kcexn

6 ms·

31.
by kcexn 6mo ago
I don't think there is a bias in the field towards a youth narrative. I think there is a bias in the media. Nobody I've ever met would expect a breakthrough from a 20 something year old no matter how much of a genius they are. Com
32.
by kcexn 7mo ago
Isn't this the fundamental problem of all AI chatbots? If the problem is costing thousands of dollars (a week?), why not hire a person? If it's not costing thousands of dollars, why would I hire a software engineer to build this f
33.
by kcexn 8mo ago
I can imagine a future where writing that is considered sloppy today is considered good because of LLMs.
34.
by kcexn 8mo ago
I don't think they're suggesting we reduce the amount of faculty. They're suggesting that you ask all the faculty to share less space, increasing the efficiency of the real estate holdings. Also by reducing the number of scho
35.
by kcexn 8mo ago
Technically it's the same. But behaviorally it's not. When pulling in more dependencies is so easy, it's very hard to slow down and ask the question do we need all of this? Mucking around with cmake adds enough friction that
36.
by kcexn 8mo ago
There's a softer component to healthcare which is that people can overreact to medical results. If a doctor administers a scan, finds a handful of likely benign things but wants to administer another scan later on down the line, I&#x27
37.
by kcexn 8mo ago
Did power tools not cause layoffs? That seems like a dubious claim to me. Building a house today takes far fewer people than 100 years ago. Seems unlikely that all the extra labor found other things to do in construction.
38.
by kcexn 8mo ago
Maybe. I'm not sure its that different though? If one person can do the work of two because of power tools, then why keep both? Same with AI. How people feel about it doesn't seem relevant. Maybe the right example is the role of t
39.
by kcexn 8mo ago
They should have known better. It was their job to sell the box. Instead they wasted a tonne of their clients money on a proof-of-concept for something that was never going to work. Using the word 'impossible' was probably also a
40.
by kcexn 8mo ago
I think this is partly an education problem, and partly an industry culture problem. Lots of young developers are incentivized to 'contribute' to open-source as a way to demonstrate that they can actually write software. So open-s
41.
by kcexn 9mo ago
As people get more comfortable with AI. I think what everyone is noticing is that AI is terrible at solving problems that don't have large amounts of readily available training data. So, basically if there isn't already an open-so
42.
by kcexn 9mo ago
Because developers are incentivized to have marketable software skills. Not marketable build things that are cheap and profitable skills. Moore's law was supposed to make it simpler and cheaper to do more computationally expensive task
43.
by kcexn 9mo ago
The problem with Wikipedia as an Academic source is that it's impossible to cite. You have no idea whether the information on there today is going to be there tomorrow or was there yesterday.
44.
by kcexn 9mo ago
The "move to a farm" dream seems like it would be nice if one didn't have any financial stress. So, more like retire to a farm.
45.
by kcexn 10mo ago
It's a shame that Fleming misremembered his process of discovery and created a myth of accidental discovery. I like the Root-Bernstein narrative more. That in the monotonous execution of routine experiments for something unrelated an u
46.
by kcexn 10mo ago
A large part of that training is done by asking people if responses 'look right'. It turns out that people are more likely to think a model is good when it kisses their ass than if it has a terrible personality. This is arguably a
47.
by kcexn 11mo ago
Seems sensible in Europe to tie "open source" eligible for financial incentives to a European licence like the EUPL.
48.
by kcexn 11mo ago
It's hard to write about the broader context with any expertise in a blog post written from personal experience. My own thinking is that the big competitive advantage that big tech firms have over small ones is the power to mobilize ve
49.
by kcexn 11mo ago
This is a position that seems to be as unenforceable as AI can't be trained on code whose copyright owners have not given consent. The main reason for being unwilling to merge AI code is going to be that it sets a precedent that AI cod
50.
by kcexn 11mo ago
They're not getting promotions because they produce promising ideas. They get them because they convince other people to build their ideas for them.
51.
by kcexn 11mo ago
As you get better at something you become more opinionated at what you need your tools to do. You demand more specific and tailored things from your tools and so you start to lean towards things that are more adjustable. There is also the c
52.
by kcexn 1y ago
I think this talk speaks to an idea that is true for early stage and small businesses. That is software development is a strategic investment not a tactical one. Maybe I don't need a product database and an API just yet, I could use a
53.
by kcexn 1y ago
GCC has come a long way in terms of features and complexity since the 90's/00's when Stallman made these decisions. Today, building a compiler from scratch would be a huge undertaking, and would be prohibitively expensive for
54.
by kcexn 1y ago
I'm not sure that there is a recession of corporate support from C++. Just that the proportion of companies that need C++ is smaller than it once was. I like the safety promise of Rust. But the complicated interop story with C and C++
55.
by kcexn 1y ago
The theoretical link that is missing is that AI isn't supposed to reduce knowledge work, it is supposed to free labor to concentrate on higher value work and investment. Nobody knows what that work is though, and nobody wants to talk a
56.
by kcexn 1y ago
It's a little bit more complicated than that if you were running a business. You would want to add the cost of your network+hardware depreciating over the timeframe, and you probably can't just ignore the first 185W since if you a
57.
by kcexn 1y ago
poll is the POSIX specified I/O multiplexer so it has the advantage of being portable. Windows even supports a version of poll called WSAPoll. If you must implement your own event loop and you want your application to be portable, poll
58.
by kcexn 1y ago
The problem is that the best research is not a competitive process but a collaborative one. Positioning research output as a race or a competition is already problematic.
59.
by kcexn 1y ago
This is such a nuanced problem. Like any creative endeavour, the most powerful and significant research is driven by an innate joy of learning, creating, and sharing ideas with others. How far the research can be taken is then shaped by res
60.
by kcexn 1y ago
I don't think I'm understanding the properties of a viewshed tile. Each tile is sized so that the viewshed size (in square metres) of every point within the tile can be found just from elevation data within the tile itself? But th

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