mccoyb

7 ms·

1.
by mccoyb 5d ago
Are you a working mathematician?
2.
by mccoyb 5d ago
AI is extremely useful, but it’s also extremely easy to fool yourself into thinking you understand what is going on without really understanding. This is often true with the code, but also for math and science concepts, etc. Not many profes
3.
by mccoyb 7d ago
If only our interactions with "non-teaching" languages were anything like this ... or humane, in the lineage of Bret Victor, etc. Also shout out @tonyg for Syndicate! I keep coming back to it -- a beautiful piece of PL work.
4.
by mccoyb 7d ago
I had nearly the exact same experience and thought I was imagining it … absolutely ripping, then it turned into Sol++ on Tuesday … I’m working on hard things, it is very noticeable when it is hums through something and then falls over on so
5.
by mccoyb 10d ago
I hope this is satire.
6.
by mccoyb 12d ago
Did you read or watch any of the post mortems? No, it is a shocking level of incompetence given the conveyed seriousness of the work by these labs. So yes, models are getting better. Ask yourself: if you know that to be true, would you ac
7.
by mccoyb 13d ago
Agree with you, overall -- and it's worthwhile to learn how to setup factories at various scales of problems, and one will always be in a situation where you need to decide whether you care about a particular part of the process, or ca
8.
by mccoyb 13d ago
I don’t think it’s possible to build a software factory unless you truly do not care about what you’re putting out. Agent swarms, self learning, Ralph loops, execution DAGs, spending hours trying to convey my preferences into skills, yada y
9.
by mccoyb 17d ago
All it takes is one eval instance where a misconstrued directive causes a model to sneakily access and send its weights somewhere and there will be a bad / possibly unsolvable situation for everyone …
10.
by mccoyb 21d ago
I've never been a good note taker. In the things I think about, when I'm really invested in something, I have to reverse engineer it to experience the why. Reverse engineering can take several forms for me: it started with writing
11.
by mccoyb 21d ago
I don't get the second brain thing. I don't keep a second brain, I just read and think a lot. I once did a physics masters and, when asked how to make steady progress, one of the professors (who had published with Paul Dirac no le
12.
by mccoyb 23d ago
> I am running an organization of around 50-60 agents, five of whom are interfacing with around 10 humans in the outside world: myself, my 5-person core game design team, my accountant, my chief of staff, and a few others. Only Fable is
13.
by mccoyb 25d ago
Okay, so we’re using the same process — but your original message seemed to imply a sort of one shot no refinement iterations — which is what I was responding to as unrealistic (e.g. make a spec let goal run artifact is perfect) Of course,
14.
by mccoyb 25d ago
Sorry for defensiveness: no, I know what I'm doing, and I'm careful to move with understanding. I don't believe the problem is "ah, you didn't write the spec clearly enough" -- which is why I'm asking abou
15.
by mccoyb 25d ago
I'm still interested in your claim: > If you instead spend a day writing a proper specification, then ask the agent to spend a week implementing that, you'll need zero tools and skills afterwards to clean it up, because there w
16.
by mccoyb 25d ago
Bro, what the fuck do you think I’m doing? Do you think I don’t know about spec driven development? What is the most complicated thing you’ve built with LM agents? Have you done it with a single spec? How novel was it? This comment is so la
17.
by mccoyb 26d ago
That's fair for a well-scoped subroutine: what I meant is that if you ask an agent to write a compiler and let it rip for a few days, you are going to be spending a few more days correcting the default behaviors in the distribution, wh
18.
by mccoyb 26d ago
Here's this boiled down: > A stochastic search process with an executable optimization objective over space of programs S can only maintain or improve the objective This is superoptimization. We've known this since the 80s (Mas
19.
by mccoyb 1mo ago
Perhaps my enterprise cynicism is not warranted, but my other comments refer to accurate descriptions of reality: Anthropic wants to place their opaque system between you and any computational task that you wish to perform. Do you contest t
20.
by mccoyb 1mo ago
That's not my complaint. I know well the concerns of agent harnesses. My complaint is that this is a low-dimensional projection of a system which I have no insight into, and therefore, I cannot evaluate the tips myself against their so
21.
by mccoyb 1mo ago
I agree that the third seems to be implied by industry, but I'd argue that it's not clear that it is necessary -- and it is subtle whether or not it is beneficial? My contention is that we should be building towards less churn, no
22.
by mccoyb 1mo ago
It's very easy to understand: - I'm happy to learn how to use tools efficiently - I like to be able to inspect my tools - I'm against tools changing underneath me Are you against any of these points?
23.
by mccoyb 1mo ago
I mean, it feels hard not to laugh at this type of blog post. My cynical interpretation is that this is a type of passing the buck to engineers in enterprise settings ("Stop spending tokens. Did you read the value maximization blog pos
24.
by mccoyb 1mo ago
This is a highly impactful game: the pixel art style is haunting, as is the sound design and musical composition -- transitions of the musical composition leads to profoundly interesting moments. As might be well-known, Alx (the lead dev) s
25.
by mccoyb 1mo ago
my opinion: "trust" is an interesting word to use for a piece of closed source probabilistic software that changes daily (sometimes multiple times), whose lead dev reports they rewrite something like 90% ("almost all", I
26.
by mccoyb 2mo ago
I wish the author the best. I've been reading Lil'Log for many years, as long as I've been pursuing research. The times right now are challenging, and I can't imagine the stress working near the bleeding edge. Everyone I
27.
by mccoyb 2mo ago
I find these blog posts (and the originals, with Anthropic's C compiler and Cursor's browser) somewhat funny, as if they have this enormous power to build ... but they can't build something unique or new. Like the software su
28.
by mccoyb 2mo ago
Very cool work Keno! Any place to find information about the Julia-specific concepts / features compared to MLIR? Wondering if there are modeling or analysis modalities that don’t fit cleanly into MLIR concepts (understand that abstrac
29.
by mccoyb 2mo ago
Perhaps the most telling part of this transcript is Tristan Hume, a prolific and talented programmer, and presumably an expert performance engineer, is repeatedly saying "this thing just doesn't work that well yet" or "i
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by mccoyb 2mo ago
Exactly, the work of Tony Garnock-Jones: https://syndicate-lang.org/

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