HackerTrans
TopNewTrendsCommentsPastAskShowJobs

frumiousirc

421 karmajoined vor 10 Jahren

comments

frumiousirc
·vor 3 Tagen·discuss
Another way to interpret it is that a massive sample bias is governing your premise. Programmers are embracing LLMs to scratch their own itches and programmers tend to work in terminals (yes, many use IDEs) so they build to their own environments and HN readers and contributors tend to be programmers talking about programming things.
frumiousirc
·vor 9 Tagen·discuss
I'd settle for Altman and his ilk paying a proper progressive income tax.
frumiousirc
·vor 12 Tagen·discuss
It's not so straight-forward. Either you must add hooks the the agent to notify tmux directly or you must use an external tool that polls tmux to determine one of its panes has gone silent and then based on that, send notification to tmux.

The poling requires tmux (not screen nor dtach, as far as I could find). And, silence for N seconds is just that, the poll doesn't know if that really means waiting for input or something else. With agents (like claude) that have a throbber/spinner going while "thinking", silence is a good indicator.

Kitty terminal can be polled for current text and then see if that has changed in N seconds. This would allow not having to depend on tmux which may be preferable to some kitty users. Generally, using tmux always surfaces some annoying problems for me.
frumiousirc
·vor 14 Tagen·discuss
This split in what different people or groups get out of LLMs is pervasive and really interesting. In the beginning I was dismissive of those with bad experience with a "you are holding the tool wrong" smugness. But as I read more and more experience, I see all combos and I now know my initial knee jerk conclusion was clearly wrong. There are newbie programmers getting good or bad results as well as experienced developers getting either flip of the coin. I don't know what to conclude. I really want to know what are the lines that explain these very different outcomes. Is it the types of problems being solved? The harnesses? The programming languages? FWIW, my experience has been that among my cohorts of mid to deeply experienced developers working in the domain of experimental physics, all have leveled up various degrees after adopting Sonnet and Opus level LLMs using claude code CLI in Python, C++ and web tech, small scale scripts up to multi-package novel system develop and green field as well as incremental development and code maintenance.
frumiousirc
·vor 16 Tagen·discuss
What is "AOT"?
frumiousirc
·vor 20 Tagen·discuss
Maybe it was a thing from before clock speeds saturated and Moore's law mutated into being satisfied by ever increasing core count? It could have been useful when spec'ing hardware with the goal of running multi-threaded jobs that scale both their throughput and RAM requirements linearly with number of threads. That would make it sort of a continuous version of the more discrete GB/core rule of thumb. However, such linearly-scaled MT jobs are a subset of all MT jobs. And, ST jobs are not covered. A 2GB ST job on a 1GB / 1GHz machine will again need two cores, wasting one. When run on a 5GB/5GHz machine the job needs only its one core but must waste 3GB.

In particle physics, as more of the code is being GPU-accelerated, there is now another integer ratio to worry about optimizing: CPU core per GPU device. Across the landscape, some jobs have zero GPU acceleration, others may need 100 cores to keep a GPU busy, or only 1 core. Yet others can tune their CPU/GPU ratio to optimize throughput given what hardware ratio a given facility provides. Only a fraction of the software in the ecosystem takes up this challenge.

Most physicist pretending to be software developers or vice versa who are involved in the field do not consider any of these computing realities. At some level, that's natural and excusable. It's hard enough to develop the simulation and reconstruction and analysis algorithms. Simultaneously optimizing their implementation for throughput on a given hardware assumption is even harder. Harder still is to do that optimization over the variety of hardware assumptions. There are only a few cases where this holistic thinking has driven the design of the software.
frumiousirc
·vor 21 Tagen·discuss
> cuts harsh wind noise

They look a little silly but cat-ears work surprisingly well.
frumiousirc
·vor 21 Tagen·discuss
In particle physics, processing jobs face a limit of about 2GB/core. This is driven by the realities of "grid computing". The hardware in the computing facilities have approximately 2GB/core and jobs allocate based on number of core. This ratio has been fairly stable for a long time. Some facilities may have a bit more RAM per CPU core but 2GB/core is the general rule of thumb. I hazard a guess that this will not change throughout the (hopefully small number of) years that this memory cost bubble persists. In fact, the increase in cost may lead some facilities to keep older hardware going beyond its EOL/warranty period, prolonging a ratio that may actually be relatively generous compared to today's hardware systems.

As a consequence of this fixed RAM/core ratio, substantial software development effort goes to either making jobs fit in 2GB or if that is not possible then to utilize multithreading. Generally, particle physics processing does not particularly benefit from MT except in this fixed RAM/core situation. Sometimes large memory jobs are needed (inherently or because of bloat that is too costly to improve). When run on the "grid", these jobs must allocate multiple cores just to get "their" memory. If those jobs can use the extra cores, overall throughput does not have to suffer.

That's for conventional software, which still makes up the bulk of the computing. The situation for the growing amount of GPU-accelerated software is different and more varied. One trend can be seen relating to VRAM. Research groups with easy access to big GPUs like A100 write code to fit or exceed the relatively copious VRAM limits of the data-center GPUs, while groups that lack easy access to DC GPUs but have access to more modest "gamer" GPUs write more advanced software that can fit the smaller VRAM. In some cases, they write the software so it can scale the computation, keeping GPU utilization high while staying just under the VRAM limit.

