nilirl

I think you're discounting people's reaction of not liking it. That is communicative. Not everything has a well established model to communicate efficiently using words.

And being a trope is not enough of a defense; tropes can drift away from culture over time.

The demo is not egregious by itself, it's the choice of the demo for this circumstance. Why boy-hits-boy-with-rock-for-girl for an animation DSL?

If the choice is meaningless, why defend it?

And if the choice is meaningful, why this?

That's how conversation works. Things can be implied when it's obvious.

And if it's not, the onus is on you to ask why.

> but you are implying that people read him to feel smart or that they need to put a great amount of effort in reading

Yes, I did imply that. Maybe my experiences have been more challenging than I expected.

Ok, I will try Crime & Punishment again. I really do want to have that feeling of reading something great.

Ok, I've added "A Young Doctor's Notebook" to my list. Thanks!

Funnily enough, I'm currently reading a book by a Russian author. 'Metro 2033' by Dmitry Glukhovsky. It's post-apocalyptic and set in the Moscow subway.

Oh, I like the features a lot but I don't like the aesthetics.

Maybe that's just the examples but the animations are not appealing to look at.

As someone who only gets time to read when tired at the end of the day: I can't get past the first 50 pages of any Dostoyevsky work.

Why are the classics classic? I doubt being a great read is sufficient or necessary; I struggle to read most classics, Dickens being the only exception.

I'm not reading to study, I want to be entertained! I want engagement, I want clarity, I want suspense! I don't want to wrestle with the author's intentions, I want to be gripped by the character and their situation.

It's not being "picky" to those whose lives get worse.

How do you have such confidence for what works in a complex adaptive system?

Do you think society can be reduced to a model of functions and metrics?

You can only afford to use that model if it doesn't harm your experience of life. For many, it's a model that makes them invisible.

Why not? What if it did bad?

Maybe it's not that valuable? No snark, but how much confidence do these evals provide?

And here I am huffing and puffing because the latest models keep adding nonsense to my codebase.

Have you seen the decisions LLMs make? They write code like the worst developers I know. They're lazy, short-sighted, and impossible to teach.

I like this author but this post was only weakly intriguing.

More importantly, I'd like to know how long it takes to write a post like this.

Everything I write, I try to research and publish in under 2 weeks.

This post looks like it grew over time. I like that quality very much.

The 'reading effort : meaning' ratio of this post is a bit painful.

There are about 3 named concepts in every paragraph.

There are about 15 claims about named concept being the solution to a problem that's never explained.

At some point, if you try to make 20 different points, you make no point at all.

> conditioned on verified success

Thank you! That made it clear to me why it's an useful caching technique.

I read this post thinking "Finally! Finally someone will explain to me what I've been missing because 'skills' just seem to be re-usable text that help make prompting faster."

Nope. Still the same.

A bit much.

Go is a very unique language in that it is the only language designed to make you understand the frustration of online dating.

First, seduction, and then as it reveals how little it cares about you, eventual disappointment.

What's funny is that if you go to the linked site that's meant to be a showcase of the design agency's design skills, you'll see that it's ... pretty shit.

Ugly. Random. Thoughtless.

What's your point? That it's not a skill? Having a system behave acceptably as it grows does not count? Getting paid for it does not count?

Fine. Don't do it. Wait till you get a certification. No one's forcing you to think about these things.

I don't know but I'm less wrong than I used to be.

More focused, better at reasoning about context.

Maybe good architects learn by starting as awful architects? Consider giving them more time.

I meant any institution where such cost of delay can be absorbed more easily. The cost of one day of that kind of work in a startup is probably more expensive than in a more established firm.

Relative to my technical skills.

One of the PRs was some data visualization code in the Elm language. They explained the solution so beautifully, showing how the problem lay in how the Elm compiler compiled to JS and how JS managed memory. It just blew me away that this person did this in an evening, with no experience in Elm or front-end developement, and that it would've taken me days to be that precise. And they weren't even out of college yet.

