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coder-3

197 karma · joined May 24, 2021

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coder-3··on The Harness Is the Thing
Depends on how in-the-loop you want to be. I personally delegate all the writing of the code to agents, but I maintain a clear mental model of the architecture, which I come up with by iterating and prototyping with agents. I can use Luna for all of this, although I switch depending on the task. It's nice to be able to throw a 1,000 word rough spec at Fable and get a personal tool that works perfectly though. I expect that as the models get better, I'll continue to be in the loop, but operate at increasingly higher levels of abstraction.
coder-3··on Accelerating GPT-5.6 Sol Ultrafast
Yeah, the main value of this for OAI is probaby to speedup RSI
coder-3··on Grok 4.6 scores 61 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index
I disagree with Musk's politics but it does not impact my decision to use Grok. That's because being serious about aligning my capital to my values doesn't leave much in the way of eligible products or services. I consequently decide not to worry about this as a moral axis for my life.
coder-3··on LLMs reward expertise
We've seen plenty of examples of apps successfully vibe coded by non technical people, including apps making real revenue.

Your friend could start with telling the LLM that they are a non technical person who wants to make an app and it will explain all the successive steps.

coder-3··on Microsoft and OpenAI end their exclusive and revenue-sharing deal
Interesting. Why? My current mental model is that AMD chips are just a bit behind, so, less efficient, but no biggie. Do labs even use CUDA?
coder-3··on Ilya Sutskever: We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research
As someone who is building an LLM-powered product on the side, using AI coding agents to help with development of said LLM-powered product and for my day job, and has a long-tail of miscellaneous uses for AI, I suspect you're right.
coder-3··on The JavaScript Handbook (2025 edition)
I skimmed through it and it's a simple and concise overview of the language suitable for a beginner. It is by no means exhaustive. Also, haven't seen anything in there that makes it so that it couldn't have been written in 2015
coder-3··on Show HN: ChatGPT UI for rabbit holes
I love this! My suggestion is to not close panels when going back up levels but instead put them in a parallel branch.
coder-3··on Tell HN: We should snapshot a mostly AI output free version of the web
The problem with AI-generated content is not necessarily that it's bad, rather, it's not novel information. To learn something, you must not already know it. If it's AI-generated, the AI already knows it.
coder-3··on Memory and new controls for ChatGPT
How does this technically work? Is it just a natural language shortcut for prepending text to your context window, or does it pull information as needed as inferred from the prompt? E.g. the meeting note formatting "memory" gets retrieved when prompting to summarise meeting notes.
coder-3··on OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns
You don't think AGI is feasible? GPT is already useful. Scaling reliably and predictably yields increases in capabilities. As its capabilities increase it becomes more general. Multimodal models and the use of tools further increase generality. And that's within the current transformer architecture paradigm; once we start reasonably speculating, there're a lot of avenues to further increase capabilities e.g. a better architecture over transformers, better architecture in general, better/more GPUs, better/more data etc. Even if capabilities plateau there are other options like specialised fine-tuned models for particular domains like medicine/law/education.

I find it harder to imagine a future where AGI (even if it's not superintelligent) does not have a huge and fundamental impact.

coder-3··on Sam Altman Will Not Return to OpenAI as CEO
The battle, yes. The war, no.
coder-3··on Sam Altman Will Not Return to OpenAI as CEO
They won't be able to catch up to and surpass OpenAI. At least not for a few years. I'm in the camp that we ought to solve alignment before we get to AGI and also of the camp that this is unlikely. Therefore, the pace of AI progress slowing and a point won by the safety side is a good thing based on my assumptions.
coder-3··on Sam Altman Will Not Return to OpenAI as CEO
This is good. If Sama managed to overthrow the board I'd be worried about the future of AI safety
coder-3··on How to Think Computationally about AI, the Universe and Everything
Raw IQ doesn't mean you'll have good epistemology. His brain lets him reach deeper abstractions than most but it doesn't mean what he comes up with is grounded in base reality. If you're worried about being off-base, try:

- Contact with reality (feedback). Predict, try, did it work?

