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tedmiston

6,862 karmajoined 15 lat temu
Taylor D. Edmiston, Principal Software Engineer / Backend / DevOps / etc

I'm in the top 3% on Stack Overflow (all-time) [1] having helped over 8 million [2] software developers.

- web: https://taylore.dev

- email: [email protected]

- stack overflow: https://stackoverflow.com/users/149428/taylor-edmiston

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/tedmiston; my proof: https://keybase.io/tedmiston/sigs/Q1_u0JHA3IxrPnlGfmtvPIzqSu2kR05Gsys9NZXWUks ]

All comments copyright © Taylor D. Edmiston, all rights reserved.

[1]: https://stackexchange.com/leagues/1/alltime/stackoverflow/2008-07-31/149428?sort=reputationchange#149428

[2]: https://stackoverflow.com/users/149428/taylor-edmiston?tab=topactivity

comments

tedmiston
·3 dni temu·discuss
> Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." It is based on the assumption that if the publishers were confident that the answer was yes, they would have presented it as an assertion; by presenting it as a question, they are not accountable for whether it is correct or not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
tedmiston
·6 dni temu·discuss
> you are constantly not finishing today's tasks. it lives to see another day. if you can fix it, bound it to the workflow, you will be a billionaire

dual dishwashers
tedmiston
·13 dni temu·discuss
[dead]
tedmiston
·13 dni temu·discuss
Allergy immunotherapy (shots) work by gradually desensitizing the immune system for your specific allergens over several years, so yes. Some people can get to the point where they no longer need a daily antihistamine, but it's all very personalized and individual.

In any case, it's worth doing the skin prick allergy shot testing so you can have some idea of what common allergens affect you and the intensity of each.
tedmiston
·15 dni temu·discuss
the creative inputs to the whole process and judgment aspects of telling it how to refine and edit
tedmiston
·15 dni temu·discuss
Definitely. One of my fav techniques is to ask an LLM to simplify something by 90% or 99% if it looks overly complicated. Or asking the output to be critically reviewed by another agent too.
tedmiston
·15 dni temu·discuss
pretty big leap of faith there
tedmiston
·15 dni temu·discuss
likewise
tedmiston
·15 dni temu·discuss
The adoption curve across companies and industries is highly variable right now. Tech moves fast but plenty of boring industries need software but don't move on the bleeding edge of tech / LLMs / etc.

Even in the discourse here, you can see people getting variable quality of results and variable skepticism, some of which is valid, but a lot of it reads more like not having spent time really understanding prompt engineering.
tedmiston
·15 dni temu·discuss
What does a random bug in one LLM's frontend app have to do with learning how to do prompt engineering well?
tedmiston
·15 dni temu·discuss
> What are you writing that Claude is actually writing all of it? Every time I get past the green field stage, I just end up throwing out what it writes half the time since its trash.

For the current state of frontier models, you need to break the steps down so that the LLM understands a process like what you might go through as you expect it (which is often different for everyone).

i.e., get it to agree to a spec, then get it to agree to a build plan, agree on unit test signatures, UI etc as needed, then let it build, ...

"Prompt engineering"
tedmiston
·15 dni temu·discuss
> LLMs (at least today’s) don’t build simple solutions ...

... by default.
tedmiston
·15 dni temu·discuss
> One area where I feel safe saying they are “wrong”, rather than just going with a different assumption that was left unsaid, would be when it makes up API endpoints. It sees the general pattern in an API, then makes up an endpoint that sounds good, follows the pattern, but isn’t actually implemented.

I remember seeing this maybe 6+ months ago, but using paid plans, RAG, and a high thinking mode has eliminated a ton (almost all) of those kinds of hallucinations. Open models and free tiers are not there yet though.

> I’ve also seen a lot of issues with co-workers using an LLM to write their readme files. I look at the readme for what return values I should get, go to use them, and get an error. I check the code, and sure enough, none of the variables in the readme exist. The LLM just through they sounded good. Things like this I would say are pretty objectively wrong.

LLMs don't co-sign the quality of PRs though — your coworkers do. It's not unusual for docs to get oudated and not be maintained enough in small codebases, but that's not an LLM specific problem.
tedmiston
·16 dni temu·discuss
They work in that they induce taking more breaks (20/20/20 rule) but they're also annoying in that they interrupt deep focus. If the latter can become a bit smoother about not interrupting deep focus context, then they'll be more helpful.
tedmiston
·16 dni temu·discuss
Time Out is okay but extremely annoying in that it always seems to pop up and take over the screen at the worst possible times even with configuration to make it less interruptive. I stopped using it in favor of just closing my laptop for a bit with that.

It could be a lot better if it understood the focus context better, but it doesn't do that today. Hopefully LookAway is better at that.
tedmiston
·23 dni temu·discuss
> I work with one guy who's just completely lost the ability consensus-build ideas with human beings. When he reaches consensus with his AI assistants on a design, analysis, plan of action, etc., he's extremely resistant to considering any other options or accepting any other input. When people do push back, he ...

To me this reads like a personal resistance to feedback / resistance to behavior change or a very jr eng more than agent related. Code isn't sacred — LLMs often easily generate absurdly overcomplicated garbage spaghetti code, but this appears to be getting better, and they are "steerable" towards better outputs with a few rounds of revisions, and some light process around a light spec, TDD, etc.
tedmiston
·24 dni temu·discuss
Well that's a Silicon Valley level pivot
tedmiston
·28 dni temu·discuss
you can do the period trick:

> . http://example.com .

https://www.idownloadblog.com/2024/03/15/how-to-send-links-w...
tedmiston
·w zeszłym miesiącu·discuss
I generalized the statement from one cloud to big public clouds categorically to show by hyperbole that ... what difference does it make?! [One can find analogous critiques of Azure, GCP, etc.]

Last year, AWS did ≥ $100B in revenue across millions of customers. But where do you draw the line exactly? "Everyone who uses < thing > is < problematic >" feels extreme.
tedmiston
·w zeszłym miesiącu·discuss
"Anyone who uses < public cloud computing > is hypocritical" is a pretty insane take, even for HN.

All technologies have benefits and costs — choosing and using a technology does not imply the nonexistence of tradeoffs. One can give sufficient consideration to the downsides, and then determine that the upsides outweigh them. It's not rocket science.