singingfish

Aligning the computer's and the humans' thinking processes. Cognitive load is exceptionally important - one of the few uncontravenable facts in human psychology is that healthy human short term memory has a capacity of 5 items plus or minus 2. So reliably 5. And thus the maximum number of thinking balls you should be juggling at one time.

Which then leads to thinking about designs that lead to the management of cognitive load - thus the nature of the balls changes due to things like chunking and context. Which are theoretical constructs that came out of that memory research.

So yes, this is pretty much principal zero - cognitive load and understanding the theory underneath it are the most important thing - and are closely related to the two hard problems in computer science (cache invalidation, naming things and off by one errors).

Thank you for attending my TED talk

I've had some C# code inflicted on me recently that follows the pile of garbage design pattern. Just some offshore guys fulfilling the poorly expressed spec with as little brain work as possible. The amount of almost-duplicate boilerplate kicking around is one of the problems. Yeah it looks like the language design encourages this lowest common denominator type approach, and has lead into the supplier providing code that needs substantial refactoring in order be able to create automated tests as the entry points ignore separation of concerns and abuse private v public members to give the pretense of best practices while in reality providing worst practice modify this code at your peril instead. It's very annoying because I could have used that budget to do something actually useful, but on the other hand improves my job security for now.

I thought it was more that python was basically perl with the fun bits removed.

Or to put it another way: python helps you think more like the computer does. Perl helps the computer think more like you do.

I believe it was NSA not NASA - in his hubristic style larry wall described perl as being born from "a secret project in a secret laboratory".

I'd say the biggest influence on my programming work is recognising how to use that style of humour can help deal with situations that can sometimes get to quite high pressure - e.g. "please rescue this failing 9 month long $x^e6 project before it goes live in the next fortnight"

I think the lack of discussion of perl is in part because from a bird's eye view, python and perl do exactly the same stuff in exactly the same way, but python has the mindshare. Because of perl's depth and flexibility, for the average developer team it can be really hard to manage.

There's a similar story around javascript - note how es6(?) introduced `"use strict"`. Old school javascript always struck me as a bit like crippled perl with really good vendor support.

nah, it was created for their day job in order to provide reliable quick to write code under difficult conditions

Today's job is finishing up and testing some rather gnarly haproxy configuration. There's already a fairly high chance I'm going to stuff something up with it. There is no chance that I'm giving some other entity that chance as well.

I' a fully paid up member of the cult of Honk! festivals :D

There's a few local bands. Most notably to my mind, we have a periodic jam band that appears with varying configurations at one of the beachside changing rooms around here. There was this time when it was busy at summer tie, we had a decent sized group, and a couple of very well credentialed jazz musicians there. One of the nearby South Pacific Islanders came up to us and asked if he could sing with us. Between him and the band, we did this joyfully insane version of Kenny Rogers The Gambler. People were videoing it, but I've never seen any of the footage.

I have no aspirations to ever get paid gigs as a musician. To the point where if anyone ever does try to pay me, I'm not sure how I'd deal with it.

But I play lots of gigs on the streets and similar. My favourite is the rehearsal in a public space that accidentally turns into a gig. Life-changingly wonderful stuff.

Tough life being an actual pro musician, although there's an OK living to be made in teaching for the right people.

Speaking as a 50-something year old man whose mother finished her career in medicine and the very pointy end of politics, when I first heard this joke in the 1980s it stumped me and made me feel really stupid. But my 1970s kindergarten class mates who told me “your mum can’t be a doctor, she has to be a nurse” were clearly seriously misinformed then. I believe that things are somewhat better now but not as good as they should be …

> LLMs do none of that, they will take whatever you ask and give a reasonable-sounding output that might be anything between brilliant and nonsense.

This is exactly why I’ve been objecting so much to the use of the term “hallucination” and maintain that “confabulation” is accurate. People who have spent enough time with acutelypsychotic people, and people experiencing the effects of long term alcohol related brain damage, and trying to tell computers what to do will understand why.