- Having a good reasoning framework. For some it's 1. Religious text, 2. what others they respect think, 3. reasoning for understanding. This is not the worst but not the best. Perhaps a better one would be 1. Science/rationality, 2. religious/philosophical/spiritual texts, 3. first principles thinking

- Humility, you don't know anything unless you have great reasoning and empirical evidence to back up what you're saying. Even then, when faced with complexity (i.e. unless you are dealing with the most atomic/simple concept), you're still almost certainly wrong.

coder-3··on Anxious brains redirect emotion regulation
No, burnout is too much exposure to certain stressors
coder-3··on When did people stop being drunk all the time?
The calming effect comes from L Theanine which you can buy separately and add to your coffee
coder-3··on Benchmarking the accuracy of GPT3.5's and GPT-4's code generation abilities
This might not be an issue for the same (somewhat inscrutable) reason that GPT-4 has quasi-perfect grammar.
coder-3··on The violent focus of Francis Bacon
What really helped my productivity on creative projects is replacing idle-scrolling and other distractions with following my curiosity. I get just as much dopamine from both so it's a perfect replacement
coder-3··on Show HN: GPT-3 Powered Shell
Only to be supplanted by the next gen of companies who took an AI-first approach
coder-3··on Show HN: GPT-3 Powered Shell
So it begins! AI is going to permeate an increasing amount of existing software. Eventually, all software will have some form of intelligence built into it.
coder-3··on Tell HN: ChatGPT can reply like a specific Reddit or HN user, including you
Wow, you can tell this one was personal.
coder-3··on It’s Time for ‘Maximum Viable Product’
Yep came here to say this. The article is incorrect in the diagnostic and thus the prescription
coder-3··on Dwarf Fortress – randomly generated, persistent fantasy world
Time is what's been preventing me from getting into DF. Do I need to spend a significant amount of time on this game to get a good experience? Could I get away with, say, one hour once in a while? I'd probably need to invest time upfront to learn the basics though.
coder-3··on Wickr Me is shutting down December 31, 2023
Any predictions about where they'll move to? I'd be surprised if they start picking a set of different apps.
coder-3··on Watercolor Basics
Get thicker paper
coder-3··on My experience getting a tech job with no degree or relevant work experience
Getting a tech job with no degree or relevant work experience just requires you to have skills and proof of those skills. Keep improving your skills and strengthening your proof until you land a job. The only cost is time and effort.
coder-3··on Ask HN: Do you find it challenging to talk to your users?
My experience has been very different. People have been quite happy to chat about their experience using the product and the pain-points uncovered were consistent across users.

In a nutshell, what we did was email users asking for a 30-45 minute remote interview in exchange for $50 gift card. We started the meetings letting the user know that there are no wrong answers, that it's quite informal and they can leave at any time. We then spent the first half of the interview finding out who the user is, what they do and how they use the product. The second half was spent uncovering pain-points and maybe even asking users to share their screen and show us.

We'd take notes during the interviews and then once we've done a few we'll collate the notes at which point the improvements to make to the product would become obvious.

coder-3··on A downtick is coming for online advertising
It's case-by-case. You can calculate whether ads are worth it for what you're selling by using cost per click, conversion rate and customer lifetime value.

My general sense is that paid ads is still valuable for niche markets as the ad will be cheaper and ad platforms allow quite specific targeting (they do gather huge amounts of data after all). It's probs too expensive for big competitive markets.

As an aside, it's quite risky to rely too much of paid ads as your business becomes subordinate to the whims of Google, Facebook etc.

coder-3··on Ask HN: How to improve as a struggling junior software engineer?
Some advice on increasing your rate of improvement:

Practice

- have a 3 hour weekly practice session (minimum) outside of work. Won't do much for you in the beginning but it'll add up a lot over the years

- focus on the fundamentals related to the type of work you're doing

Reflection

- Identify what went wrong

- Identify the root cause

- Come up with a solution

- Implement the solution

- Identify what went right

- Come up with how you can further improve it or at least keep doing the right things

Feedback

- You can ask for feedback and advice about the areas of improvement you identified in your reflections

Concentrate

- When you work, make sure you're concentrated. Don't check IMs/email/socials

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