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tipsytoad

268 karma · joined May 22, 2020

https://tom-pollak.github.io/
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tipsytoad··on I'm a Luddite (and So Can You)
I wholly disagree with the comic, but a anti AI art take I’m more sympathetic to: https://x.com/soi/status/1815584824033177606?s=46
tipsytoad··on Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations
I don’t think this hits at the heart of the issue? Even if we can catch AI text with 100% accuracy, any halfway decent student can rewrite it from scratch using o1s ideas in lieu of actually learning.

This is waay more common and just impossible to catch. The only students caught here are those that put no effort in at all

tipsytoad··on Leaving Neovim for Zed
Just another +1 that if you’re going to give vscode a fair shot, it’s much better to go with vscode-neovim than the standard vim extension. You can even map most of your config right over.

E.g. (mine) https://github.com/tom-pollak/dotfiles/tree/master/nvim

tipsytoad··on Structured Outputs in the API
How is this different from instructor? github.com/jxnl/instructor

namely, why did they take so long for something that just seems like a wrapper around function calling?

tipsytoad··on I’m writing a new vector search SQLite Extension
Looks really nice, but the only concern I had — how does the perf compare to more mature libraries like faiss?
tipsytoad··on LLMs and Programming in the first days of 2024
The most useful feature of llms is how much output you get from such little signal. Just yesterday I created a fairly advanced script from my phone on the bus ride home with chatgpt which was an absolute pleasure. I think multi-prompt conversations don't get nearly as much attention as they should in llm evaluations.
tipsytoad··on In 2024, please switch to Firefox
Switched to Firefox a month or two ago, mostly for ublock origin on android, and unlimited history (seriously, why is this not the standard?)

I've tried to like it but honestly it's been painful. MacOS Sonoma seems to have a hover bug, which has been unresolved through the last 3 bug fix updates. Performance is "fine" but seems to lag with many tabs open which was never an issue in chrome (this is on an M2 pro!) PDF reader also seems significantly slower as well. At this point I'm considering going back to chrome.

tipsytoad··on IDEs we had 30 years ago
Moved to vscode with the neovim extension (vim mode was slow for me over large files). vsc is super customisable, and you can remove all the tab bars, side panels and anything else you don't use fairly easily. It's also far more stable than the neovim ecosystem, i don't have time to mess with neovim plugins breaking bi-weekly anymore
tipsytoad··on Show HN: TBMK – A Commands Bookmark for Terminal
Using fzf through bash history and using # comments as tags on common commands seems to work just as well for me. Not sure what else this adds
tipsytoad··on Fish – Update on the Rust port
Eh, you can probably get very similar to fish with zsh + loads of plugins, but fish has lots of niceties out of the box (syntax highlighting, autosuggestion based on your directory). I've been using fish + starship with just a fzf plugin and it's got everything I need.

Check it out, it's effective with very little config

tipsytoad··on What's New in Python 3.12
Priding ;)
tipsytoad··on Text embeddings reveal almost as much as text
So like an autoencoder for text?
tipsytoad··on "You have a 27% 'AI' issue in here"
I emphasize with the student here, but passing it through an ai detector yourself before submitting and keeping a version history seems like an easy way to combat any false claims.
tipsytoad··on Tig: Text-Mode Interface for Git
It's a repository viewer last time I checked, it doesn't have as many features as lazygit (rebase, merge conflict). I prefer lazygit personally
tipsytoad··on How to Use Monadic Operations for `std:optional` in C++23
Tangentially related, but if you don't have access to c++23 or you don't like monadic properties, passing by reference and returning bool success can emulate or_else, transform, and_then with || &&

  bool fetchFromCache(int userId, UserProfile& profile);
  bool fetchFromServer(int userId, UserProfile& profile);

  UserProfile profile;
  if (!fetchFromCache(userId, profile) && !fetchFromServer(userId, profile)) {
    std::cout << "Failed to fetch user profile.\n";
    return;
  }
or just to prove a point, although even more unreadable than the monads:

  bool extractAge(const UserProfile& profile, int& age);

  UserProfile profile;
  int age;
  if (
    (!fetchFromCache(userId, profile) && !fetchFromServer(userId, profile))
    || !extractAge(profile, age)
  ) {
    std::cout << "Failed to determine user's age.\n";
    return;
  }
  
  int ageNext = age + 1;
This probably isn't a great example usecase for this, but its helpful when creating composable transform pipelines
tipsytoad··on macOS Containers v0.0.1
Karabiner and applescripts can get you pretty far
tipsytoad··on Ask HN: What programming languages are you using at $WORK?
Python, C++
tipsytoad··on Teaching with AI
Really? The only reason that ChatGPT is more adept at coding problems is because there is vastly more training data. There's nothing fundamentally different between problem solving a coding problem and physics problem. Like all the others before it, I don't think this comment will age too well.
tipsytoad··on Fish – A friendly interactive shell
I like https://github.com/PatrickF1/fzf.fish

Can also do cool stuff like search for a file to open in $EDITOR and searching git log

tipsytoad··on Do Machine Learning Models Memorize or Generalize?
Seriously, are they only talking about weight decay? Why so complicated?
tipsytoad··on What's Wrong with Me?
Your CV is how many pages? Instead of listing everything from assembler to JSON, maybe try to get it down to 1 (2 max)
tipsytoad··on Mac Mouse Fix
Lol. Have you ever tried to use a trackpad on Linux?
tipsytoad··on Copy is all you need
Vscode has this built in: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/python/jupyter-support-py
tipsytoad··on Writing Python like Rust (2020)
I didn't know about Protocol! How does this differ from ABC?
tipsytoad··on Ask HN: Why does HN require tiny baby fingers to operate on a phone?
Materialistic is a good android app for HN
tipsytoad··on An open-source mouse and trackpad utility for Mac
Trackpads SOTA, Keyboards OK, Mouse is PITA
tipsytoad··on Your keyboard layout is broken
Boy I can't wait to remap my entire vim/vscode config, relearn a lifetime of touch typing, and have my computer inaccessible to anyone else who wants to use it for a +30% typing efficiency
tipsytoad··on Exploring the Illusion of Sentience in Large Language Models
I agree? Also related karpathy:

https://karpathy.github.io/2021/03/27/forward-pass/

tipsytoad··on Exploring the Illusion of Sentience in Large Language Models
There's no "exploration" here... The argument that an LLMs output can be deterministically calculated as a sum of matrix multiplications and non linearity is not evidence that LLMs are conscious/understanding either way.

In reference that LLMs "don't understand anything and are stochastic parrots over their training dataset" refer to in context learning, llms can be taught new concepts not present in their training data.

tipsytoad··on FANN: Vector Search in 200 Lines of Rust
Dude.

Cos(x, y) = x . y / ||x|| * ||y||

If x and y are normalized:

Cos(x, y) = x . y

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