Edit: This was pre-LLM, where research and reading were a big part of the job

I've met maybe 1-2 people in my whole life who were clearly beneficial 'A' from the get go. There's also a weird 'A' that tries very hard but causes more pain than inspiration. Meaning, they're clearly smart but think that's all that's necessary to be useful.

I once worked with an intern from MIT who came in and immediately submitted large PRs everyday that improved the algorithmic complexity for a bunch of functions. Which was awesome to see but the changes were off the hot path and the code was much harder to read. The part that still comes to me was when I'd said during a code review that there were other more pressing concerns, the intern said yes but you can't argue against the improvement in time complexity.

Smart guy. Inspirational, even. But better suited to a large corp than a startup. I think a startup 'A' has a lot more to do with attitude about speed and uncertainty than competence.

Thank you for illuminating the realities of real business.

It made me realize I've only had the misfortune of being employed at fake ones.

Your argument has many, many leaps but I infer your point.

The lack of attention does reduce the overall correctness of the system.

But, and unfortunately, in most situations the loss of correctness is more than made up for by the speed gains.

Unless you're building software that could kill someone, it's hard to reject the improved speed. The cost of delay is usually more damaging than the cost of incorrectness.

Relatedly, this is Plato on writing:

"They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks"

Yes, and I struggle to give junior developers feedback because of this.

The code they submit for review no longer represents their thinking or their skill. The feedback loop for beginners is a bit broken.

What is their skill now? How is it displayed? How and where do we provide valuable feedback? I find myself just approving large PRs because I don't have the time to read it all.

I feel like I've let down a lot of developers this year.

I haven't written a full function of code in over a year. That being said, I've been spending a lot more time thinking about architecture and system properties.

So, yes, I do feel like I've lost some of that very low-level skill. But maybe I've also been able to spend more time on a higher level skill? Maybe the doctors got worse with the images but had more cognitive resources to think about the patient's context?

Not sure.

But yes, I can't physically get myself to write code without an AI anymore. It feels so much slower, almost painful.

> isn't that what we're supposed to do in science? Listen to the folks who have the expertise?

No. We look at the best model that explains and predicts the most observations.

> Nothing that they've said has appeared to be inconsistent with their claim of expertise, however.

What expertise have they shown? How did you determine they're an expert? This is what they said in their original post: "if it leads to a more focused funding of actual, legitimate science, I'm largely in favor"

That has no expertise required. That's a political stance of what "actual, legitimate science" is.

> If some science doesn't have rigor, it's fair to question its quality

Yes, and I'm saying rigor should be pragmatically determined by operating conditions. All fields cannot instantly achieve the same level of rigor; instrumentation and methodologies need to develop over time. It's fine to say there's a problem with repeatability, it's not fine to say the researchers are illegitimate. Mine is a political stance as well.

> You keep trying to spin it that way, but I haven't seen that indication of that particular intent.

Our interpretation is at odds. You have not argued against it either. What makes their stance apolitical?

> the people doing the science to 'answer these questions' are doing it badly

And I'm saying that's in the nature of tough problems. Do you want to study tribal behavior? Culture? How nation states interact? How slavery has ripple effects across centuries? Tough shit, experimentation is hard. That doesn't make it bad science. That framing is thoughtless.

I may have moved some of the goal posts but you refuse to engage with your own bias. I think we can move on.

Maybe they've been more consistent but the strength of their position is not measured by my inconsistency.

Look at how much "trust me, I've got training, I know what's good, I know what's already right" is in their argument.

What is their actual point? That we can say across the board that good research must have easy-to-control experimentation and guarantee novelty?

Good research is field dependent; some fields are younger than others, some fields have an easier time controlling experiments than others.

I'm saying what matters is what people care about. My point about stances being political is because what gets funded is what people care about, not what can guarantee the highest confidence using research design.

My point is that their stance is political too, because it says 'I don't care about this like how they care about this, so I think it should get cut'.

Their position is not some innocent defense of empiricism, it's a political stance that says "these questions don't matter, I already know how the world works."