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WhitneyLand

6,586 karma · joined March 13, 2013

I have steadily endeavored to keep my mind free so as to give up any hypothesis, however much beloved, as soon as the facts are shown to be opposed to it - C. Darwin
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WhitneyLand··on Chezmoi introduces ban on LLM-generated contributions
No, unreviewed was the previous policy. Now it’s none at all.
WhitneyLand··on Chezmoi introduces ban on LLM-generated contributions
Say I prepare a contribution on my own that meets all guidelines and quality standards.

Then before submitting if I ask an LLM to review my code and it proposes a few changed lines that are more efficient. Should I then

- Leave my less efficient code unchanged?

- Try to rewrite what was suggested in a way that’s not too similar to what the LLM suggested?

WhitneyLand··on Tesla is heading into multi-billion-dollar iceberg of its own making
Oh come on. How many of us have been an engineer on a project and had to watch an exec make promises we knew were not reality?

It also doesn’t necessarily mean he was a yes man. Often in these situations people spell out their confidence levels plainly and directly to such execs and it just bounces off.

I’m also seeing below people suggesting he could have publicly voiced his concerns, but that probably wasn’t even a legal option for multiple reasons.

WhitneyLand··on You are the scariest monster in the woods
For the love of God let’s ignore him being wrong about the impossibility of AGI, and take to heart the nightmarish and inevitable threats coming from how people will use it, that will almost certainly challenge us first.
WhitneyLand··on Apple M5 chip
“nobody really needs to upgrade that for most things”

Maybe, but for lots of scenarios even M5 could still benefit from being an order of magnitude faster.

AI, dev, some content scenarios, etc…

WhitneyLand··on TigerBeetle is a most interesting database
You’re changing the subject to the company’s mission when the concern was about a specific claim made.
WhitneyLand··on SWE-Bench Pro
Recently it was pointed out that models were sometimes finding SWE-Bench verified cheats by scanning parts of the repo not meant to be visible.

Hope they’re addressing that at the same time.

WhitneyLand··on I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster
“with 160 GB of total RAM, shared by the CPU and iGPU, this could be a small, efficient AI Cluster, right? Well, you'd think.”

No, I wouldn’t think.

WhitneyLand··on You can't test if quantum uses complex numbers
So, the point of the entire article is that he didn’t like the title of paper he’s criticizing?

The post implies flaws in the original paper, then at the very end seems to concede it was technically fine just should’ve been up front about entanglement.

The post should be edited to be more upfront about what he realized after writing it.

WhitneyLand··on DeepSeek writes less secure code for groups China disfavors?
Not ready to give this high confidence.

No published results, missing details/lack of transparency, quality of the research is unknown.

Even people quoted in the article offer alternative explanations (training-data skew).

WhitneyLand··on Addendum to GPT-5 system card: GPT-5-Codex
Really, I thought I had checked for it a couple months ago and didn’t see it?

Commented after I saw this added in today’s release notes: “initial MCP interface and docs”

WhitneyLand··on Addendum to GPT-5 system card: GPT-5-Codex
Apparently today is the first release with MCP support.

Updates (v0.36) https://github.com/openai/codex/releases

WhitneyLand··on Qwen3-Next
Not really.

Typically less than 1% of training data is memorized.

WhitneyLand··on Conway's Game of Life, but musical
Very cool Hudson.

“each cell birth plays a harmonic note and each death plays a complementary tone”

How are you deciding which notes to play?

Is it a function that somehow depends on generations or position?

WhitneyLand··on ChatGPT Developer Mode: Full MCP client access
It’s not that simple.

That would result in a brittle solution and/or cat and mouse game.

The text that goes into a prompt is vast when you consider common web and document searches are.

It’s going to be a long road to good security requiring multiple levels of defense and ongoing solutions.

WhitneyLand··on Anscombe's Quartet
This reminds that “visualize while thinking” will probably become an important part of reasoning as we move closer to AGI models.

This will require improvements to vision models, RL frameworks, etc, but will be interesting to see how much it can broaden current abilities.

