rerdavies

5 ms·

31.
by rerdavies 5mo ago
Yeah,don't use GPT for that. It really can't do basic arithmetic. Try Claude, which can.
32.
by rerdavies 5mo ago
I'm not mostly Claud-ing it. Perhaps I should. But in the difficult bits, it never ceases to amaze me what these tools are able to do. Yes, if it matures, it will go open source. Not immediately clear at this moment whether it's f
33.
by rerdavies 5mo ago
I'm not getting why "scope" gets any priority at all. Are filenames not attached to a commit for those exceedingly rare cases where you're looking for which files are thrashing?
34.
by rerdavies 5mo ago
Working on a Spice compiler to convert schematics for classic guitar pedals into real-time executable code. I provided a reference to a The Spice Manual 2nd ed. a page number and an equation number, and asked Claude to implement it (not rea
35.
by rerdavies 5mo ago
You are oversimplifying. They do produce one word per cycle. But they can also have context buffers carrying up to two million tokens, which is most definitely larger than your measly human short-term memory context buffers. You, of course,
36.
by rerdavies 5mo ago
I point of sorts. Assuming that is true (I don't think it is), the big question that urgently needs to be addressed is what happens when we DO give LLMs tools to interact with the real (or virtual) world. And people are doing that, rig
37.
by rerdavies 5mo ago
Millenia, in fact. The big difference, of course, being that we now have experimental philosophy machines (aka computers). So we can actually put some of these theories to the test, and recognize how utterly inadequate most of the work done
38.
by rerdavies 5mo ago
The false conclusion that's being drawn is "therefore LLMs could not be good models of consciousness" (consciousness being a cognitive capacity). Plus, I suppose a subtle implication that a good model of consciousness is not
39.
by rerdavies 5mo ago
The "some cognitive capacity" that's relevant to the current discussion is "consciousness".
40.
by rerdavies 5mo ago
That is actually a open problem with current models: whether they will act on self-interest or not. There seems to good evidence that they will. See: https://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment which
41.
by rerdavies 5mo ago
It does seem like a very click-baity title.
42.
by rerdavies 5mo ago
Not sure I follow the argument. Are you one of those people who have never read a book in their life?
43.
by rerdavies 5mo ago
Seems like a rather desperate argument for human exceptionalism to me. I'm not sure if you have noticed. The character of different AI models varies dramatically. And most of the models I use in my daily work have a sense of self (in a
44.
by rerdavies 5mo ago
With you mostly, but wondering how "suffering" got into the equation. Do humans lose consciousness if they aren't suffering? No. Just a reminder that the question is not whether they are the same as humans. Obviously they are
45.
by rerdavies 5mo ago
Nailed it. I suspect the OP is a waterfall guy (despite the token references to agile). All the references to documentation is a big clue. When I see "documentation" and "development" running in parallel, as if that&#x27
46.
by rerdavies 5mo ago
Had them already for a couple of years in Ottawa, before the pandemic. City council made them illegal. They are expensive as heck (six figures?). So I guess they lost a significant capital investment. No sympathy. (Actually they problem jus
47.
by rerdavies 6mo ago
I am feeling really uncomfortable sitting on a large React project. Whether to do constant npm upgrades to keep the high-priority security issues count at zero (for what seems like about 15 minutes), or whether to hang back a bit to avoid c
48.
by rerdavies 6mo ago
Not to disparage Ryan Grim at all. That's fabulous work. And grimly fascinating, because it means that Israel may have horrifying kompromat on active senior politicians. And the insights into the horrors of Israeli political sausage ge
49.
by rerdavies 6mo ago
To be honest, I don't think I've ever found Booker Prize Winners that satisfying, for exactly the same reason you put your finger on. Pulitzer's however...!
50.
by rerdavies 6mo ago
Fortunately, they chickened out when they realized that forcing Google to divest Chrome would result in Chrome being owned by Perplexity (an Indian AI company). Or perhaps somebody even worse, like Elon Musk.
51.
by rerdavies 6mo ago
I get it. Every social medium has mobs, even HN. There are still subjects that I would like to respond to on HN, but do not, because doing so will incur merciless downvoting by a vocal minority. The AI techno-luddite crowd is an example tha
52.
by rerdavies 6mo ago
Sure. But syntax sugar that allows you to write functions whose content isn't indented 300 columns to the right whose flow of control is much easier to reason about. <shrugs>
53.
by rerdavies 6mo ago
But we end up talking past each other if we're using different definitions of the word "colored".
54.
by rerdavies 6mo ago
Also very useful for applications that have heavily animated graphical user interfaces, where you don't want I/O to interfere with UI animations on the UI thread. (e.g. ALL android apps. Or any UI framework that has a message pump
55.
by rerdavies 6mo ago
Colored functions. (Just thought I'd add that, because despite the rhetorical question, it took awhile for me to come up with the answer).
56.
by rerdavies 6mo ago
Even my stone age Algorithmics course (50 years ago) covered cache-friendly algorithms. And one would hope that contemporary algorithmics courses at least touch on SIMD optimizations. And one would hope that professional software engineers
57.
by rerdavies 7mo ago
129.74 is not really close to a power of two. 31-tet scales have a better approximation of a 5th (and an impressively better approximation of a minor 7th). The obvious exception in the western system would be the blues scale, which arguably
58.
by rerdavies 7mo ago
Music is more like language. (This is profoundly true). There is very little that's mathematical about music; and even the bit that is, isn't really (since nobody actually uses just temperament). Digital sound production, however.
59.
by rerdavies 7mo ago
That's not really how security works. Either it's broken, or it's not. Security is only as good as the weakest link in the chain. Whether it's good enough or not... hard to say.
60.
by rerdavies 7mo ago
Bump this please. This should be the #1 comment.

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