any given time rather than figuring out ways to multi-task. I do however enjoy choosing to do math/coding adjacent activities
105.
by jebarker 10mo ago
The issue I find with Chinese cooking is that it often requires very high heat and so (probably due to bad technique on my part) I get a house full of smoke or at least very high VOCs. Any tips to avoid that?
106.
by jebarker 10mo ago
Mike Acton talks about deliberate practice in programming exactly this way. Every day start with a blank sheet and try to build something for an hour (his example is Astroids). Next day, start again and get a little further. Eventually you&
107.
by jebarker 10mo ago
Analogies all the way down.
108.
by jebarker 10mo ago
Multiplying two 100 digit numbers requires the application of a fixed algorithm which can be learned. If you don't know the algorithm it's challenging, if you do it's not. But that is not true of painting. Painting requires c
109.
by jebarker 10mo ago
How does the existence of AI make watercolor painting less of a challenge for a human?
110.
What Dan Read(what-dan-read.com)
3 points by jebarker 10mo ago|1 comments
111.
by jebarker 10mo ago
The 3500+ book and 50 year reading list of a gentleman that died in 2025
112.
by jebarker 10mo ago
My top reads this year: - How to Tame a Fox - great popsci history of a genetics experiment - "The Sixth Extinction" and "Not the end of the world" - compelling but contrasting takes on climate change - Through Two Doors
113.
by jebarker 10mo ago
I compiled the code with minor changes on my M3 Macbook Air and it found the 19186 unique solutions in about 3hrs 15min, so ~9.2X speedup (over the 30hrs stated in the post). Would indeed be interesting to see how fast you can go with some
114.
by jebarker 10mo ago
> At other times in history, leisure was the default state and work existed to enable leisure. What times/places are you thinking of when you write this?
115.
by jebarker 10mo ago
FWIW I've had a meditation practice for over a decade and do use things like box breathing and journaling too. But sometimes my brain just needs stimulation and this has never gone away. I've learned that the thing I need to avoid
116.
by jebarker 10mo ago
I just bought a Switch 2 having not really played games much for decades. I'm finding that occasional breaks for "mindless" gaming noticeably relaxes my always on, work obsessed brain. The challenge is overcoming the feeling
117.
by jebarker 10mo ago
> Within an hour, Koishi Chan gave an alternate proof deriving the required bound {c(k^2) \geq 1/k} from the original Erdős-Szekeres theorem by a standard “blow-up” argument which we can give here in the Alice-Bob formulation. Is th
118.
by jebarker 10mo ago
This is an interesting paper and I like this kind of mechanistic interpretability work - but I cannot figure out how the paper title "Transformers know more than they can tell" relates to the actual content. In this case what is i
119.
by jebarker 10mo ago
This is how I feel about basically all consumer software
120.
by jebarker 10mo ago
I agree. Wolfram gets so much crap ok this site but I think he’s produced so much interesting science and tech that has built up over decades, that’s very admirable.

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