HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

giraffe_lady

5,589 karma · joined December 23, 2021

I'm rate-limited so if I appear to drop out of a conversation at a key point or not answer a direct question I probably just ran out of comments for the day. Often I will edit the original comment in response though, within the edit window.

I am far left, a christian socialist, disabled, autistic, prison abolitionist, recovered addict, formerly incarcerated, and spent many years homeless. I am significantly older than I take the median to be on this site. I often post from these perspectives, which generates a lot of comments to respond to. My views are extreme but I try very hard not to troll or flamebait. I do make jokes but if it seems serious chances are I am sincerely representing my view.

This is draining and sometimes I end up using my handful of permitted daily comments on something less serious. I try to remember to come back around the next day but often forget.

submissionscomments
giraffe_lady··on The two Christian saints who are the Buddha
Catholics don't formally recognize them but most or maybe all orthodox christian churches do.
giraffe_lady··on The far right's win in Germany is sending a chill through Europe's establishment
The far right's win on hacker news goes mostly without comment, however. Very uh, interesting views you guys got in here.
giraffe_lady··on Learn Programming with OCaml
I don’t know it’s not my paper. I don’t want to talk shit but I’m also a little confused at this apparent limitation.
giraffe_lady··on Learn Programming with OCaml
No it’s more about speed and quality of the feedback loop. So you want the compiler that catches the most stuff when given the least information.
giraffe_lady··on Learn Programming with OCaml
I will add you to the list, I’ll definitely post it on HN also.

They had originally planned on june and my part is in so…. Me too.

giraffe_lady··on Learn Programming with OCaml
Yes I contributed code to a paper on it this spring. It’s hard to measure and “studying” it just means feeding money into frontier models. If anyone has a few billion tokens for a couple masters students hmu so they can get it published.
giraffe_lady··on Learn Programming with OCaml
Both force the model to reason about types too much. The more constrained type system plus global inference merely holds them to what they already wrote, with very fast feedback.

Rust is fine if you need it but most things don’t and ocaml has more convenient abstractions for “regular” work. If you need rust you need rust but ocaml isn’t that far off in perf.

Haskell type system is too expressive, it itself becomes a place for the agent to make mistakes and get bogged down.

giraffe_lady··on Learn Programming with OCaml
OCaml is the LLM secret weapon right now. They are better at writing it than they are any other language.* That’s all I have to say about it.

* Other “pure” hindley-milner languages are tied but among them ocaml has some particular strengths that I’m sure others will discuss.

giraffe_lady··on People that worked on the same idea for decades
A couple software examples off the top of my head are Richard Hipp with SQLite and Matthew Ahrens with ZFS. Both almost incomprehensibly sophisticated projects executed well over decades.

Neither are anything like a solo effort in the way these examples are, and it's hard to say what they'd be like without the long individual involvement.

giraffe_lady··on Wendell Berry has died
Yeah that comment isn't quite fair but Berry does have a massive blindspot around labor. His entire like, deal, is built on the nearly-unmentioned-in-his-entire-works fact that he's describing a world of agrarian landowners who do relatively little productive work themselves. We can't all be gentleman farmers!

The fact that his writings are still so good and useful and interesting speaks incredibly highly of his powers of perception and skill as a writer. But it makes them nearly useless in a "how ought we to be" conversation, which is one of the main things his works engage with. So it really is a huge problem with his entire project.

giraffe_lady··on Htmx 4.0
I think, at least for the next few years, certain preferences and consensuses were accidentally embedded in the models to your benefit.

They love htmx! Claude will independently suggest using it instead of more general js frameworks for smaller projects. A gpt model told me, and I wrote this down because it was striking, "htmx won the argument it was making."

It's the same thing with rust. I'm an ocaml expert and ocaml genuinely fits a lot of the problems I work with better regardless of that. But because of when the models were trained and what they were trained on, a certain sort of alt-consensus opinion is frozen into them, and it believes rust is a better choice for nearly everything!

I think you're good for the next few years at least. It's an open question what happens after that dead internet theory recursive loop of llms trained on llm output etc so who knows you might be good forever.

giraffe_lady··on U.S. sanctions against the A/I Collective
Do you think that's a different understanding of the situation than the one that the state currently has?

Is it not "legitimate" in the same way to kill terrorists?

giraffe_lady··on U.S. sanctions against the A/I Collective
> Palestine Action has been designated a terrorist group in the UK as well after sabotaging military aircraft

This is already an extreme perversion of justice all on its own. Damaging military equipment is absolutely outside any useful definition of terrorism. This is simply armed conflict.

giraffe_lady··on Small Models Have Arrived
Why do you think I haven't done this?
giraffe_lady··on Small Models Have Arrived
Yes small models are and will be useful for lots of stuff for several reasons.

