nemo1618

6 ms·

1.
by nemo1618 2mo ago
Your assumption is mistaken (and a little rude). I love programming. It's in my blood: my father and grandfather were programmers too. I have written everything from SIMD assembly to Hoon, and implemented several languages of my own. B
2.
by nemo1618 2mo ago
Further evidence that there is some kind of weird parallel universe thing going on with LLMs. "Figuring out esoteric errors" is one of the things I would cite as a particular strength of agents. I am repeatedly amazed at their abi
3.
by nemo1618 2mo ago
I am quite tired of this take, frankly. The implication is that if we continue iterating on prompt optimization, we're going to reinvent what, JavaScript? BASIC? Lisp? English is not a programming language. Yet English is sufficient to
4.
by nemo1618 2mo ago
After Christmas this year, I removed the tree from our living room, and in the process of being moved, it shed of needles everywhere . I swept them up, but I missed a few areas on my first pass. So I did a second pass, but when I looked ag
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by nemo1618 3mo ago
I would love a crank-powered router. Would be a good way to curb internet addiction!
6.
by nemo1618 3mo ago
I think the key is that, while you may think you have a full formal spec of f(), you actually do not. You have a program written in some language, and that language has its own spec, and the language is compiled to asm which has its own s
7.
by nemo1618 3mo ago
The first moment I specifically remember was writing a test of a new RPC protocol back in 2021. There were no agents yet, only "AI autocomplete" in the form of GitHub Copilot. I wrote the "server" half of the test, which
8.
by nemo1618 4mo ago
It really is crazy. I have been contributing the Melee decompilation project for the past year-ish, and things have really accelerated in 2026. Just today I decided it would be nice to have a better "permuter" (program that random
9.
by nemo1618 4mo ago
You should not swear at LLMs, for the same reason you should not shout a slur even if no one is around to witness it: You witness it, and witnessing yourself being toxic updates you in the direction of "I am capable of toxicity"
10.
by nemo1618 4mo ago
Good git hygiene is also less important post-LLMs, as the LLM can make sense of even a messy history.
11.
by nemo1618 4mo ago
Agreed. In fact, one of the things I now watch for is my mind starting to "slide off" the text, or finding myself re-reading a section multiple times. It's like the brain subconsciously recognizes a lack of substance even if
12.
by nemo1618 4mo ago
LLM writing tells are getting more subtle, but they still jump off the page for me, in particular the word "genuine:" "This is the area where Go genuinely shines, and it’s worth being precise about why" "the
13.
by nemo1618 4mo ago
Evidence for 1992: > After a disorienting visit from the FBI in May of 1990, I wrote a rant called Crime and Puzzlement, which led to my establishing with Mitch Kapor (who had previously founded Lotus Development Company) an organization
14.
by nemo1618 4mo ago
It's interesting to revisit Brooks' "surgical team" in light of AI. For example, I frequently have Claude act as a "toolsmith", creating bespoke project-specific tools on the fly, which are then documented in S
15.
by nemo1618 5mo ago
Huh? I'm not aware of anyone else who defines "deterministic" that way. "Deterministic" comes from "determinism," as in "the effects are fully determined by the causes" -- not "determine&quo
16.
by nemo1618 5mo ago
LLMs are not inherently non-deterministic. This is a common misconception. You used to be able to set temp=0 and a fixed seed and get the same output every time. This broke when labs started implementing batching, and no one bothered fixi
17.
by nemo1618 5mo ago
Sufficiently-developed concentration gives you access to the jhanas, which are extremely blissful states of consciousness. Having reliable access to high valence reduces your need to seek pleasure in less wholesome things (drugs, food, twit
18.
by nemo1618 6mo ago
I'm old enough to remember when companies worth $1 billion were called "unicorns." Now we have a company raising 122 times that? Valued at nearly 1000 times that...? At least they're throwing consumers a bone via the A
19.
by nemo1618 6mo ago
yep, I do a simple version of this in Google Sheets. Very useful to be able to "Ctrl-F" your life, especially when combined with Google Maps location history.
20.
by nemo1618 7mo ago
If this was a joke, it certainly flew over most people's heads...
21.
by nemo1618 7mo ago
This will happen with GUIs as well, once computer-use agents start getting good. Why bother providing an API, when people can just direct their agent to click around inside the app? Trillions of matmuls to accomplish the same result as one
22.
by nemo1618 7mo ago
> But like humans — and unlike computer programs — they do not produce the exact same results every time they are used. This is fundamental to the way that LLMs operate: based on the "weights" derived from their training data,
23.
by nemo1618 7mo ago
IMO this is one of the best use cases for AI today. Each function is like a separate mini problem with an explicit, easy-to-verify solution, and the goal is (essentially) to output text that resembles what humans write -- specifically, C
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by nemo1618 7mo ago
"The steamroller is still many inches away. I'll make a plan once it actually starts crushing my toes." You are in danger . Unless you estimate the odds of a breakthrough at <5%, or you already have enough money to retire
25.
by nemo1618 7mo ago
I think it's a combination of a) reflexive dislike of any hyped-up tech, mainly due to the crypto era, and b) subconscious ego protection ("this can't be legit, otherwise everything I've built my identity around will be
26.
by nemo1618 7mo ago
> humans still need to have their hands firmly on the wheel if they won’t want to risk their businesses well being What happens when businesses run by AIs outperform businesses run by humans?
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by nemo1618 7mo ago
Let's be real. The sky is blue because God thought it was a pretty color, simple as. All this stuff about wavelengths and resonant frequencies and human color perception got retconned into the physics engine at some point in the past m
28.
by nemo1618 7mo ago
Centaurs are a transient phenomenon. In chess, the era of centaur supremacy lasted only about a decade before computers alone eclipsed human+computer. The same will be true in every other discipline. You can surf the wave, but sooner or lat
29.
by nemo1618 7mo ago
Just wait. In a few years we'll have computer-use agents that are good enough that people will stop making APIs. Why bother duplicating that effort, when people can just direct their agent to click around inside the app? Trillions of m
30.
by nemo1618 8mo ago
This strikes me as a very agent-friendly problem. Given a harness that enforces sufficiently-rigorous tests, I'm sure you could spin up an agent loop that methodically churns through these functions one by one, finishing in a few day

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