alecbz

17 ms·

1.
by alecbz 6d ago
> The overwhelming majority of bad driving is caused by alcohol and other drugs, drowsiness, and inattentive driving. > Sober, well-rested human beings who pay full attention to the road are surprisingly good drivers, to the point whe
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by alecbz 6d ago
> that's primarily a human concern that's unrelated to the final output. It's an LLM concern too. LLMs seem to do better with well-organized codebases, just like the humans they were trained on.
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by alecbz 7d ago
In the long-long-term, self-driving will get good enough and people will be relying on it so thoroughly that allowing people to drive on their own, with barely any practice, will probably be more risky than it's worth. In say, idk, 100
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by alecbz 22d ago
Cab tipping culture is totally different and I would imagine varies significantly locally. This is the study I was recalling: https://www.academia.edu/51293325/Restaurant_Tipping_and_Ser... Though in looking for that I
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by alecbz 23d ago
Normalize price discrimination Though actually I’d suspect a lot of that is just rising costs (rent)?
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by alecbz 23d ago
Knowing to flag down a waiter is probably a big part of the equation. In the US waiters will generally come on their own to take your order fairly quickly and so we’re less used to flagging them down. And in a lot of places in Europe waiter
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by alecbz 23d ago
At restaurants at least, most people I know just default tip 20% and only adjust up or down in pretty rare circumstances. Maybe it’s different in other parts of the US or for other generations, but I recall studies supporting that people ge
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by alecbz 24d ago
Software engineering has been getting more efficient for decades and over that time there’s been a massive increase in the number of software engineers. The Mythical Man-Month describes teams of ten engineers operating before the Internet.
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by alecbz 24d ago
> we won't even need programming languages > just do “natural language” to a programming language
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by alecbz 1mo ago
> Germany The HRE for several hundred years could probably seen as a proto-Germany.
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by alecbz 1mo ago
Interesting -- is there any term referring to the executive, legislative, and judicial functions collectively?
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by alecbz 1mo ago
> At least the countries in the EU should have separation of powers, and the judicial (the courts) are independent from the government In the US "government" generally refers to all three branches; is that not the case in Europ
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by alecbz 1mo ago
OOC what's your other income from?
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by alecbz 1mo ago
Honestly, either feels like an improvement over now. If LLMs actually get good enough to really automate the production of good software, it'll be disruptive for the industry and we'll all have to adjust a lot more than we already
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by alecbz 1mo ago
Things like bad management, disillusionment with the company's goals, worries about being automated out of a job, etc. can lead people on the floor to care less and put in less effort.
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by alecbz 1mo ago
There's centralized tooling for the PR descriptions, but I have some local flows where I try to provide more careful prompting and examples to get it to write better. It definitely helps but it's still not great and I'm often
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by alecbz 1mo ago
This has unfortunately not been my experience at all. Often LLMs miss or get wrong subtle details when I don't do the pre-work to organize my thoughts well ahead of time (at which point it's unclear how much value they're pro
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by alecbz 1mo ago
The PR descriptions are pretty universally disliked. We have centralized tooling that manages the prompts for that, I’m sure they’ve tried tuning it but maybe there’s more they could do. Though I have some local workflows where I try to t
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by alecbz 1mo ago
I mean, the “meta” right now is trying to automate as much of the software engineering flow as possible, including writing PR descriptions. They’re shooting for LLMs being able to one-shot PRs or need minimal oversight. But yeah, in practic
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by alecbz 1mo ago
LLM-generated (or at least LLM-assisted), but a human's still the one submitting the PR for review.
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by alecbz 1mo ago
We have LLMs try to generate descriptions of PRs for us and they're pretty universally disliked. They're always overly-complex descriptions of the mechanical changes and have no sense of motivation. Also, a huge reason to understa
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by alecbz 1mo ago
> understands people and knows what people need > does not understand the concept of [incredibly common psychological problem]
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by alecbz 5mo ago
I think if you just look at what people like e.g. Sam Altman are doing it's clear that they don't believe everything that they're saying regarding AI safety. > nearly 100% of code would be written with AI in 2026 I feel li
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by alecbz 5mo ago
There's no need to tack on "because the wiki is open". That's still just part of a solution seeping into the statement of the problem.
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by alecbz 5mo ago
I don't think this means "most concerns aren't valid", it's more "people aren't always good at vocalizing their underlying concerns, and instead treat a proposed solution as the concern".
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by alecbz 5mo ago
Those sound like proposed solutions, not the underlying concerns. Motivating concerns here might be things like "our wiki will be full of inaccurate info", "people will unknowingly install spyware".
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by alecbz 5mo ago
I don't know that you can establish objectively if someone is a good writer. He's an acclaimed, award-winning writer, sure.
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by alecbz 5mo ago
Yeah I think the lesson is that specific suggestions for what to do aren't as helpful as just hearing how someone else experienced your work, and then drawing your own conclusions about how to fix that. Bug reports should describe the
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by alecbz 6mo ago
How can you tell the difference?
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by alecbz 6mo ago
I don't think parliamentary systems help the legislature remain effective, since they're still elected in roughly the same way, no? But yeah, it prevents an ineffective legislature from leading to strong-men, which does seem nice.

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