Yeah, claiming “product-market fit” on coding assistants for this multi-trillion dollar capital expenditure seems premature. Anthropic will post one and only one quarter of “operating profit” (aka losses after taxes and…
There's a very real possibility that AI proponents completely lose the next generation of adults. The output is not enjoyable to consume, the people who rely on it are not cool, and the effects of using it are…
AI coding isn’t an abstraction, though. You can’t treat a prompt like source code because it will give you a different output every time you use it. An abstraction lets you offload cognitive capacity while retaining…
At what point do LLMs enable bad engineering practices, if instead of working to abstract or encapsulate toilsome programming tasks we point an expensive slot machine at them and generate a bunch of verbose code and…
It's easy to get this way with enough scrolling, try to focus on the things around you in real life. If you aren't reading LinkedIn or HN, how much do you actually hear about AI in day-to-day life? If someone at work…
It’s notable that just the English “implementation” of FizzBuzz here is longer and more ambiguous than the naive Python implementation, never mind the boilerplate (which itself is also longer than the Python). The…
LLM coding isn't a new level of abstraction. Abstractions are (semi-)reliable ways to manage complexity by creating building blocks that represent complex behavior, that are useful for reasoning about outcomes. Because…
I think the analogy to high level programming languages misunderstands the value of abstraction and notation. You can’t reason about the behavior of an English prompt because English is underspecified. The value of code…
It's disheartening that a potentially worthwhile discussion — should we invest engineering resources in LLMs as a normal technology rather than as a millenarian fantasy? — has been hijacked by a (at this writing)…
Going to a popular restaurant that accepts app delivery orders (or a grocery store in a neighborhood where people prefer to pay for delivery) is an objectively bad experience. The kitchen or checkout line is backed up…
I feel like this needs an editor to have a chance of reaching almost anyone… there are ~100 section/chapter headings that seem to have been generated through some kind of psychedelic free association, and each section…
It's interesting to call this a pre-mortem as it seems mainly organized around thinking positively past the imperfections of the technology. It's like a pre-mortem for the housing crisis that focuses on the benefits of…
I think this leaves out what is probably the most likely future for this technology, having a similar destiny to most technologies as a tool. Both of these visions assume (I think incorrectly) a trend towards ubiquity,…
No doubt it's a profit margin game, but I wish the big e-reader companies (Kindle, Kobo) would take a foray into this form factor. The friction of navigating through an Android interface into an app is just enough to…
I'm sure it's nearly an academic distinction, but: > Basically, for any given region, we find its highest point and assume that there is a perfectly placed sibling peak of the same height that is mutually visible.…
Impressive that this was done in 3 days at all, but to anyone who is familiar at all with System 7's appearance, the screenshot is almost comically "off" and gives away that this is not a straight port so much as some…
Fixing "theoretical" nondeterminism for a totally closed individual input-output pair doesn't solve the two "practical" nondeterminism problems, where the exact same input gives different results given different…
A world model itself, in its particulars, isn't as important as the tacit understanding that the "world model" is necessarily incomplete and subordinate to the world itself, that there are sensory inputs from the world…
There are two additional aspects that are even more critical than the implementation details here: - Typical LLM usage involves the accretion of context tokens from previous conversation turns. The likelihood that you…
I think the wide variance in responses here is explainable by tool preference and the circumstance of what you want to work on. You might also have felt "behind" not knowing or wanting to use Dreamweaver, or React, or…
If you have a decent understanding of how LLMs work (you put in basically every piece of text you can find, get a statistical machine that models text really well, then use contractors to train it to model text in…
The example given for inverting an embedding back to text doesn't help the idea that this effect is reflecting some "shared statistical model of reality": What would be the plausible whalesong mapping of "Mage (foaled…
I think two things can be true simultaneously: 1. LLMs are a new technology and it's hard to put the genie back in the bottle with that. It's difficult to imagine a future where they don't continue to exist in some…
Typically debugging, e.g., a tricky race condition in an unfamiliar code base would require adding logging, refactoring library calls, inspecting existing logs, and even rewriting parts of your program to be more…
Because you, as someone who is buying a $500k house with 20% down in 2025, are going to have much higher costs than your landlord, who bought it for $100k in 1995 and has already paid it off. Bake in the fact that many…