But the idea they’d be better than a bigger model is cope, you’re pretty much always better off running the biggest one you can bring to bear within your constraints.

giraffe_lady··on Small Models Have Arrived
Everyone wants this to be it but over and over we discover that the bigger a model is the better it is at all tasks, even ones far outside the domain it was optimized for. IE claude fable is better at writing both code and prose than smaller code- and prose-specific models.

The way vision and language models converge into the same geometric space should be extremely alarming for the "you don't need global knowledge for local tasks" type dreams.

And to be clear I'm not saying that smaller models don't or can't work well, or that we shouldn't be heading in this direction. And it's not quite the case that broad knowledge is strictly necessary. But it never seems to be negative! And so far it is the best way we've found to do... everything. Small models are good to the extent they are like big models, not to the extent that they are small.

giraffe_lady··on Grand jury declines to indict Ohio man charged with destroying Flock camera
You ever hear of the scottsboro boys? Emmett Till's murderers were also acquitted via jury nullification, it was common for lynchings in the jim crow era. It's a tool.
giraffe_lady··on New Worlds: We are living in the future of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson
Sprawl is where he originally started exploring these ideas but Jackpot is where he really focused deep into them and it's even more prescient. It's also bleaker, he has clearly recalibrated his estimate of how much power and control these new entities will have and what they will choose to do with it. Unfortunately I think it's a better representation of the path we're on.
giraffe_lady··on AI usage patterns in software teams
Whether you make a good trade with the stolen information is spurious though.

I don't believe this very strongly. Again it's a contract issue not a moral one. But the metaphor still holds I think.

giraffe_lady··on AI usage patterns in software teams
I think their point is that there's business value in the usage data and linear is using that value in a way that benefits them but not the customers they got it from.

It reminds me of matt levine's reframing of insider trading where it's not about fairness it's about theft. You're supposed to get secret insights and use them to get an edge. What you can't do is get an edge for yourself with secret insights that your employer got.

So it roughly comes down to "that data is valuable and rightfully belongs to the originating company." Which then makes this a contract diligence type situation.

giraffe_lady··on Rhombus 1.1 is now available
Racket was my main language for personal stuff for years despite me never really liking it all that much and not able to put my finger on why. It's not even top 10 languages or top 5 lisps for me but it is just incredibly practical. I have zero passion for this language.

The way I use racket its main competitor is python. It's for when I want to accomplish something with heavy third party deps, and I have zero interest in writing the actual cool code I just need to make some libraries kiss and then use my tool. Not saying that's the case here but maybe racket just doesn't offer you much that python doesn't?

Sounds like you'd get more from just using one of the other lisps you liked, especially if there's a more specialized one that wouldn't be competing with a language you probably would prefer to use anyway. Like eg I have to deal with a lot of lua so I get my lisp rocks off with fennel.

giraffe_lady··on Jaithon 3, a fast programming language with the perfect syntax
wdym they've had it for years?

https://github.com/github-linguist/linguist/pull/5688

giraffe_lady··on Jane Street suffers $15B hit after meltdown at Situational Awareness
Fuck, ocaml's never getting row polymorphism now, my day is ruined.
giraffe_lady··on Bike Bureau: Report Bike Lane Obstructions
Is something wrong with bike lane uprising? They've been doing this for years, very active where I am, well connected both with activists and local politicians.

https://www.bikelaneuprising.com

giraffe_lady··on Read this before you buy that TV streaming stick
> allowing low-skilled operators to drag blocks of code together in their editor — without any need to understand what the underlying code blocks do or how they work.

We're called engineers brian.

giraffe_lady··on Cops Use Flock to Track People, Not Cars
I'm a volunteer court watcher for DV court and I haven't gone six months without seeing a cop in there for using state surveillance tools to stalk women or abuse a domestic partner.
giraffe_lady··on CO2 overload, detected in human blood, suggests toxic atmosphere within 50 years
It's a factor in "shallow water blackout" a fairly common death for experienced swimmers. Caused by hyperventilating prior to a long breath hold flushing too much CO2 out of your blood, so your sense of needing to breathe is suppressed relative to your need for oxygen.
giraffe_lady··on Primate Is the Last Great Web Framework
cgi bin with extra steps.
giraffe_lady··on DSLs Enable Reliable Use of LLMs
Well yes of course I was using a harness lol. We're talking about the application of tools to engineering problems. Getting an LLM to cold start on a completely novel to it language without prompting is a different problem that I don't have.
giraffe_lady··on DSLs Enable Reliable Use of LLMs
> or you need some way to get your dsls examples in the training data for the llm, or feed it in the prompt.

I'm really not sure this is true. Recently for work I've been making changes in a system written in tcl in the early 2000s, including a custom dsl that has never escaped this company. The LLMs can write it fine. It wrote it almost acceptably on first sight, an hour or two of targeted test cases to extract a one page functional spec of the subset we needed and that was it. They are quite good at finding and fitting to patterns, go figure.

Page 1 of 34Next →