Characters from the hitch hikers guide to the galaxy. Currently I have arthur, eddie, zarquon, trillian, alice, hotblack and marvin

This lab I was in used to use Scottish mountains. Some of which were visible from the lab window, sometimes.

Not that long ago I moved a 250kline codebase from oracle to postgres. Yes, SQL embedded in strings and so on.

Towards the end of that process, chat GPT helped me with that, and it was pretty valuable for some kinds of problem. Still had to watch it like a hawk and specify things really clearly to make sure it didn't go off the rails.

bottom of the article has a section "Does Notation Even Matter?"

And no mention of notched box plots which make a lot of the troublesome aspects go away?

+1 - recommend crunchy. I ran a substantial oracle to postgres project recently and crunchy were great.

The only advice on hearing aids is if you need them, get it diagnosed and intervened early. That way you get the cheapest and most reliable hearing aid that's going to work well for you.

Otherwise the stuff you described in your comment around attention filtering starts to happen because of the sensory loss. Therefore the longer you avoid hearing correction once your hearing starts to become impaired, the more complex and expensive a hearing aid you need to re-do. This is because these expensive hearing aids do a poor approximation of the things your brain/auditory cortex was doing prior to the sensory loss.

BRB - better go book a hearing test.

Too cold to hang washing out? Below freezing wet laundry starts to sublimate which when you hang it out.

I've been working on this as a way of better exposing organisational knowledge recently. A few things I've observed:

* The prompt engineering side is a black art.

* Generation is pretty amazing but less useful than it first seems.

* The open source and proprietary tooling around managing and interrogating datasets for NLP stuff is way ahead of where it was last time I looked maybe a decade ago

* It looks to me that with appropriate thinking about indexing then there's a lot of potential here. For example if I have a question answer set, I can index the question and which answers point to it. Get the LLM to identify the type of question I've just asked, and then use my corresponding corpus of answers to provide something useful based on the appropriate parts of the answer corpus.

That last bit is not the automatic panacea that the flashy and somewhat gimicky emergent properties of the generative side supply, but it seems like it can get good traction on some quite difficult problems quickly, and actually quite well using not too many local computing resources.

I'm going to put this here - The Crooked Fiddle Band - a Sydney folk band with major inspiration from Big Black and others had two albums produced by Albini - I couldn't think of a better match:

https://crookedfiddleband.bandcamp.com/album/overgrown-tales https://crookedfiddleband.bandcamp.com/album/moving-pieces-o...

I'm not sure that's correct. Hallucination definitely implies some sort of connection to reality, confabulation does not, it implies some kind of hard to detect error in stitching memories together coherently

Fabrication implies making things up for the sake of it. Confabulation is similar but is defined by making things up due to some limitation in capacity.

would lead to hafabulation. Still not acceptable in my view - confabulation is clearly the correct term

That making things up based on memories of past things is entirely what confabulation is. Bullshitting in the large as it were. I've met quite a few clinical confabulators (people with Korsakov syndrome and the like) and I find the parallels remarkable.

My view is that hallucination is something related to the interpretation of reality. It's not really directly mapping to memory at all. The mechanisms of confabulation entirely surround the gluing together of memories, and what are these models other than some sort of representation of memory.

I believe that you can also cause something a bit like a transient dysphasia by giving them bad inputs as well, so there is that on the language production side. However there's still nothing that pertains to the experience aspects central to what hallucinations actually are.

Please can you give an example of what might not be a memory error. Not that I think "memory error" is the right phrase either.

I'm really cross that the word "hallucination" has taken off to describe this as it's clearly in incorrect word. The correct word to describe it is "confabulation", which is clinically more accurate and a much clearer descriptor of what's actually going on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation

Interesting, thanks! On a similar but unrelated note, I think instead of MERGE INTOs, self-updating CTEs are a better bet for similar reasons.

Back in the dialup days, my dialup would die, and be unable to re-connect at dusk. Other than that, it was fine, for dialup.

The other week I saved my company a grand a year by reusing an existing service for some contractors rather than some new cloud service. Then promptly expensed a big chunk of that for repairs on my office chair :)