skydhash

4 ms·

1.
by skydhash 6d ago
But code is the mean to get an idea across to someone. It’s the difference between “I think this can work” and “I’ve worked on this and it does work”. I’m part of the OpenBSD mailing list and it quite nice someone sharing a diff for an idea
2.
by skydhash 7d ago
The issue is with the people sending code for reviews, not people reading the slop commit message.
3.
by skydhash 7d ago
> as someone coming from software I find learning electronics pretty hard as it requires a completely different mental model and way to approach systems I went from electronics to software and one thing that has puzzled me is how much pe
4.
by skydhash 7d ago
> Open source programs could be more like motivated explanations of computation. It is already that. Every time a method/function is created, a structure is defined, a variable is added, a file is created or renamed,… It’s all for t
5.
by skydhash 7d ago
We have good engineers that gave us curl, ffmpeg, the 4.4BSD, tmux, vim and emacs, x11,… To this day, no one can show any particular important software that comes from LLM assistance at scale. It’s all slop.
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by skydhash 7d ago
The thing is a text generator. It generates text. You can couple that with any code that gives rhe ikkusion of a normal decision workflow, but it does not make any decision more than a software like latex. According to your definition, the
7.
by skydhash 7d ago
> I’m not saying gradient descent was empirically discovered, I’m saying that its use in machine learning is itself a form of empiricism. A repeated observe/adjust-based-on-data cycle The data is the input, the output is to generall
8.
by skydhash 7d ago
> In contrast, we do not understand LLMs in the same way From my point of view, (not a ML researcher), it’s due to the magic of numbers. The same thing happens with computer vision and neural networks. There’s a bunch of magic weights th
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by skydhash 7d ago
> The best moments of these is even when they are confusing on purpose, because imprecise language is a gateway to deeper levels of meaning through fourth-wall breaks, metaphor, analogy, and humor. I don't agree. Because those metap
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by skydhash 7d ago
I was reading the manual of a car head unit, and it was better quality than 99% of AI flavored content.
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by skydhash 7d ago
If you use a loaded dice, you can be pretty confident about where it will lands. It may not be 100% accurate, but can be quite close to certain. Without training the weight are pure noises. After training, it leans towards coherent sentence
12.
by skydhash 8d ago
Sometimes the end result is good, but the means aren’t. With the “give me something” approach of most LLM usage, often you won’t realize you have bad code full of hidden bugs. Often, the steps are “it works on my machine” follows by an erro
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by skydhash 8d ago
> but they probably did just that because I never heard a human being say "load-bearing" before but now it's all over the place I have but it was a house construction worker explaining its practice on youtube.
14.
by skydhash 9d ago
> without safety protocols That is always the key. There’s no need for AI in that mix. Imagine a gun without any safety, a blade with no handle, a car with no brakes, a fan with no guard, no fuse for an electrical installation,… You eval
15.
by skydhash 10d ago
My coding by hand is always exploratory. Either I’m getting familiar with a new library/platform or I’m sizing up the architecture of the software. Then it’s a heavy dose of copy/pasting, snippets, and emacs-fu. What I spend most
16.
by skydhash 10d ago
> find myself trusting the LLM better than I ever trusted a development team to deliver accurate work That’s the main issue. You’re talking about the development side guarante, while the most important is the user side guarantee. There’s
17.
by skydhash 10d ago
I’m sure that in every case where there such non deterministic abstraction, it’s been always statistically or with a lot of hand waving. So with a heavy dose of expected errors. Pro LLM users don’t want to talk about the error margins of wh
18.
by skydhash 10d ago
Building software for me has always been about creatin a set of concepts (data structures, basic behaviors) out of the primitives of the platform (language, libraries,…) and then coordinate their behavior according to the requirements. Base
19.
by skydhash 10d ago
That’s the power of abstraction when there’s a good API around something to hide the internal that doesn’t matter much at an higher level. You only need ‘open’ and ‘read’ instead of dealing with disk access and file system trasversal. But t
20.
by skydhash 10d ago
> the food you buy at the store or restaurant is heavily regulated, provenance established, safety checks in place. When there’s a widespread issue, we have systems in place for recalls I live in a country where those things are not regu
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by skydhash 10d ago
> The overall point is that you learn through observation and lots of trial and error That’s the most inefficient way and people usually avoid doing that. Instead they find someone that knows how to do the thing and ask him to be a teach
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by skydhash 10d ago
> The only way you get better at chess is by playing a lot of games and learning from mistakes How can you play without being aware of the rules and how can you learn from your mistakes without knowing they are mistakes? That’s what I sa
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by skydhash 10d ago
> There are probably fewer fields where you can verify rewards than one might hope. 2 tasks I've done today that I believe robots are nowhere near being able to do: Cleaning my wardrobe and draining bad fuel out of my generator. As
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by skydhash 10d ago
Pretty much this. Feed it a book or two on chess, and you should have a decent (or good) player. That's the generic intelligence people have. The aims is not to be supremely talented at something, but being able to read a manual and fi
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by skydhash 11d ago
It’s called incremental search and it’s useful, but only when there’s some debouncing involved and the search results is presented at once or the items are sorted by the order they are found.
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by skydhash 13d ago
It would be a skill issue if someone would show they’re able to use it to produce good software while showcasing that it’s due to their mastery. Till this day, I don’t think there’s any such demonstration. Any defects of the technology is a
27.
by skydhash 13d ago
> "ooh it would be cool if" had to answer to "yeah but it'll take too long". Now, it's more like, "how important is that really?" to stupid ideas that never would have seen the light of day before.
28.
by skydhash 13d ago
> yes, being able to bang out leetcode hard from head on an interview on paper matters so much... oh wait. it does not. That's about reciting standard data structures like stack and queues. I think parent is talking more about the d
29.
by skydhash 13d ago
That reminds me of something on my last job. Before AI, we had not so good communication, but if we had a question, the person on the other end will try to give you a passable answer. After AI, everyone seems to be a proxy for the LLM tools
30.
by skydhash 13d ago
> For people without sufficient clarity I imagine it amplifies that lack of clarity, which is where it is factually unproductive while it still ‘seem’ to be productive Convenient way of saying "you're holding it wrong".

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