yosefk

5 ms·

31.
by yosefk 9mo ago
You could say the same things about assemblers, compilers, garbage collection, higher level languages etc. In practice the effect has always been an increase in the height of a mountain of software that can be made before development grinds
32.
What the FTC got wrong in the Google antitrust investigation(danluu.com)
3 points by yosefk 10mo ago|0 comments
33.
by yosefk 10mo ago
Rust HashSets are HashMaps with an empty type as the value type, but the compiler actually optimizes away the storage for the keys based on the type being empty. Go doesn't bother to either define a set type like most languages do, or
34.
by yosefk 10mo ago
The Chinese are ahead at too many things at this point to think they're only good at copying
35.
by yosefk 10mo ago
"Why, then, are the reconstructions so ugly? One factor may be that the specialists who execute them lack the skill of classical artists, who had many years of training in a great tradition." Has he ever met people doing this stuf
36.
by yosefk 11mo ago
I am very impressed with the kind of things people pull out of Claude's жопа but can't see such opportunities in my own work. Is success mostly the result of it being able to test its output reliably, and of how easy it is to set
37.
by yosefk 11mo ago
"AI systems exist to reinforce and strengthen existing structures of power and violence." I still can barely believe a human being could write this, though we have all read this sort of sentence countless times. Which "struct
38.
by yosefk 11mo ago
"Many—especially historically minded—developers complain that modern C++ compilers take longer to compile. But this criticism is short‑sighted. You cannot compare C++ compile times with compilation in other languages, because the compi
39.
by yosefk 1y ago
extern "C" functions + ctypes are a personal favorite - it's the least "type-rich" approach by far, and I prefer poverty to this sort of riches
40.
by yosefk 1y ago
The real problem is that the browser won't let you control the width of a tab without resizing the browser window, which is a bit fiddly, exposes stuff behind the window, and makes you resize the window again and again when moving betw
41.
by yosefk 1y ago
What's the chemistry of life without water? Do you refer to the promising Russian studies of life sustained by alcohol?
42.
by yosefk 1y ago
The examples are from the latest versions of ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Google AI Overview. I did not bother to list the full conversations because (A) LLMs are very verbose and (B) nothing ever reproduces, so in any case any failure is &qu
43.
by yosefk 1y ago
The post or rather the part you refer to is based on a simple experiment which I encourage you to repeat. (It is way likelier to reproduce in the short to medium run than the others.) From your link: "...The first was gpt-3.5-turbo-ins
44.
by yosefk 1y ago
Correct - as long as the tools the LLM uses are non-ML-based algorithms existing today, and it operates on a large code base with no programmers in the loop, I would be wrong. If the LLM uses a chess engine, then it does nothing on top of t
45.
by yosefk 1y ago
If you're right, there will soon be a flood of software teams with no programmers on them - either across all domains, or in some domains where this works well. We shall see. Indeed I have no experience with Claude Code, but I use Clau
46.
by yosefk 1y ago
Cursor fails miserably for me even just trying to replace function calls with method calls consistently, like I said in the post. This I would hope is fixable. By dealing autonomously I mean "you don't need a programmer - a PM tal
47.
by yosefk 1y ago
thank you for your kind words!
48.
by yosefk 1y ago
A "world model" depends on the context which defines which world the problem is in. For chess, which moves are legal and needing to know where the pieces are to make legal moves are parts of the world model. For alpha blending, it
49.
by yosefk 1y ago
I'm not saying that LLMs can't learn about the world - I even mention how they obviously do it, even at the learned embeddings level. I'm saying that they're not compelled by their training objective to learn about the w
50.
by yosefk 1y ago
ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and Google AI Overviews, whatever powers the latter, were all used in one or more of these examples, in various configurations. I think they can perform differently, and I often try more than one when the 1st try doesn
51.
by yosefk 1y ago
Actually I forgive them those issues that stem from tokenization. I used to make fun at them for listing datum as a noun whose plural form ends with an i, but once I learned about how tokenization works, I no longer do it - it feels like mo
52.
by yosefk 1y ago
Your being blunt is actually very kind, if you're describing what I'm doing as "being smart and reasoning from first principles"; and I agree that I am not saying something very novel, at most it's slightly contra
53.
by yosefk 1y ago
This is interesting. The "professional level" rating of <1800 isn't, but still. However: "A significant Elo rating jump occurs when the model’s Legal Move accuracy reaches 99.8%. This increase is due to the reduction
54.
by yosefk 1y ago
But why are 32b floats relevant? JS, the language famously representing ints as floats, uses 64b floats. Who puts ints into 32b floats and cares about precision loss?
55.
by yosefk 1y ago
Style has been copied since time immemorial and was never copyrightable. I think it's better to be the studio everyone copies in their AI slop than the studio nobody copies in terms of publicity, sales and cultural impact. And the mass
56.
by yosefk 2y ago
I updated the post with the point on visibility; in my tests inspired by https://lobste.rs/s/b5dnjh/0_0_0_c_thread_local_storage_perf... I see that clang improves codegen thanks to hidden visibility but g++ does n
57.
by yosefk 2y ago
Actually sounds like it isn't mandated by the standard after all; it's mandated for block thread_locals but not for thread_locals in the global scope: 3.7.2/2 [basic.stc.thread]: A variable with thread storage duration shall
58.
by yosefk 2y ago
In what sense should reading the TID be cheap? You would need either a syscall (not cheap) or thread-local storage (the subject of TFA.) Avoiding the use of TLS by reading the TID can't really work
59.
by yosefk 2y ago
> A significant portion of that is rdtsc time, right? Like 50-80%. Writing a few bytes to a ringbuffer prefetched in local cache is very very cheap but rdtsc takes ~4-8 nanos. Exactly right, though it seems totally insane to me coming fr
60.
by yosefk 2y ago
> the per-function-call overhead is due to dynamic initialization on first use requirement Thanks - I didn’t realize this was mandated by the standard as opposed to “permitted” as one possibility (similarly to how eg a constructor of a g

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