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hace 3 horasdiscuss

I remember the first time I encountered someone that said they chose software because it paid well. They were such an oddity to me, including their thought process when it came to code. Now, in the cooperate world, I work with people who all admit they cheated their way through school (what an insane group conversation that was), and are very far from "nerds". I haven't worked with someone that gave a single damn in nearly a decade now. I feel incredibly out of place, and increasingly angry that nobody cares about anything. And, this has nothing to do with AI (which I enjoy). It's just a big group of people who do the absolute minimum for any task, who don't have any engineering rigor/care at all, and just try random shit until it works.

I'm trying VERY hard to get into their mindset, and be more like them, but it so hard to not care. I wish I could have sooner.

hace 3 horasdiscuss

See the reason Google Fiber existed [1]. It wasn't for a product, it was to kick the pants of all the monopolistic broadband providers. Now, you have similar motivation on a global scale.

[1] https://gdt.com/blog/whatever-happened-to-google-fiber/

hace 3 horasdiscuss

> we’d have 24/7 live coverage of every inch on earth but do we really want that?

I think you misunderstand the maths a bit. If the goal is high bandwidth, which requires high density, for specific, randomly distributed, parts of the earth, then, by the fundamental laws of gravity and orbits, you'll also have coverage over the rest of it, whether you like it or not.

hace 4 horasdiscuss

It's in the training data! Long conversations between humans result in humans getting tired and going to bed.

I have this reality baked into my workflow:

1. Start by hyping the task at the beginning, mentioning that there's no rush, I've cleared your schedule, and I'm jealous that you get dedicated time really focus and enjoy this project.

2. Periodically say "Great work, let's finish this next week. Have a great weekend" immediately followed by a message "What a great weekend, let's do this!" sort of hype, for it to continue. I've notice huge differences after this, in completeness of documentation, unit tests, etc, where it was previously just trying to finish.

3. Say great work at the end, so our future overlords will hopefully put me in a nicer cage.

hace 4 horasdiscuss

Please reread this comment thread. I never spoke to software performance being solved.

hace 5 horasdiscuss

Related, the craziest emergent behavior I see is non-technical managers killing projects because they themselves can't understand how it could be implemented. I firmly believe many managers think they're in the positions they are because they're technical, rather than managerial.

hace 5 horasdiscuss

> Even if this was a good idea when applied to humans (it's not)

I'm not sure I understand. What's not a good idea? I'm asking you how you would do it, with some possible examples. Or, are you saying it's a bad idea to try to measure how competent someone is before hiring them?

> LLMs aren't humans,

Not sure how this is relevant. My question was how to measure competence and "intelligence" for a task an entity, intelligent enough to do that task, will do. LLMs are not humans, but are usually used to complete tasks humans want completed that would usually be done by humans. That's where the most token spend is for them. Since that's what people are using them for, it seems reasonable to try to measure competence in those tasks.

hace 5 horasdiscuss

I had incredible difficulties with Chemistry, more than any other subject, because most everything was hand waved away, requiring mostly rote memorization. I could never get an intuitive understanding, partly because my profs seemingly refusing to think about things from a physics perspective. My physics prof was able to help with some of it. It was very odd.

If I would have stuck with it, would things have improved?

hace 6 horasdiscuss

True, but that's an unknown internal model, without details of the architecture. We'll have to see if the LLM model, itself, was responsible for the "novel" bits, or if it was stuffs bolted onto the LLM that made it possible. I suppose "LLM" is maybe no longer sufficient to describe the systems that LLM are being integrated into, so maybe my point is pedantic/semantic.

hace 6 horasdiscuss

Say you were interviewing a human, to see how capable they were. You are allowed to give them take home work. What kind of questions would you ask, or tasks would you give, to try to get a measure of their competence? If you gave them a task, would you iterate with them on the design, or would you see what they could produce on their own, without input?

Measuring "intelligence" is hard, but giving an "intelligent" entity tasks, and seeing what comes out, and then comparing the output with others, seems like a very reasonable, relative, way to do it.

hace 6 horasdiscuss

> without a large chunk of that being pre-existing information.

Is there any evidence that novel reasoning is present in LLM? I've never been able to make that work, and I believe Apple's paper some time ago was good evidence that it doesn't exist. In my experience, sparse latent spaces result in a complete, comical, failure in reasoning.

hace 9 horasdiscuss

> that you’re choosing to frame as a “best practice”,

I don't follow.

> because you do not want to put in the work.

Yes, just as nobody wants to type opcodes, or write their own http clients, or etc. It's why most of us use higher level languages. Leave the solved things solved, and work on actually interesting/new things! That doesn't mean not understanding, it just means not wasting time on the same boilerplate/code duplicated by millions of developers.

hace 10 horasdiscuss

Is this a reply to my comment?

hace 10 horasdiscuss

I disagree.

Abstractions are not a convenience, they're a cognitive necessity, compressing large aspects of the problem space into easy to not think about blocks, allowing humans, with their limited working memory, to reason about larger problems. The only reason a seasoned developer can think at a high/system level is because of the abstractions/compressions they've formed in their heads.

Technology exists to make it so we don't have to think about/put time into low level things, so we can do more interesting things instead. Not thinking about banal things is the foundation of progress.

AI seems to be the give us an abstraction I've been waiting for: a method to write code at the level of libraries , with libraries working with/adapting to other libraries.

hace 10 horasdiscuss

> the day API costs balloon

This can only happen if government gets involved and prevent the free market, which includes foreign models, from doing its thing.

> or APIs are down

There's no reason to depend on a single model, at this point.

> No you couldn’t. Well you could but it wouldn’t be appropriate for actual beginners unless you stripped it down so much that calling it an engine was meaningless.

You definitely can. One of the assignments in the CS intro course I took was a bullet hell game. "calling it an engine was meaningless" is an opinion that requires ignoring the fundamentals of what a game engine is.

It actually seems to be a relatively small vocal group. I've marked most of them red (as I previously did the one above) with https://hackersmacker.org

2026 Steam hardware survey [1]:

    Windows: 94.10%
    Linux: 3.68%
    macOS: 2.21%

[1] Click the "OS Version" row to expand the table, https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

I think this is a perfectly reasonable question. They're having a very different experience than many other people (including myself). It would be interesting to get an idea of why it's so different.

anteayerdiscuss

Say I rewrite a large codebase from python to C++, preserving all behavior. That's up to a 50x speed up.