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pcloadlett3r

13 karma · joined February 4, 2025

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pcloadlett3r··on GPT-6 Astra
A counterexample (at least the jacobian conjecture one) is a lot easier to manually verify than 10MB Lean proof
pcloadlett3r··on Bringing a dead Spring Boot project back to life with Claude
As a Solr committer, this is heartwarming to see! I personally never used spring's solr data abstraction but I know there were folks that asked about it.
pcloadlett3r··on Verification debt: the hidden cost of AI-generated code
Will the TLA+ spec Claude spits out do what the users actually desire? Will there be human oversight of the spec? If not, I don't see how it really helps if the future human machine interface is supposed to be loosey goosey natural language. The best thing I can conceive is some human observers of the system saying "Claude, the behavior as it stands now is perfect! Set it in stone with TLA+." But this whimsical idea has many problems.
pcloadlett3r··on Claude's Cycles [pdf]
In another part he says Filip restarted Claude many times so it seems they are aware of context polution and ways to avoid it (also why they kept telling Claude to write everything to a file). It could just be that Claude was caught between a rock and a hard place; dissapointing the user vs solving a problem it couldn't solve.
pcloadlett3r··on Thinking hard burns almost no calories but destroys your next workout
Do you really write like this in every single paragraph?
pcloadlett3r··on Thinking hard burns almost no calories but destroys your next workout
Do you really write like this in every single paragraph?
pcloadlett3r··on Thinking hard burns almost no calories but destroys your next workout
It's just so cliche. The dramatic transitions which introduce things that aren't as important as the transition itself. The flow is very AI, short dramatic responses to a previous question that's also not "groundbreaking" enough to warrant such a style. It's just hard to unsee these things. Idk man, I guess if you like it, that's great but I cringe when I read this and I never finish reading because I assume the author put in minimal effort so why should I?
pcloadlett3r··on Thinking hard burns almost no calories but destroys your next workout
You really couldn't tell? The overly dramatic transitions all over the place is such an obvious tell:

> Here's the part that surprised me:

Might as well have said "here's the kicker" and used emojis instead of bullets. Maybe you can share your reading sites as you seem rather undrrexposed to not recognize this immediately lol.

Edit: I mean come on man, how can you not tell?! I'm still cringing from this one:

> The incremental cost of actually thinking hard? Almost nothing.

Edit II

"This isn't one study"

Dum dum dum. Sooo dramatic. 100% slop.

pcloadlett3r··on We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler
I feel like maybe you spend too much time watching hypefluencers. AI tools are great but if they are already super intelligent why haven't you gotten a swarm of agents to build yourself a billion dollar SaaS?

It's hard to separate the bullshit from reality when the hype is just turned to the max everywhere you turn. It feels like I'm in some elaborate psy-op where my experiences with these tools are just an order of magnitude lower than the hype and I can't even express those thoughts without having "luddite" patch attached to me. And if you read between the lines of what Karpathy wrote in his famous "anxiety" post, it kind of echoes my point. Its "an alien technology and we can't yield it right" yada yada. Which is an odd way to say "sometimes this thing works magically but a lot of the time its total shit so you aren't as productive as you would like".

pcloadlett3r··on We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler
Is it really shippable if it is strictly worse than the thing it copied. Do you know anyone who would use a vibe coded compiler that cant be modified without introducing regressions (as the researcher admitted)?
pcloadlett3r··on We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler
Of course it's impressive. I am just pointing out that these experiments with the million line browser and now this c compiler seem to greatly extrapolate conclusions. The researchers claim they prove you can scale agents horizontally for econkmic benefit. But the products both of these built are of questionable technical quality and it isnt clear to me they are a stable enough foundation to build on top of. But everyone in the hype crowd just assumes this is true. At least this researcher has sort of promised to pursue this project whereas Wilson already pretty much gave up on his browser. I hadn't seen a commit in that repo for weeks. Given that, I am not going to immediately assume these agents truly achieved anything of economic value relative to what a smaller set of agents could have achieved.
pcloadlett3r··on We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler
You are projecting and over-reacting. My response is measured against the insane hype this is getting beyond what was demonstrared. I never said ot wasn't impressive.

I'm not hung up on anything. Clearly the project isn't stable because it can't be modified without regression. It can be an MVP but if it needs someone to rewrite it or spend many man-months just to grok the code to add to it then its conceivable it isnt an economic win in the long run. Also, they haven't compared this to what a smaller set of agents could accomplish with the same task and thus I am still not fully sold on the economic viability of horizontally scaling agents at this time (well at least not on the task that was tested).

pcloadlett3r··on We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler
> it's probably good enough to use, yea.

Not for general purpose use, only for demo.

> that reasonably working software of equivalent complexity is within reach for $20k to solve

But if this can't come close to replacing GCC and can't be modified without introducing bugs then it hasn't proven this yet. I learned some new hacks from the paper and that's great and all but from my experiencing of trying to harness even 4 claude sessions in parallel on a complex task it just goes off the rails in terms of coherence. I'll try the new techniques but my intuition is that its not really as good as you are selling it.

pcloadlett3r··on We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler
Is there really value being presented here? Is this codebase a stable enough base to continue developing this compiler or does it warrant a total rewrite? Honest question, it seems like the author mentioned it being at its limits. This mirrors my own experience with Opus in that it isn't that great at defining abstractions in one-shot at least. Maybe with enough loops it could converge but I haven't seen definite proof of that in current generation with these ambitious clickbaity projects.
pcloadlett3r··on GPT-5.3-Codex
Copilot has access to the latest models like Opus 4.6 in agentic mode as well. It's got certain quirks and I prefer a TUI myself but it isn't radically different.
pcloadlett3r··on Show HN: Use Claude Code to Query 600 GB Indexes over Hacker News, ArXiv, etc.
How is the alerts functionality implemented?
pcloadlett3r··on Happy 100000th birthday, Debian
100000nd* birthday
pcloadlett3r··on The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE
> If the private market doesn't want bonds, the central bank can purchase them. That's not inflationary.

Central bank buying bonds and increasing money supply absolutely is inflationary. That is precisely how FOMOs work, with the end goal being increasing or decreasing money supply depending on inflation and labour market. So if you already have stubborn inflation and you have a fiscal crisis then unmooring inflation expectations by lowering rates is exactly what you don't want to do (risk becoming a banana republic that inflates away it's debt). I don't think this will happen in the near future but it is absolutely a risk and you'd be foolish as a central banker not to consider it.