libraryofbabel

8 ms·

61.
by libraryofbabel 6mo ago
Agree. This is such a good balanced article. The only things that still make the insights difficult to apply to professional software development are: this was greenfield work and it was a solo project. But that’s hardly the author’s fault.
62.
by libraryofbabel 6mo ago
I agree with you take the there isn’t a lot of specialist work for data scientists to do with using off-the-shelf LLMs that can’t be done by an engineer. As an AI-aware software engineer myself… this stuff wasn’t that hard to pick up. Even
63.
by libraryofbabel 7mo ago
Oh for sure, both thinkers were products of the English Civil War and its aftermath (and see my comment below about reading Quentin Skinner for all the context on Hobbes). I’d add that Locke (who was writing later than Hobbes) was all wrapp
64.
by libraryofbabel 7mo ago
GP here, I agree with you, my characterizations were both pretty casual to the point of flippancy. I could write y’all a deeper essay on this stuff, but hey, I have LLMs to herd, the 17th century wasn’t my period anyway, and there is alread
65.
by libraryofbabel 7mo ago
Just because I prefer Locke to Hobbes if you forced me to choose doesn't mean I'm some sort of anti-regulation libertarian. Far from it. But if you actually read Hobbes you will see that: * He thinks everyone should be compelled t
66.
by libraryofbabel 7mo ago
Oh totally. I actually don’t like Locke’s position much either, he’s too libertarian for my taste (I would like the state to provide healthcare &c &c). But if I had to choose I’d choose Locke over Hobbes. Hobbes is… real dark.
67.
by libraryofbabel 7mo ago
As an ex historian I love how this famous 350yo work of political philosophy is just sitting at #7 on HN with absolutely no context on why it was submitted. The great debate of political philosophy coming out of the 17th century was between
68.
by libraryofbabel 7mo ago
The Munster siege is also a centerpiece of the novel “Q”, which is well worth a read, especially if you enjoy all things Anabaptist.
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by libraryofbabel 7mo ago
Thanks for the note about Qwen3.5. I should keep up with this more. If only it were more relevant to my day to day work with LLMs! I did consider MoEs but decided (pretty arbitrarily) that I wasn’t going to count them as a truly fundamental
70.
by libraryofbabel 7mo ago
This is great - always worth reading anything from Sebastian. I would also highly recommend his Build an LLM From Scratch book. I feel like I didn’t really understand the transformer mechanism until I worked through that book. On the LLM
71.
by libraryofbabel 7mo ago
Thanks for saying this. It never ceases to amaze me how many people still talk about LLMs like it’s 2023, completely ignoring the RLVR revolution that gave us models like Opus that can one-shot huge chunks of works-first-time code for novel
72.
by libraryofbabel 7mo ago
The article mentions Mach numbers, but it leaves out what is most interesting about Mach’s place in the history of science, which is as a bridge to Einstein and General Relativity. Essentially Einstein read Mach and took a bunch of mind-ben
73.
by libraryofbabel 7mo ago
I think your comment really captures some of the reasons behind the differences between people’s reactions to Claude pretty well. I will add though, on 2 and 3, during most of the coding I do in my day job as a staff engineer, it’s pretty
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by libraryofbabel 7mo ago
> In my experience, tech employment is incredibly bimodal right now. Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever, but an "average" developer is going to have an extremely hard time finding a position. That sounds go
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by libraryofbabel 7mo ago
This is interesting stuff. I wonder if these sorts of tricks are already in use at the big labs. Incidentally, I would recommend trying implementing speculative decoding yourself if you really want to understand LLM inference internals (t
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by libraryofbabel 7mo ago
Oh, boy. The Shrike. That thing still haunts me in a way that no other monster or alien across all of Sci-fi or fantasy really does. It's something about the inscrutability of it, especially in the first novel (still my favorite) whe
77.
by libraryofbabel 7mo ago
I’d rather talk about the history of steam engines than AI today, so: let’s just say it sounds like at some time in the past you saw a clunky inefficient Newcomen steam engine pumping water out of a coal mine, and you hated it, and now you
78.
by libraryofbabel 7mo ago
Ex historian here, now engineer. I would gently suggest you’re underestimating the magnitude of some of the transformations wrought by the technologies that OP mentioned for the people that lived through them. Particularly for the steam eng
79.
by libraryofbabel 7mo ago
Obviously you don’t just say those words and leave it at that. Both those things can be explained in understandable terms. And even having a superficial sense of what they are gives people a better picture of what modern LLMs are all about
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by libraryofbabel 7mo ago
I have come to think “predict the next token” is not a useful way to explain how LLMs work to people unfamiliar with LLM training and internals. It’s technically correct, but at this point saying that and not talking about things like RLVR
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How Will OpenAI Compete?(ben-evans.com)
5 points by libraryofbabel 8mo ago|1 comments
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by libraryofbabel 8mo ago
How nice for you. But since you totally neglected to say anything about your use-case or schema or query patterns, it’s impossible to know what this even means. Some use cases can trivially be done without any explicit transactions and you’
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by libraryofbabel 8mo ago
I actually like this article a lot. I do a bit of teaching, and I imagined the ideal audience for this as a smart junior engineer who knows SQL and has encountered transactions but maybe doesn’t really understand them yet. I think introduci
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by libraryofbabel 8mo ago
Is that actually true, if the charges differed at the 12th decimal place only? That’s non-obvious to me.
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by libraryofbabel 8mo ago
There’s a name for that: the Anthropic principle. And it is deeply unsatisfying as an explanation. And does it even apply here? If the charge on the electron differed from the charge on the proton at just the 12th decimal place, would tha
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by libraryofbabel 8mo ago
Slightly tangential, but I discovered recently that the famous literary critic Harold Bloom was a huge fan of Ursula Le Guin and rated her one of the great canonical writers of the 20th century, in all of literature not just sci-fi. Also, t
87.
by libraryofbabel 8mo ago
From a blog post last month by the same author: > Today, I would say that about 90% of my code is authored by Claude Code. The rest of the time, I’m mostly touching up its work or doing routine tasks that it’s slow at, like refactoring o
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by libraryofbabel 8mo ago
So many people responding to you with snarky comments or questioning your programming ability. It makes me sad. You shared a personal take (in response to TFA which was also a personal take). There is so much hostility and pessimism directe
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by libraryofbabel 8mo ago
Oh sure. We agree on all you said. I wouldn’t call it cheap either. :) The best you can say is “high cost but positive ROI investment.” Although I don’t think that’s true beyond a certain point either, certainly not outside special cases li
90.
by libraryofbabel 8mo ago
I do not really agree with the below, but the logic is probably: 1) Engineering investment at companies generally pays off in multiples of what is spent on engineering time. Say you pay 10 engineers $200k / year each and the features t

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