Yeah, claiming “product-market fit” on coding assistants for this multi-trillion dollar capital expenditure seems premature. Anthropic will post one and only one quarter of “operating profit” (aka losses after taxes and…
There's a very real possibility that AI proponents completely lose the next generation of adults. The output is not enjoyable to consume, the people who rely on it are not cool, and the effects of using it are…
AI coding isn’t an abstraction, though. You can’t treat a prompt like source code because it will give you a different output every time you use it. An abstraction lets you offload cognitive capacity while retaining…
At what point do LLMs enable bad engineering practices, if instead of working to abstract or encapsulate toilsome programming tasks we point an expensive slot machine at them and generate a bunch of verbose code and…
It's easy to get this way with enough scrolling, try to focus on the things around you in real life. If you aren't reading LinkedIn or HN, how much do you actually hear about AI in day-to-day life? If someone at work…
It’s notable that just the English “implementation” of FizzBuzz here is longer and more ambiguous than the naive Python implementation, never mind the boilerplate (which itself is also longer than the Python). The…
LLM coding isn't a new level of abstraction. Abstractions are (semi-)reliable ways to manage complexity by creating building blocks that represent complex behavior, that are useful for reasoning about outcomes. Because…
I think the analogy to high level programming languages misunderstands the value of abstraction and notation. You can’t reason about the behavior of an English prompt because English is underspecified. The value of code…
It's disheartening that a potentially worthwhile discussion — should we invest engineering resources in LLMs as a normal technology rather than as a millenarian fantasy? — has been hijacked by a (at this writing)…
Going to a popular restaurant that accepts app delivery orders (or a grocery store in a neighborhood where people prefer to pay for delivery) is an objectively bad experience. The kitchen or checkout line is backed up…
I feel like this needs an editor to have a chance of reaching almost anyone… there are ~100 section/chapter headings that seem to have been generated through some kind of psychedelic free association, and each section…
It's interesting to call this a pre-mortem as it seems mainly organized around thinking positively past the imperfections of the technology. It's like a pre-mortem for the housing crisis that focuses on the benefits of…
I think this leaves out what is probably the most likely future for this technology, having a similar destiny to most technologies as a tool. Both of these visions assume (I think incorrectly) a trend towards ubiquity,…
No doubt it's a profit margin game, but I wish the big e-reader companies (Kindle, Kobo) would take a foray into this form factor. The friction of navigating through an Android interface into an app is just enough to…
I'm sure it's nearly an academic distinction, but: > Basically, for any given region, we find its highest point and assume that there is a perfectly placed sibling peak of the same height that is mutually visible.…
Impressive that this was done in 3 days at all, but to anyone who is familiar at all with System 7's appearance, the screenshot is almost comically "off" and gives away that this is not a straight port so much as some…
Fixing "theoretical" nondeterminism for a totally closed individual input-output pair doesn't solve the two "practical" nondeterminism problems, where the exact same input gives different results given different…
A world model itself, in its particulars, isn't as important as the tacit understanding that the "world model" is necessarily incomplete and subordinate to the world itself, that there are sensory inputs from the world…
There are two additional aspects that are even more critical than the implementation details here: - Typical LLM usage involves the accretion of context tokens from previous conversation turns. The likelihood that you…
I think the wide variance in responses here is explainable by tool preference and the circumstance of what you want to work on. You might also have felt "behind" not knowing or wanting to use Dreamweaver, or React, or…
If you have a decent understanding of how LLMs work (you put in basically every piece of text you can find, get a statistical machine that models text really well, then use contractors to train it to model text in…
The example given for inverting an embedding back to text doesn't help the idea that this effect is reflecting some "shared statistical model of reality": What would be the plausible whalesong mapping of "Mage (foaled…
I think two things can be true simultaneously: 1. LLMs are a new technology and it's hard to put the genie back in the bottle with that. It's difficult to imagine a future where they don't continue to exist in some…
Typically debugging, e.g., a tricky race condition in an unfamiliar code base would require adding logging, refactoring library calls, inspecting existing logs, and even rewriting parts of your program to be more…
Because you, as someone who is buying a $500k house with 20% down in 2025, are going to have much higher costs than your landlord, who bought it for $100k in 1995 and has already paid it off. Bake in the fact that many…