nilirl

Is the idea of the runtime contracts similar to the idea of runtime validation? Or are they different in some way?

Thank you for writing this, it flowed well and clearly took time and thought to write.

I think I still haven't fully understood the significance of aperiodicity, even if I learnt some of its properties.

And thank you for elaborating on Mendeleev.

I wrote that post on Mendeleev because I'd actually come across his example in a book about library science.

I was interested in this story (a rumor) that he used physical cards to sort and reorganize the elements in front of him till he found a periodic organization.

Even after reading the Wikipedia entry I couldn't intuit what Aperiodicity means.

Does it mean simply lack of pattern? But that doesn't seem to be the case, at least visually.

Just last month I wrote a post about how Mendeleev's real genius was in how we went looking for periodicity [0] and how that helped predict elements.

Does aperiodicity have any cool properties that help in specific domains?

[0] https://www.nair.sh/guides-and-opinions/communicating-your-e...

Sure, but where is this mythical "open debate" where nobody important ever shows up?

> Schmidt urged graduates to embrace freedom, open debate, equality and the willingness to engage with those they disagree with.

I think it was a great embrace of freedom and open debate to boo him for only asserting predictions that benefit him.

My hero, thank you! <3

Anyone know how those MS-paint-like vibrating gifs were made?

It's my first time reading Fukuyama's 'The Origins of Political Order', and there's a point in the book he says (I think; and in my words): we don't actually know how things got to be this way but none of the extremes work by themselves, not perfect top-down control, nor complete bottoms-up self-organization.

Maybe the best we can do is make survival meh?

So ... the better you explain the codebase to the LLM the better it explains it to you?

Hi, site looks beautiful!

How does this compare to managing our own read-only replica with anonymized data?

I finished writing this book 2 weeks ago.

Copywriting after AI

https://www.nair.sh/books/copywriting-after-ai

It's 88 pages of me describing my mental models for marketing, those which I think still hold true even after the introduction of AI.

How to use a spreadsheet for creativity

https://www.nair.sh/guides-and-opinions/communicating-your-e...

I finished writing that over the weekend.

I talk about combinatorial creativity as a way to be creative under time pressure. I had fun writing it, it'd been on my mind for weeks.

No, it is not pointless to say other things are more important. An order of importance is how you prioritize things.

You're asserting that it is critical. Why is code change speed critical?

What is your analogy getting it? It does not map to my argument evidently.

You're asserting it is slow code that has evolved our development process. Why? It used to be correctness and appropriateness. How is it suddenly speed?

Bottleneck for what?

I was not merely stating other bottlenecks. I'm saying they're more important bottlenecks.

They can't all be equally important bottlenecks; a bottleneck is by definition a singular component or sub-system most-limiting to the system's output.

What are we trying to output from our businesses? Code?

What is this magical context floating around every business that will unlock AI agents to produce ... what?

[Edit] I apologize for my tone. You're right, dealing with the speed of code generation is an unprecedented problem. I was making the argument that it's not the most important to the business and that rate of code change is very rarely the top concern. But that does not mean it's not the most important problem for someone. For the developers dealing with the system, it is.

Bottleneck for what? More features?

I don't think amount of software is what determines whether a company does well.

I don't think capturing quantity of context is that important either.

Now, quality of context. How well do the humans reason?

Then, attitude. How well do the humans respond to bad situations?

Then, resource management. How well does the company treat people and money?

Finally, luck. How much of the uncontrollables are in our favor?

Those are pretty good bottlenecks for a company. I doubt an agent is fixing any of those. At least any time soon.

I'm afraid it'll lead to a weird music-ification of content.

Music can make you feel good and keep you engaged just purely out of engaging our pattern recognition.

AI videos and photos seem to have a similar effect. Even if it's not real, they encode enough patterns from good human work to be able to engage our attention.

Just proving people with an attentional escape is valuable on the internet.

I feel that pressure of not knowing how to definitively compete on the internet, especially when there's so much AI created noise.

I'm a copywriter and I used to get hired to write posts on behalf of founders on LinkedIn or for their company blog.

Now, the last three jobs I had were all focused on sending cold email.

What I'd said: it just feels like so much harder for a human's design to feel valuable now

I'm talking about competition; being valuable within a market; being seen as useful by others.

Maybe my focus on competition wasn't well communicated but you're making a precise but irrelevant point about personal integrity.

Yes, lacking for the expert.

To the non-expert, probably acceptable, even impressive.

Why would you use an example that limits sharing to loved ones?

Your point is thin.

You're right in that our expertise can see how this was not generated with the same kind of thoughtfulness that we might apply.

But you're wrong in implying (if you are) that it's not valuable to be impressive to a non-expert.

Why would you pick an example that does not have AI as a competitor?

If people could generate an infinite variety of chairs in a few seconds, than yes, my sharing would be discouraged.

Yes but you're talking about groundbreaking work.

There's so much joy to be found in regular human creating and sharing.

The creating part still remains because it's intrinsic but the sharing part feels discouraging now.

Regular, non-groundbreaking creative work seems ... less worthy of sharing?

Your point? It's an analogical problem.

I love writing but even there I have to work doubly hard to make sure I'm doing something valuable.

My point is that the space within which human creators can distinguish themselves is diminishing rapidly.

How does a human designer even compete? I just looked at all the demos and they look beautiful.

I hand designed my site https://www.nair.sh/ and it feels like it doesn't even compare.

Sure, there's some judgment as to what design is appropriate in a given situation, but it just feels like so much harder for a human's design to feel valuable now.

One thing I've struggled with before is building a collection of data models based off of a collection of PDF forms.

I wanted to abstract away the PDF form building my own html form on top of a data model that can later be used to programmatically fill the PDF .

Since I had 100s of PDFs, I wanted an OCR+LLM pipeline to build a data model for each PDF. Unfortunately, OCR + LLM works ~90% of the time but sometimes fields are missed or mislabeled in the data model.

Does this sometimes get it wrong during programmatic filling? How do you deal with that?

This was surprisingly hard to read. Not in terms of sentence structure but in terms of coherence and meaning.

Also the book is $60 on Kindle and $80 for paperback? Who's the target audience?

CS fundamentals is about framing an information problem to be solvable.

That'll always be useful.

What's less useful, and what's changed in my own behavior, is that I no longer read tool specific books. I used to devour books from Manning, O'reilly etc. I haven't read a single one since LLMs took off.

Huh? The point of the article is that we should use git to store an LLMs output as it works?

How do any of the quotes and citations used coherently form that argument?

What is this writing style? Why does it feel like it doesn't want me to understand what the heck it's saying?

also the nefarious population control by Big Condom