General budget crisis and limited resources in the particle physics field are in part responsible for all of this tailoring of the software to fit the hardware. If better funded, particle physicists could spend more time doing physics and less time squeezing last drops of processing power.
frumiousirc
·vor 28 Tagen·discuss
Yes, the spam arms race is a really good analogy. In that light, my thoughts are aligned with heuristics that might be applied with procmail or in the original, pre-learning, spamassassin.

A fight-fire-with-fire is to insert an LLM to judge and/or respond to new pull requests and issues. This brings its own risk as it lets anyone who can make a PR/issue inject a prompt. It would also put one more wedge between the real human contributors and the real human developers.

A "humanity score" could also be an ingredient. GitHub or 3rd parties, could maintain a score of how human an account is. The "humanity" of all text produced by an account could be judged by LLM and/or humans. This could be centralized or based on a web-of-trust. Actually, I'd also like to have such a thing for reading HN and reddit comments.

But still, any system we can dream up can be attacked and we are back to an arms race.
frumiousirc
·vor 28 Tagen·discuss
[flagged]
frumiousirc
·vor 30 Tagen·discuss
I think everyone / every project needs to adopt a strategy consistent with their values.

Unfortunately, I see the choice space here as having "developer effort" anti-correlated with "negative repercussions".

On one end of the distribution, a "hair trigger ban" strategy is low-effort for the developer but will have some fraction of false positives and some fraction of those impacted will complain to "the socials" and some fraction of those complaints will gain traction and, as we have seen, can unfairly taint the project or worse. Responding and managing the false positives also requires developer effort, unless the developers can sustain a "fsck the haters" attitude.

On the other end of the distribution, the developer can spends substantial effort to engage each submitter to ascertain and correct bad behavior, educate them on how they should engage other humans as a fellow human in this LLM era.

There is developer effort needed of different types along this distribution.

A divide-and-conquer strategy might go something like this:

- Rank each submission in some low dimension space (llm<-->human, malicious<-->helpful)

- When enough samples are collected, perform clustering in this space to determine stereotypes, name these clusters, and develop mitigating strategies and implementations as needed.

Mitigations from easy/extreme to hard/accommodating could include:

- Hair trigger ban button.

- Copy-paste a link to an explanation in a comment before closing and/or banning.

- Customized explanation in comment before closing and/or banning.

- Link or customized explanation of what must be done to move the sample to a more favorable category and close/ban if resistance or silence is returned.

- Ongoing engagement in the face of resistance or silence.

This "meta development" program to provide such a system/facility could of course be highly automated with LLMs, fighting fire with fire.

(Despite the length of this reply, it was written entirely by a random human on the internet and not an LLM).
frumiousirc
·letzten Monat·discuss
> Basically, think of this not as the CLI program saying to an agent "answer me this question" or "edit this file for me", but rather, the CLI program popping open a mini "guided + 99%-of-the-time automated" TUI coding-agent micro-IDE "inside" the workflow, in about the same way that git pops open your EDITOR inside `git commit`.

Isn't this simply having your mechanistic script call `claude "Prompt that is well honed to provide a mini, guided, 99%-of-the-time automated LLM action to $THE_THING"`? And, possibly including some `--allowed-tools`?
frumiousirc
·letzten Monat·discuss
> The target codebase is very large.

But, does every prompt need the entire codebase?
frumiousirc
·letzten Monat·discuss
"microsoft", okay, off to a great start. First click in the ToC that looks interesting and something I'd actually like to know as a RUST outsider:

    Common Python Pain Points That Rust Addresses
But then number one:

    1. Runtime Type Errors
    
    The most common Python production bug: passing the wrong type to a function. 
    Type hints help, but they aren’t enforced.
Uh, okay. This rarely if ever has been a problem for me and I don't usually even use type hints.

Then comes calling out the existence of None, the GIL and packaging as common "pain points". None of these have posed any problem to me essentially ever. Packaging used to be honestly annoying but since uv hit the scene, not at all.

I should have known better and stopped after reading "microsoft".
frumiousirc
·letzten Monat·discuss
> They do need to have some form of dedinator

And some dedotaded wam.
frumiousirc
·vor 2 Monaten·discuss
> Based on the article here, and Firefox's mythos article, they had found bugs with Opus 4.6 as well but mythos is finding more that it missed.

It's not quite apples-to-apples. It was Opus on Firefox 148, Mythos on 150. A better test of Mythos vs Opus would have been to apply Mythos to Firefox 148. Or also re-apply Opus to Firefox 150.

Do we know all the Opus+Firefox 148 bugs are fixed in Firefox 150? Do we know the number of new bugs introduced per Firefox release?
frumiousirc
·vor 2 Monaten·discuss
> When my Emacs opens a markdown file it immediately converts it into OrgMode format.

I want that. Can you give some details?

A search finds modeverv/markdown-to-org which looks 80% there but activates based on a yank or converting an already loaded markdown buffer. Perhaps it can be made to apply on opening a .md file.
frumiousirc
·vor 2 Monaten·discuss
> When an LLM provides you with an overconfident piece of writing with no sources to back it up, what do you do?

You draw made up lines on made up plots and call it evidence, obviously.
frumiousirc
·vor 2 Monaten·discuss
If I'm a malicious actor that gets root, can I killswitch the killswitch?
frumiousirc
·vor 2 Monaten·discuss
It's been a day or so and I don't see any change at https://usage.report/