ianbicking

5 ms·

1.
by ianbicking 24d ago
I looked at Khanmigo fairly early on. I tried it out and thought: this is ChatGPT with a system prompt. And not a good system prompt either. In addition to what felt like rote math it had some had some experiences, like you could "talk
2.
by ianbicking 1mo ago
Looking at the OpenAI/Hugging Face incident and the difference in what "persistent" models do, it seems reasonable. Like: is this a solvable problem? How much work does the model think is intended to solve this problem? Each
3.
by ianbicking 1mo ago
I used Oberon [1] in school, and it had a bunch of funky UI ideas. One I liked it if you clicked on the scrollbar then it would scroll that position to the top. Like if you click the exact middle of the scrollbar then it would scroll up exa
4.
by ianbicking 1mo ago
I remember in San José and maybe other Costa Rican cities with a street number system where even/odd were used for the cardinal directions. Calles (streets) run N/S, Avenidas (avenues) run E/W, and odd is east or north. So Ca
5.
by ianbicking 1mo ago
I genuinely expect to see some of this when agentic AI is added to customer support systems. That is, we'll see the AI manipulate the company's systems in order to satisfy the customer. People do this too (the customer support rep
6.
by ianbicking 1mo ago
Maintaining human understanding in the face of fast progress is a big unsolved problem. If you are worried about there being nothing left when LLMs tear their way through a topic then the presence of a big unsolved problem should be comfort
7.
by ianbicking 4mo ago
When I was a kid in the 80s I noticed a lot of hackers of that era that typed like that. I thought it was strange at the time, but not at all uncommon
8.
by ianbicking 4mo ago
I've been doing something similar to this in a personal claude code frontend, though not particularly "magical". I'm mostly using my system to make comments on long AI-generated documents (especially design documents). I
9.
by ianbicking 7mo ago
In a sense they do use their own language; they program in tokenized source, not ASCII source. And maybe that's just a form of syntactic sugar, like replacing >= with ≥ but x100. Or... maybe it's more than that? The tokenizatio
10.
by ianbicking 9mo ago
The knowledge machine question is fascinating ("Imagine you had access to a machine embodying all the collective knowledge of your ancestors. What would you ask it?") – it truly does not know about computers, has no concept of its
11.
by ianbicking 9mo ago
I haven't really kept up with what Midjourney has been doing the past year or two. While I liked the stylistic aspects of Midjourney, being able to use image examples to maintain stylistic consistency and character consistency is SO us
12.
by ianbicking 9mo ago
I've been working on a LLM fiction writing workflow and associated tools. It's built on agentic coding tools with lots of structure, guidance, prompting, and critique. Almost all of the flow is on the filesystem and using a custom
13.
by ianbicking 10mo ago
I've come around to feeling that if I'm going to make an experimental development tool, I need to make it in service of building something specific. Maybe something playful... if I'm building something "important" t
14.
by ianbicking 11mo ago
It does however work just fine if you ask it for grammar help or whatever, then apply those edits. And for pretty much the rest of the content too: if you have the AI generate feedback, ideas, edits, etc., and then apply them yourself to th
15.
by ianbicking 11mo ago
I think there might be a pattern across education with a strong ideology (Montessori, Waldorf, Classical education, etc) that they aren't very good at recognizing when the ideology is failing a kid. The relatively weak and mushy educat
16.
by ianbicking 11mo ago
I have wanted to do experiments with a receipt printer hooked up to a Raspberry Pi, with some simple controls... but every time I look up the cost of the printer I balk. It's probably not fair, but I guess in my head it feels like they
17.
by ianbicking 11mo ago
I think it can be a false comfort to think of LLMs being trained to the center of the bell curve. I think it's closer to true that there's no real "average" (just like there isn't an "average" human) becau
18.
by ianbicking 11mo ago
I remembered hearing a podcast about a startup robotics company doing the same thing; a little search and they actually have a comparison page between their product and HP's: https://www.dustyrobotics.com/compare/f
19.
by ianbicking 11mo ago
I think a big part of it is not so much that they aren't capable of being a dungeon master, but they are constitutionally unfit due to their agreeability. The biggest improvement there is to treat the game engine as the "user&quot
20.
by ianbicking 11mo ago
I think the player freedom and simulation elements of a text adventure are mostly an illusion. I don't think a typical text adventure has more degrees of freedom than a point-and-click adventure. Doing experiments with LLMs and text ad
21.
by ianbicking 11mo ago
Oh, I got confused at first, I think it's writing the story out in Chinese on purpose as a kind of hidden state...? Clever approach. I can't tell what the background color shifts represent, and they are a bit abrupt, but I like th
22.
by ianbicking 11mo ago
I did give it a try, but no luck; qb64 seems to only run the code by compiling it via C++, and that failed on my system. (And I don't have the determination to try to find out why.)
23.
by ianbicking 11mo ago
Anyone got it running on a Mac? It says to use DOSBox, but that doesn't work for me. (Sure would be nice if this could run on the web...)
24.
by ianbicking 11mo ago
Text adventures and AI-driven interactions are surprisingly different I've found... https://ianbicking.org/blog/2025/07/intra-llm-text-adventure – still not sure what the right fusion might be.
25.
by ianbicking 11mo ago
I'm doing some experiments in LLM (historical) fiction writing. I feel like we can get pretty good writing out of an LLM (especially Sonnet) with enough prompting, reasoning, and guided thinking. Still with a human as producer and guid
26.
by ianbicking 1y ago
Alan Kay described [1] what he considers the first object oriented system, made in the 60s by an unknown programmer. It was a tape-based storage system, where the "format" of the tap was a set of routines to read, write, etc. at a
27.
by ianbicking 1y ago
This looks like RAG...? That's fine, RAG is a very broad approach and there's lots to be done with it. But it's not distinct from RAG. Searching by embedding is just a way to construct queries, like ILIKE or tsvector. It work
28.
by ianbicking 1y ago
Re: RpcPromise, I'm pretty sure all logical operations will result in unexpected results. TypeScript isn't going to complain about using RpcPromise as a boolean. Maybe the best solution is just an eslint plugin. Like this plugin b
29.
by ianbicking 1y ago
Couple random thoughts: I'm trying to see if there's something specifically for streaming/generators. I don't think so? Of course you can use callbacks, but you have to implement your own sentinel to mark the end, and ot
30.
by ianbicking 1y ago
There were some responses about educational expectations, but I would love to hear how folks in these Asian countries specifically deal with cell phones, social media, and these general media/online distractions.

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