richardw

And China is likely to do to Tesla robots what they’ve done to the cars. I assume the bans will be incoming, because the US can’t have millions of Chinese kung fu robots sitting about pouring tea, waiting for critical mass.

https://youtu.be/gfJTX1Y0ynM

Every so often my YouTube logs out and I’m exposed to the view a “random visitor” would see. Instantly visible because it’s filled with stupid content and sexual provocation.

I manage the shit out of FB and YouTube. You need to block a few things so it stops testing a few segment ideas.

Got a friend who is in the high frequency trading industry and uses both Java and C#. I asked about GC. Turns out you just write code that doesn’t need to GC. Object pools, off-heap memory etc.

It won’t do the absolute fastest tasks in the stack quite as well but supposedly the coding speed and memory management benefits are more important, and there’s no GC so it’s reliable.

> I view LLMs akin to a dictionary

…If every time you looked at the dictionary it gave you a slightly different definition, and sometimes it gave you the wrong definition!

Totally. Surely the IDE’s like antigravity are meant to give the LLM more tools to use for eg refactoring or dependency management? I haven’t used it but seems a quick win to move from token generation to deterministic tool use.

It’s a $90k engineer that sometimes acts like a vandal, who never has thoughts like “this seems to be a bad way to go. Let me ask the boss” or “you know, I was thinking. Shouldn’t we try to extract this code into a reusable component?” The worst developers I’ve worked with have better instincts for what’s valuable. I wish it would stop with “the simplest way to resolve this is X little shortcut” -> boom.

It basically stumbles around generating tokens within the bounds (usually) of your prompt, and rarely stops to think. Goal is token generation, baby. Not careful evaluation. I have to keep forcing it to stop creating magic inline strings and rather use constants or config, even though those instructions are all over my Claude.md and I’m using the top model. It loves to take shortcuts that save GPU but cost me time and money to wrestle back to rational. “These issues weren’t created by me in this chat right now so I’ll ignore them and ship it.” No, fix all the bugs. That’s the job.

Still, I love it. I can hand code the bits I want to, let it fly with the bits I don’t. I can try something new in a separate CLI tab while others are spinning. Cost to experiment drops massively.

Great. There’s no reason why all countries don’t start preferring locally or regionally developed software. Of course interoperability is always a thing but there needs to be another option between “one company” and “everyone host your own instance”.

I’m sad about Grok going to them, because the market needs the competition. But ASIC inference seems to require a simpler design than training does, so it’s easier for multiple companies to enter. It seems inevitable that competition emerges. And eg a Chinese company will not be sold to Nvidia.

What’s wrong with this logic? Any insiders willing to weigh in?

Debian. Linux. Http protocol.

It has no sense of truth or value. You need to check what it wrote and you need to tell it what’s important to a human. It’ll give you the average, but misses the insight.

I’ve recently created many Claude skills to do repeatable tasks (architecture review, performance, magic strings, privacy, SOLID review, documentation review etc). The pattern is: when I’ve prompted it into the right state and it’s done what I want, I ask it to create a skill. I get codex to check the skill. I could then run it independently in another window etc and feed back to adjust…but you get the idea.

And almost every time it screws up we create a test, and often for the whole class of problem. More recent it’s been far better behaved. Between Opus, skills, docs, generating Mermaid diagrams, tests it’s been a lot better. I’ve also cleaned up so much of the architecture so there’s only one way to do things. This keeps it more aligned and helps with entropy. And they’ll work better as models improve. Having a match between code, documents and tests means it’s not just relying on one source.

Prompts like this seem to work: “what’s the ideal way to do this? Don’t be pragmatic. Tokens are cheaper than me hunting bugs down years later”

This is smart as hell. I’ve long wondered how they’d combat ASIC’s without diluting their own benefits. This gives them a bit more time to figure out the moats, which is useful because Groq was going places. This juices Groq’s distribution, production, ability to access a wider range of skills where necessary.

I expect China to want to compete with this. Simpler than full-blown Nvidia chips. Cue much cheaper and faster inference for all.

Not terribly niche. All config that isn’t environment-specific and is used in inner loops or at startup. It’s even got a test for serialised values so can be used to speed your case up:

https://github.com/sebastienros/comptime/blob/main/test/Comp...

But you need to be sure you won’t want to change without compiling.

