spot5010

+1 you can walk through the subway turnstile and not slow down.

In a conversation about careers, a friend of mine casually dropped a simple approach to life that has helped me a lot: you can’t have everything all the time, so make the best of what you got. Some years you will have health and knowledge but be poor, others years you will build wealth but may not be able to uphold your moral values, etc.

I may not have the luxury to ignore bad incentives right now, but I try to make lemonade from the lemons life throws at me so that one day I can.

Wow okay I need to try this out.

Nothing against what you are doing. That’s awesome and exactly the kind of thing I would nerd out about. I was just commenting on my current state of not having the mental bandwidth to do these things.

As a new father, just using so many apps sounds exhausting, let alone building and maintaining them. I would have been very excited about these maybe 10-15 years ago. Now I just want the ability to do things with my phone when my hands are tied up holding the baby.

The website is martinfowler.com, but the article seems to be written by Giles Edwards-Alexander.

The human analogy would be that I don’t remember everything in the books I have read, but I do recall reading a particular book and can always look it up.

So, is there a way to train a neural network and then tune it forget a lot of the facts that can be easily retrieved, but keep the intelligence.

My father worked in the HPCL refinery in Chembur. I got to go visit on Republic day when I was a kid, but they stopped doing visits. He worked in the distillation tower at first, but then moved into diesel desulphurization. I wish it wasn't but its a dangerous job, and he narrowly escaped several accidents, including a horrible naphta fire that took many lives.

As a young grad student, I remember going to a talk by Bennett where he explained how a Quantum Computer allows manipulation in a 2^N dimensional hilbert space, while the outputs measurements give you only N bits of information. The trick is to somehow encode the result in the final N bits.

I felt this was a much better layman explanation of what a quantum computer does than simply saying a quantum computer runs all possible paths in parallel.

I feel like there’s a lesson to be learnt by reading Lord of the Rings and seeing what happens to Saruman and Denethor.

I don't think we get rid of the CPU. But the relationship will be inverted. Instead of the CPU calling the GPU, it might be that the GPU becomes the central controller and builds programs and calls the CPU to execute tasks.

What if we create a situation in a lab that can be labelled as a collapse of the wave function by interaction with a macroscopic object. Except the macroscopic object is under our control and we can reverse the collapse.

A quantum computer is such a macroscopic state.

There’s papers that “derive” Born’s rule from the many worlds interpretations, e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.7907

I don’t claim to understand them though. I have tried.

What you said here makes sense. Forgive me, but I have trouble even articulating what it is that I don’t understand correctly.

Maybe what I meant was this: if I perform a quantum experiment where the spin measurement of an electron could be spin up or spin down, the future me would end up in one of two branches: I measure spin up, or I measure spin down. There wouldn’t be any possible world where I measure a superposition of spin up and spin down, because such a a state is going to decohere rapidly. This makes sense. What I’m unable to grasp is that even though the wave function of the universe contains both branches, “I” somehow experience only one of the two branches.

The answer to that I guess if that the two branches are nearly orthogonal they will merrily evolve independent of each other. But somehow “I” only experience only one of them.

Sorry for the rambling. I’m not able to articulate what I don’t understand.

The part that I have trouble wrapping around with many worlds interpretation is how I as an observer end up in one of the many bifurcations. Any links you can share that will help me with understanding that is welcome!

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-manyworlds/) goes into this in some depth, and it seems like the right way to think about it is say that "I" in one branch is a different entity than the "I" in a different branch. I have somehow not been able to grok it yet.

And I agree about the naming. I really dislike the name "many worlds interpretation", which seems to imply that we have to postulate the existence of these additional worlds, whereas in fact they are branches of the wavefunction exactly predicted by standard quantum mechanics.

I agree. My suspicion is that token efficiency is what will drive more efficient tool calls, and tool building. And we want that. Agents should rely less on raw intelligence (ability to hold everyting in context), and more on building tools to get the job done.

These seem ideal for robotics applications, where there is a low-latency narrow use case path that these chips can serve, maybe locally.

I had the same question.

Maybe the train is software that's built by SWEs (w/ or w/o AI help). Specifically built for going from A to B very fast. But not flexible, and takes a lot of effort to build and maintain.

I didn’t think of that, but you are right. At some point I thought I understood templates r-value references work but now I’ve forgotten.

Maybe a std::take to pair with it?

Maybe a compiler error that a const object cannot be “moved”?

That would force the programmer to remove the std::move, making it clear that its a copy.

How strict was your elimination of sugar? Did you find a gradual trend of your lipid profile over the course of a year, or was it more sudden?

Pre LLM agents, a trick that I used was to type in

auto var = FunctionCall(...);

Then, in the IDE, hover over auto to show what the actual type is, and then replace auto with that type. Useful when the type is complicated, or is in some nested namespace.

"I personally don’t touch LLMs with a stick. I don’t let them near my brain. Many of my friends share that sentiment."

Any software engineer who shares this sentiment is doing their career a disservice. LLMs have their pitfalls, and I have been skeptical of their capabilities, but nevertheless I have tried them out earnestly. The progress of AI coding assistants over the past year has been remarkable, and now they are a routine part of my workflow. It does take some getting used to, and effectively using an AI coding assistant is a skill in and of itself that is worth mastering.

Right, but it needs to be formalized.

The reason code can serve as the source of truth is that it’s precise enough to describe intent, since programming languages are well-specified. Compilers have freedom in how they translate code into assembly and two different compilers ( or even different optimization flags) will produce distinct binaries. Yet all of them preserve the same intent and observable behaviour that the programmer cares about. Runtime performance or instruction order may vary, but the semantics remain consistent.

For spec driven development to truly work, perhaps what’s needed is a higher level spec language that can express user intent precisely, at the level of abstraction where the human understanding lives, while ensuring that the lower level implementation is generated correctly.

A programmer could then use LLMs to translate plain English into this “spec language,” which would then become the real source of truth.

Found an article which talks about the phase margin, referencing 80 degrees (pi). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_margin

A wild guess as to what is happening. I haven’t actually tested this hypothesis so I could be completely wrong.

In feedback systems, the gain is a function of frequency, and typically decreases when going from low frequency to high frequency. This is often accompanied by a phase delay.

So if the overall gain of the system is high enough, there will be some high frequency where the gain is 1, and the phase is 180 degrees. This would result in positive feedback, amplifying noise at that frequency.

Maybe that’s what’s happening in the latest AirPods? If Apple is aggressive cranking up the gain of the noise cancellation system, there’s some high frequency where the noise gets amplified rather than suppressed.

The solution would be to either reduce the gain (which reduces the noise cancellation), or to add some differential gain in the system which pushes out the unity gain frequency to higher frequencies.

The scenario the author describes is bound to happen more and more frequently, and IMO the way to address it is by evolving the culture and best practices for code reviews.

A simple solution would be to mandate that while posting coversations with AI in PR comments is fine, all actions and suggested changes should be human generated.

They human generated actions can’t be a lazy: “Please look at AI suggestion and incorporate as appropriate. ”, or “what do you think about this AI suggestion”.

Acceptable comments could be: - I agree with the AI for xyz reasons, please fix. - I thought about AIs suggestions, and here’s the pros and cons. Based on that I feel we should make xyz changes for abc reasons.

If these best practices are documented, and the reviewer does not follow them, the PR author can simply link to the best practices and kindly ask the reviewer to re-review.

I do most of my banking and investments on my phone. I don’t think I’m in the minority here.