lsy

6 ms·

1.
by lsy 4mo ago
Yeah, claiming “product-market fit” on coding assistants for this multi-trillion dollar capital expenditure seems premature. Anthropic will post one and only one quarter of “operating profit” (aka losses after taxes and debt obligations) on
2.
by lsy 4mo ago
There's a very real possibility that AI proponents completely lose the next generation of adults. The output is not enjoyable to consume, the people who rely on it are not cool, and the effects of using it are unpleasant and hard to de
3.
by lsy 5mo ago
AI coding isn’t an abstraction, though. You can’t treat a prompt like source code because it will give you a different output every time you use it. An abstraction lets you offload cognitive capacity while retaining knowledge of “what you a
4.
by lsy 7mo ago
At what point do LLMs enable bad engineering practices, if instead of working to abstract or encapsulate toilsome programming tasks we point an expensive slot machine at them and generate a bunch of verbose code and carry on? I'm not s
5.
by lsy 7mo ago
It's easy to get this way with enough scrolling, try to focus on the things around you in real life. If you aren't reading LinkedIn or HN, how much do you actually hear about AI in day-to-day life? If someone at work directly asks
6.
by lsy 7mo ago
It’s notable that just the English “implementation” of FizzBuzz here is longer and more ambiguous than the naive Python implementation, never mind the boilerplate (which itself is also longer than the Python). The explosion of framework
7.
by lsy 7mo ago
LLM coding isn't a new level of abstraction. Abstractions are (semi-)reliable ways to manage complexity by creating building blocks that represent complex behavior, that are useful for reasoning about outcomes. Because model output can
8.
by lsy 8mo ago
I think the analogy to high level programming languages misunderstands the value of abstraction and notation. You can’t reason about the behavior of an English prompt because English is underspecified. The value of code is that it has a fai
9.
by lsy 10mo ago
It's disheartening that a potentially worthwhile discussion — should we invest engineering resources in LLMs as a normal technology rather than as a millenarian fantasy? — has been hijacked by a (at this writing) 177-comment discussion
10.
by lsy 11mo ago
Going to a popular restaurant that accepts app delivery orders (or a grocery store in a neighborhood where people prefer to pay for delivery) is an objectively bad experience. The kitchen or checkout line is backed up with delivery orders,
11.
by lsy 11mo ago
I feel like this needs an editor to have a chance of reaching almost anyone… there are ~100 section/chapter headings that seem to have been generated through some kind of psychedelic free association, and each section itself feels like
12.
by lsy 11mo ago
It's interesting to call this a pre-mortem as it seems mainly organized around thinking positively past the imperfections of the technology. It's like a pre-mortem for the housing crisis that focuses on the benefits of subprime mo
13.
by lsy 11mo ago
I think this leaves out what is probably the most likely future for this technology, having a similar destiny to most technologies as a tool . Both of these visions assume (I think incorrectly) a trend towards ubiquity, where either every
14.
by lsy 11mo ago
No doubt it's a profit margin game, but I wish the big e-reader companies (Kindle, Kobo) would take a foray into this form factor. The friction of navigating through an Android interface into an app is just enough to negate the conveni
15.
by lsy 11mo ago
I'm sure it's nearly an academic distinction, but: > Basically, for any given region, we find its highest point and assume that there is a perfectly placed sibling peak of the same height that is mutually visible. Shouldn'
16.
by lsy 1y ago
Impressive that this was done in 3 days at all, but to anyone who is familiar at all with System 7's appearance, the screenshot is almost comically "off" and gives away that this is not a straight port so much as some kind of
17.
by lsy 1y ago
Fixing "theoretical" nondeterminism for a totally closed individual input-output pair doesn't solve the two "practical" nondeterminism problems, where the exact same input gives different results given different pre
18.
by lsy 1y ago
A world model itself, in its particulars, isn't as important as the tacit understanding that the "world model" is necessarily incomplete and subordinate to the world itself, that there are sensory inputs from the world that w
19.
by lsy 1y ago
There are two additional aspects that are even more critical than the implementation details here: - Typical LLM usage involves the accretion of context tokens from previous conversation turns. The likelihood that you will type prompt A twi
20.
by lsy 1y ago
I think the wide variance in responses here is explainable by tool preference and the circumstance of what you want to work on. You might also have felt "behind" not knowing or wanting to use Dreamweaver, or React, or Ruby on Rail
21.
by lsy 1y ago
If you have a decent understanding of how LLMs work (you put in basically every piece of text you can find, get a statistical machine that models text really well, then use contractors to train it to model text in conversational form), then
22.
by lsy 1y ago
The example given for inverting an embedding back to text doesn't help the idea that this effect is reflecting some "shared statistical model of reality": What would be the plausible whalesong mapping of "Mage (foaled Ap
23.
by lsy 1y ago
I think two things can be true simultaneously: 1. LLMs are a new technology and it's hard to put the genie back in the bottle with that. It's difficult to imagine a future where they don't continue to exist in some form, with
24.
by lsy 1y ago
Typically debugging, e.g., a tricky race condition in an unfamiliar code base would require adding logging, refactoring library calls, inspecting existing logs, and even rewriting parts of your program to be more modular or understandable.
25.
by lsy 1y ago
Because you, as someone who is buying a $500k house with 20% down in 2025, are going to have much higher costs than your landlord, who bought it for $100k in 1995 and has already paid it off. Bake in the fact that many rented houses today w
26.
by lsy 1y ago
To make this more concrete: ImageNet enabled computer "vision" by providing images + labels, enabling the computer to take an image and spit out a label. LLM training sets enable text completion by providing text + completions, en
27.
by lsy 1y ago
It's honestly this kind of thing that makes it hard to take AI "research" seriously. Nobody seems to be starting with any scientific thought, instead we are just typing extremely corny sci-fi into the computer, saying things
28.
by lsy 1y ago
This seems simplistic, tech and infrastructure play a huge part here. A short and incomplete list of things that contributed: - Moore's law petering out, steering hardware advancements towards parallelism - Fast-enough internet creatin
29.
by lsy 1y ago
The new icon looks weird not just because it's a change, but because if you think of the face as being 3D and illuminated by a light source, the new icon doesn't scan as easily as the old one. You'd have to assume the face is
30.
by lsy 1y ago
On the one hand, I actually thought it was pretty refreshing to see a tech company keynote that wasn't wall-to-wall with just-so futuristic AI demos that will, if they ever arrive, inevitably be unreliable and finicky under real world

More ›