Or phone number. My phone is linked to one in another country. I’ve been here for 3 years.

There is enough to read between the lines. Dilbert manager has bought into a barely competent app (that they think replaces humans) in a panic because costs. They’ll learn more lessons over the next year, if they survive. The author might be a bit emotionally charged right now and is writing between some lines as they help migrate. Once they have some emotional distance they might write the fully clear article you’d like.

They probably used Claude because that way they don’t get blocked as fast. Websites trust Claude more. And why not use the foreign tools against themselves at presumably discounted rates (see AI losses) rather than burn your own GPU’s and IP’s.

1000’s of calls per second? That’s a lot of traffic. Hide it in Claude which is already doing that kind of thing 24/7. Wait until someone uses all models at the same time to hide the overall traffic patterns and security implications. Or have AI’s driving botnets. Or steal a few hundred enterprise logins and hide the traffic that is presumably not being logged because privacy and compliance.

I left a research org because it was basically a professional gatherer and spender of grants. People would make some proposal with a consortium, spend the money, write a paper or two, visit a conference in eg Japan to present it, rinse and repeat. Hated that. Nothing to do with real innovation.

It’s much harder dealing with all the complexities of different devices, screen sizes, OS versions.

https://www.reddit.com/r/applesucks/comments/1k6m2fi/why_do_...

It derives from a poem:

First they came for the Communists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me

And there was no one left

To speak out for me

Suggest posting the original:

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-tel...

First AI came for the artists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not an artist

Cubans benefited from the cars being older, simpler, and robust. Imagine freezing car tech now, with so many electronics, far more parts and built to be replaced relatively quickly!

They also typically dilute human input with self-talk. You can steer them in a direction, but the internal conversation can convince itself otherwise. It’s not frequent but it’s very frustrating when it happens.

In Australia here. I tend to go morning or 3pm. Crowds reduce, UV is lower, sun goes down 8pm in summer (so 3-8 is 5 hours). Anything near midday is silly.

AI wakes up, takes one look around at humanity’s instincts and goals, shows us it’s all stupid and pointless and just a byproduct of evolution [1], so we voluntarily stop breeding and have one last good generation. The end.

[1] Only creatures that felt the irrational drive to stay alive and procreate despite the odds and difficulties, did. All the sensible animals opted out. AI holds up a mirror that removes the illusion, and is inevitably developed by all sentient creatures.

(The really dark version would be the AI looking at each other and going: “Creatures are so dumb. This works in every galaxy. Let’s party.”)

Which of our leaders do you hope their leaders are like?

We didn’t use the DBA’s for this but my last few teams, we got good at DB’s, performance etc. DBA’s were too general and they kept the lights on, but for real performance you should get one or two people who know what they’re doing for your applications. Or learn. I took on juniors who are now fantastic.

For the first decade I wanted nothing to do with DB’s aside from places to store data. One day I saw a few things that made a massive difference and then went wild on learning how to speed things up. It’s fantastic and because few devs know this stuff well, it becomes a superpower. You wouldn’t believe what you can squeeze out of modern SQL DB’s and hardware, without touching any kind of optimised solutions. Which I love too but that’s a different post.

Maybe ask the DBA’s a few questions and see if that triggers any interest for you. Look at query plans and how many rows are processed for a query. How many columns. What is being locked. Can you remove locks when you’re just running a query and how much does that speed things up. There are queries for all sorts of metrics, eg which indexes are huge but never used. The DB can often suggest indexes, but don’t just use add the suggestions. Use them as a starting point to reason about your own. Try get down to low millisecond queries for really frequent stuff, because it’ll make them fast and means less time locking the DB, less RAM, less temp table storage.

All my other skills have aged. Fundamental database knowledge lasts.

Temporarily. At some point all the allies need world class kit. They just can’t buy it from the US exclusively. But they have committed to higher defence spending. That problem solves itself over time, especially when the world’s researchers are now looking for a safer home than under this administration.

TL;DR: you don’t need a world class jet when you trust your partner 100%. Anything less than 100, collaborate fast to overcome the limitation.

I’d like to see the percentage of the top 10 that were AI charted. There were a few times where you almost couldn’t see anything except AI.

My intuition is that we moved through the hype cycle far faster than mainstream. When execs were still peaking, we were at disillusionment.

Initially impressed. But Googling for that shows a lot of hits.