bunderbunder

6 ms·

1.
by bunderbunder 5d ago
That's also a good point. When I'm using caveman (and especially cavekit), I don't have to spend quite so much energy on dealing with it building features I didn't ask for and don't want.
2.
by bunderbunder 5d ago
I'm not so sure that's a fair comparison. So much "bad" enterprise code evolved into that state over years or even decades of small changes. Meanwhile, last year I got to watch an LLM-authored codebase speedrun itself in
3.
by bunderbunder 5d ago
I am actually rather fond of caveman. I haven't evaluated it for token cost, in part because frankly I think that part of the pitch is a load of malarkey. Output that's shown to the user is such a small percentage of overall token
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by bunderbunder 6d ago
It's possible to step out of your area of expertise in a way that's confident but also humble. Arrogance is not necessary. The person who signs everyone's paychecks might be making it mandatory, but that's not quite the
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by bunderbunder 6d ago
I've experienced it in industry, too. I recently got out of data science in part because I got tired of working with people who, emboldened by their PhDs in some completely other field, liked to patiently but condescendingly mansplain
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by bunderbunder 8d ago
I think that quantitative researchers have known this for a while, too. My perennial experience as a machine learning practitioner working in industry is that the ML and statistics folks raise concerns about the models learning social biase
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by bunderbunder 14d ago
I disagree with the claim that "AI agents don't get lost." What I've observed instead is that they don't experience the sensation of feeling lost. Which is quite different. This summer I spent quite a while using a
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by bunderbunder 14d ago
More information on the specific remedies in the USDOJ announcement: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-wins-signi... Sounds like it's not nothing, but also not much.
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by bunderbunder 15d ago
I spent some time working with that approach of using LLMs to generate synthetic labeled data for use in training more specialized models. It mostly didn't work. The problem was that getting the LLM to generate training data that suffi
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by bunderbunder 15d ago
I almost wonder if it's even possible now that so many of us get our information through algorithmic feeds. I listened to one Zitron interview on YouTube and my home page was immediately crammed full of similarly foamy-mouthed AI criti
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by bunderbunder 15d ago
IANAL, but it seems like the wording in the public-facing version of the policy is a little muddy. As far as I'm aware, "tax exempt donation" not a thing that actually exists in US tax law. It seems to be a conflation of &quo
12.
by bunderbunder 15d ago
I don't think it over-claimed anything? Maybe over-simplified for certain purposes. But to expect a press release to be a complete accounting of the research it reports on is to misunderstand the purpose of press releases. A press rele
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by bunderbunder 16d ago
I've discovered, for my part, that wearing yellow glasses works even better than f.lux when I'm working in an environment where I can't control the ambient lighting.
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by bunderbunder 16d ago
And the most underappreciated kind of science. There have been estimates that up to 80% of published medical and psychology results arrive at incorrect conclusions due to methodological flaws, analysis flaws, and type I errors. And peer rev
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by bunderbunder 16d ago
From the paper's abstract (emphasis mine): "Wavelength influences multiple aspects of visual performance, yet its role in spatial resolution remains incompletely understood due to confounding factors such as luminance difference
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by bunderbunder 20d ago
I don’t love the “forced upon them” framing; if that’s really how people are thinking about it then maybe they should pause and reflect for a moment yhat it isn’t their money being spent. Amd the default isn’t always having the latest and g
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by bunderbunder 20d ago
My sense from talking to people who’ve lived in both countries is that there’s also a perception that there’s at least a semblance of fairness in China, which can make it relatively more palatable. Chinese acquaintances are rather horrified
18.
by bunderbunder 20d ago
The problem I'm seeing is that most of that additional output is just increasing pressure on the real bottlenecks such as design, QA, operations, support, etc. Which is why we're seeing this dual phenomenon of programmer productiv
19.
by bunderbunder 22d ago
There's a part of me that agrees. There's also a part of me that misses the earlier days of Hacker News when the subject matter was much more eclectic and seemingly every day I'd have a chance to learn about something complet
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by bunderbunder 23d ago
For starters, it's not just APIs. Like I pointed out with the C example, programming language syntax and semantics also evolve over time. But also, LLMs' use of RAG to keep track of API evolution is limited. You can see this if yo
21.
by bunderbunder 23d ago
But they don't really have that option. They're trapped in a Red Queen's race. The world keeps moving on, and so the models need to be retrained so that they can keep up with new information. Otherwise you'll get stuck w
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by bunderbunder 23d ago
I've been using the Caveman plugin and it helps quite a bit.
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by bunderbunder 1mo ago
I expect a lot of the social anxiety can be mitigated by arranging things so that students get a chance to know the examiners and build a rapport with them ahead of time. (E.g., if they’re an instructor then make sure they have office hours
24.
by bunderbunder 1mo ago
Thing is, we don’t have strong reason to believe the AI companies are just reinvesting profits. There’s a lot of credible analysis saying inference COGS also exceeds the prices they charge. In which case they’re just burning the candle at b
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by bunderbunder 1mo ago
Essence of Decision is a great book that explores this idea. It looks at different models for understanding how organizations make decisions, and arrives at broadly the same conclusion: a model that assumes people are particularly in cont
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by bunderbunder 1mo ago
The thing that really made the Enganced Games à debacle isn’t that the participants failed to beat top clean athletes. It’s that they failed to beat their own performance from when they were still clean. Meaning that they didn’t just fail t
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by bunderbunder 1mo ago
That said growing vocabulary is widely regarded as one of the most important steps towards being able to interact with the language in a more authentic way. My concern is that AI-generated translations and example text still tend to get the
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by bunderbunder 1mo ago
I think what we are seeing with all these AI detection tools is a whole lot of shooting the messenger. Technology made the problem of lazy students impossible to ignore, but the solution might be decidedly low-tech: have students spend some
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by bunderbunder 1mo ago
To go with the gym analogy, thus far it would seem that using AI to help study seems to be working out about as well as the Enhanced Games did. Before we get ahead of ourselves and hype up AI as a tool for making people smarter, let’s first
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by bunderbunder 1mo ago
I’ve seen a similar thing with globalization. Macro scale, it’s great. Much number go up. Zoom in, though, and it also impoverished my hometown and many others like it. A whole generation saw their job prospects gutted, and had no realistic

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