libraryofbabel

10 ms·

91.
by libraryofbabel 8mo ago
It’s a cute aphorism, and useful sometimes, but when you look closely or from different angles hedgehogs often have foxy attributes, or vice versa. Some moments in a person’s life they look more like a fox, other times like a hedgehog. Perh
92.
by libraryofbabel 8mo ago
Thanks for elaborating. So what is the empirically-testable assertion behind this… that an LLM cannot create a (sufficiently complex) system without examples of the source code of similar systems in its training set? That seems empirically
93.
by libraryofbabel 8mo ago
I wonder too. It might be that progress on the underlying models is going to plateau, or it might be that we haven't yet reached what in retrospect will be the biggest inflection point. Technological developments can seem to make sense
94.
by libraryofbabel 8mo ago
I mostly mentioned Claude Code because it's what Mitchell first tried according to his post, and it's what I personally use. From what I hear Codex is pretty comparable; it has a lot of fans. There are definitely some differences
95.
by libraryofbabel 8mo ago
This is such a lovely balanced thoughtful refreshingly hype-free post to read. 2025 really was the year when things shifted and many first-rate developers (often previously AI skeptics, as Mitchell was) found the tools had actually got good
96.
by libraryofbabel 8mo ago
Nobody disputes that the LLM was drawing on knowledge in its training data. Obviously it was! But you'll need to be a bit more specific with your critique, because there is a whole spectrum of interpretations, from "it just decomp
97.
by libraryofbabel 8mo ago
Umm, Sonnet 4.5 has a 1m context window option if you are using it through the api, and it works pretty well. I tend not to reach for it much these days because I prefer Opus 4.5 so much that I don't mind the added pain of clearing con
98.
by libraryofbabel 8mo ago
Some of that is true, sure, but nobody who claims LLMs can code and reason about problems is claiming that they operate like humans. Can you give concrete examples of actual specific coding tasks that LLMs can’t do and never will be able
99.
by libraryofbabel 8mo ago
I mean, yes and . Companies may do things for broadly marketing reasons, but that can have positive consequences for users and companies can make committed decisions that don't just optimize for short term benefits like revenue or s
100.
by libraryofbabel 8mo ago
Similar point applies to being able to use a sextant for celestial navigation in bluewater sailing. GPS is great, until you lose power or your equipment malfunctions. Of course, you can have double or triple redundancy to make such cases va
101.
by libraryofbabel 8mo ago
This has been a problem for us too. Sometimes they reach for skills, sometimes they don’t and just try to do the thing on their own. It’s annoying. I think this is (mostly) a solvable problem. The current generation of SotA models wasn’t RL
102.
by libraryofbabel 8mo ago
Yeah. At this point, at the start of 2026, people that are taking these sorts of positions with this sort of tone tend to have their identity wrapped up in wanting AI to fail or go away. That’s not conducive to a reasoned discussion. Ther
103.
by libraryofbabel 8mo ago
There is so much confusion on this topic. Please don't spread more of it; the answers are just a quick google away. To spell it out: 1) AI companies make money on the tokens they sell through their APIs. At my company we run Claude Cod
104.
by libraryofbabel 8mo ago
I agree with you that everything is changing and that we don’t know what’s coming, but I think you really have to stretch things to imagine that it’s a likely scenario that AI-assisted coding will “dry up and blow away.” You’ll need to elab
105.
by libraryofbabel 8mo ago
Not OP, but I would imagine (or hope ) that this attitude is far less common amongst peer CS educators. It is so clear that AI tools will be (and are already) a big part of future jobs for CS majors now, both in industry and academia. The
106.
by libraryofbabel 8mo ago
This point about "some people already said six months ago that it was better than it was six months ago" is regularly trotted out in threads like this like it's some sort of trump card that proves AI is just hype. It does
107.
by libraryofbabel 8mo ago
There is a gem of a sci.math thread where Archimedes Plutonium claims to have proved the Riemann Hypothesis and Terrance Tao (before he was quite as famous, but still!) replies to him pointing out his errors. Also TIL Archimedes Plutonium w
108.
by libraryofbabel 8mo ago
> Having been born in Königsberg in 1724, he never left the small German city, dying there in 1804 aged 79 never having once gone further than the city’s limits. Totally false! Slander! He once went as far as the village of Jarnołtowo, a
109.
by libraryofbabel 8mo ago
You’re right to call out consumer use is what’s eating all the tokens. I suppose what was behind my way of putting it is: I haven’t seen much in the way of truly transformative products with LLMs in the consumer space. Sure, there’s a few p
110.
by libraryofbabel 8mo ago
All of these things can be simultaneously true (and I would say, are true): 1) We are in a huge investment bubble right now and it's going to burst. 2) LLMs are extremely useful right now for certain niche tasks, especially softwar
111.
by libraryofbabel 9mo ago
In fact it peaked in size in 1920. But you’re broadly correct about the sense of decline post-WWI and the sense that America would be the dominant 20th-century power.
112.
by libraryofbabel 9mo ago
It’s funny, from his books I always imagined he spent years up there in the Yukon. But it turns out he trekked in (by far the hardest experience of the Yukon Gold Rush rush was just getting there with the mandated 1 year of food and all
113.
by libraryofbabel 9mo ago
Exactly. As distributed systems legend Leslie Lamport puts it: “Writing is nature’s way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is.” (He added: “Mathematics is nature’s way of letting you know how sloppy your writing is.”) I still have
114.
by libraryofbabel 9mo ago
I agree with this. It is an extremely powerful tool when used judiciously. I have always learned and sharpened my ideas best through critical dialog with others. (After two and a half thousand years it may be that we still don't have a
115.
by libraryofbabel 9mo ago
Devin? Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time...a lonnng time. Seriously, in this age of Claude Code and Codex, does anyone use Devin, or even know someone who does? Do they have any users at all? Ironically, their prod
116.
by libraryofbabel 9mo ago
This rings true and reminds me of the classic blog post “Reality Has A Surprising Amount Of Detail”[0] that occasionally gets reposted here. Going back and forth on the detail in requirements and mapping it to the details of technical imple
117.
by libraryofbabel 9mo ago
I was also curious about this quote, and it sounded to me too like Donne (or Pascal or Robert Boyle, a bit). But Gemini 3.0 knew what it was, and it is from Omar Khayyám like the sibling commenter said, but from the little-known E. H. Whinf
118.
by libraryofbabel 9mo ago
Question for the well-informed people reading this thread: do SoTA models like Opus, Gemini and friends actually need output schema enforcement still, or has all the the RLVR training they do on generating code and json etc. made schema err
119.
by libraryofbabel 9mo ago
Then what sort of math problem would be a milestone for you where an AI was doing something novel? Or are you just saying that solving novel problems involves remixing ideas? Well, that's true for human problem solving too.
120.
by libraryofbabel 9mo ago
2026 should be interesting. This stuff is not magic, and progress is always going to be gradual with solutions to less interesting or "easier" problems first, but I think we're going to see more milestones like this with AI a

More ›