philomath_mn

6 ms·

1.
by philomath_mn 7mo ago
Reminds me of this quote from Tonya Riley's _The Staff Engineer's Path_: > In The Art of Travel (Vintage), Alain de Botton talks about the frustration of learning new information that doesn’t connect to anything you already kno
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by philomath_mn 1y ago
Why is that?
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by philomath_mn 1y ago
AI bills are already trivial compared to human time. I pay for claude max, all I need to do is save an hour a month and I will be breaking even.
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by philomath_mn 1y ago
> most people agree that the output is trite and unpleasant to consume This is likely a selection bias: you only notice the obviously bad outputs. I have created plenty of outputs myself that are good/passable -- you are likely surr
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by philomath_mn 1y ago
Anywhere I can follow your takes on LLM-assisted coding?
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by philomath_mn 1y ago
ChatGPT is $20 / month?
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by philomath_mn 1y ago
Under what circumstances would that cost be high? Is OpenAI going to rip off your app? Why would they waste a second on that when there are better models to be built?
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by philomath_mn 1y ago
The exact same logic applies to any deductible expense, and yet people think they can buy a business vehicle "for free" because it is deductible. IDK why this is so hard to understand.
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by philomath_mn 1y ago
By building a good reputation and contact list doing salaried work. Usually you do a good job there, make a bunch of stakeholders happy, and then you have a chance at spinning off on your own.
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by philomath_mn 1y ago
Best part is that they probably have data to show that all that patience costs the typical passenger mere seconds to a minute on 99% of rides. This has always bothered me about aggressive or impatient human drivers: they are probably shavin
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by philomath_mn 1y ago
Curious what you are expecting when you say "bottom falls out". Are you expecting significant failures of large-scale systems? Or more a point where people recognize some flaw that you see in LLMs?
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by philomath_mn 1y ago
While this unfortunate, I am sure I also have single lines in production with greater cost and equivalent value (close to none) -- and I've only worked at small companies. I am sure some of y'all can beat this by ~2 orders of magn
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by philomath_mn 1y ago
Any of the leading LLMs could answer this, they just need the right context. So paste in the model cards for the various models you care about, or ask a model with search or "deep research" capability. That being said, there proba
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by philomath_mn 1y ago
That definitely seems to be the play. Keep funneling in users from Lovable/bolt.new and keep building revenue or hope to be acquired if one of those vibe coding tools gets huge.
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by philomath_mn 1y ago
I agree: the incentives to use more and more AI are too strong. We're all stuck in some form of the prisoner's dilemma and the odds that nobody will defect are much too low. So it seems the most rational position is to embrace the
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by philomath_mn 1y ago
This is a bit of a strawman. There are certainly people who claim that you can ask AIs anything but I don't think the parent commenter ever made that claim. "AI is making incredible progress but still struggles with certain subset
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by philomath_mn 1y ago
That is a sub-token task, something I'd expect current models to struggle with given how they view the world in word / word fragment tokens rather than single characters.
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by philomath_mn 1y ago
Great breakdown, appreciate it. I think most of the hype around MCP is just excitement that tool use can actually work and seeing lots of little examples where it does. Watching Claude build something in Blender was pure magic, even if it i
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by philomath_mn 2y ago
Not trying to be smug or blithe, but this is one of the main things I love about living in the suburbs or the country: neighbors can only bother me outside (and they rarely do).
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by philomath_mn 2y ago
It seems like the possible outcomes are: (a) nobody uses the language, so a package manager doesn't matter OR (b) people use the language, they will want to share packages, then a package manager will be bolted on (or many will, see py
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by philomath_mn 2y ago
Attack? Is there any other indication of an attack? There are many possible root causes which could explain what you observed.
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by philomath_mn 2y ago
Going from an X1 Carbon to a MBP felt like stepping 10 years into the future. The seamless lid close, battery life, operating temp, build quality and performance were all _huge_ upgrades. I held out on Mac for 20 yrs, no idea what I was thi
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by philomath_mn 2y ago
Let’s be honest though: there has been an immense amount of propaganda on both sides. How many times has Ukraine reportedly embarrassed Russia, knocked them back on their heels, been within weeks of winning? All with young beautiful people
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by philomath_mn 2y ago
Right, I just don't know where the dividing line would be. What % of a book is acceptable?
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by philomath_mn 2y ago
Idk, it is pretty good a generating synthetic data and recognizing the different logic branches to exercise. Not perfect, but very helpful.
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by philomath_mn 2y ago
Wonder how Readwise is managing what they do -- really hope they don't get shut down.
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by philomath_mn 2y ago
I usually throw a lot of context at it and have it write unit tests in a certain style or implement something (with tests) according to a spec. But the o3-mini-high results have been just as good. I am fine with Deep Research taking 5-8 min
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by philomath_mn 2y ago
I paid for pro to try `o1-pro` and I can't seem to find any use case to justify the insane inference time. `o3-mini-high` seems to do just as well in seconds vs. minutes.
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by philomath_mn 2y ago
In my experience, LLMs have a hard time processing large amounts of raw data and finding patterns (even simple univariate time series) so I would be surprised if a GPT could find _real_, non-hallucinatory patterns in raw data.
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by philomath_mn 2y ago
I would agree, but I do think I get a lot out of Readwise which helps me review what I have read. If this could help me with review or highlight collection then I'd be happy with it.

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