WhitneyLand··on Apertus 70B: Truly Open - Swiss LLM by ETH, EPFL and CSCS
This is an impressive milestone.

It’s easy to become jaded with so many huge models being released, but the reality is they are still from a relatively small group of countries.

For example India has no indigenous models this big despite having a world class talent pool.

WhitneyLand··on Le Chat: Custom MCP Connectors, Memories
Were you using structured output with gpt-5 mini?

Is there an example you can show that tended to fail?

I’m curious how token constraint could have strayed so far from your desired format.

WhitneyLand··on Vector search on our codebase transformed our SDLC automation
Antony, you’d be right to call me out on providing a source. So in case it’s helpful, this is the last place I recall the subject being discussed:

RAG is Dead, Context Engineering is King

https://www.latent.space/p/chroma

WhitneyLand··on Vector search on our codebase transformed our SDLC automation
Does anyone write anymore?

It’s difficult to read posts that rely so heavily on AI generated prose.

Everything’s a numbered/bulleted list and the same old turns of speech describe any scenario.

That aside, what’s really keeping this from being useful is showing some results. How well does this approach work? Who knows. If the data is sensitive, seeing it work on an open source repo would still illuminate.

Also, we hear lots elsewhere about the limitations of relying on embeddings for coding tools, it would be interesting to know how those limitations are overcome here.

WhitneyLand··on Are OpenAI and Anthropic losing money on inference?
Not sure what you’re disagreeing with? Context window size limits are not artificial. It takes real time/money/resources to increase them.

There are a few ways to approach the problem. Pre-training on longer context lengths I’ve already mentioned. Fine-tuning techniques (like LongRoPE) I’ve already mentioned.

Inference time context extension tricks I didn’t mention because the papers I’ve seen seem to suggest there’s often problems with quality or unfavorable tradeoffs.

There’s no magic way around these limits, it’s a real engineering problem.

WhitneyLand··on Are OpenAI and Anthropic losing money on inference?
Model context limits are not “artificial” as claimed.

The largest context window a model can offer at a given quality level depends on the context size the model was pretrained with as well as specific fine tuning techniques.

It’s not simply a matter of considering increased costs.

WhitneyLand··on Launch HN: Bitrig (YC S25) – Build Swift apps on your iPhone
Hey Kyle, looks very cool!

- If Bitrig can do things like let your app have editable data, or make rest api calls, etc. it would be nice to see a little more in the demo video.

- Sounds like you don’t have an expensive mic/studio for recording, but luckily this is free and can work wonders for your audio: https://podcast.adobe.com/en/enhance

Best of luck with the launch.

WhitneyLand··on I built a production app in a week by managing a swarm of 20 AI agents
“if it achieves the business goals, is stable and performant, does it matter?”

Yes, if you want code to be maintainable over time, or to be able to evolve as a coherent foundation that lends itself to a long term direction and vision.

WhitneyLand··on I built a production app in a week by managing a swarm of 20 AI agents
Yes you’re right, it’s AI enhanced to the point of sounding not like an engineer authentically trying to communicate with other engineers.

However it’s also the direction given to the AI enhancement - it’s steered toward buzzword/hype style.

“I managed a swarm of AI agents…”? How about instead just “I ran multiple instances of Claude Code and the results seem promising”? No swarms necessary.

WhitneyLand··on Show HN: Base, an SQLite database editor for macOS
Base is nicely done, I’ve found it worthwhile over other options.
WhitneyLand··on Show HN: Bicyclopedia
Try speeding up the animations and adding easing to them… https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/animation-t...
WhitneyLand··on "Remove mentions of XSLT from the html spec"
Thank you for the citation. Up voted.
WhitneyLand··on The contrarian physics podcast subculture
This is supposed to be about science.

Tim is the only side willing to publish papers and let them be peer reviewed.

He’s also the only one willing to engage on the merits of the debate. Eric has/will not.

WhitneyLand··on AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard'
Your comment about memorizing as part of understanding makes a lot of sense to me, especially as one possible technique to get get unstuck in grasping a concept.

If it doesn’t work for you on l33t code problems, what techniques are you finding more effective in that case?

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