arglebarnacle

25 дней назадdiscuss

The models are getting better at agentic coding, so over time using complicated harnesses and precise prompt engineering to attempt to squeeze out an extra X% performance will become irrelevant as the models approach expert-level performance. The bitter lesson in miniature.

arglebarnacle

2 месяца назадdiscuss

I hear you but of course history is full of examples of biases shared across large groups of people resulting in huge human costs.

The analogy isn’t perfect of course but the way humans learn about their world is full of opportunities to introduce and sustain these large correlated biases—social pressure, tradition, parenting, education standardization. And not all of them are bad of course, but some are and many others are at least as weird as stray references to goblins and creatures

arglebarnacle

4 месяца назадdiscuss

Fascinating. We hear that the leaps in AI have been made possible by orders of magnitude increases in compute and data availability, and of course that’s substantially true—but exactly how true? It’s a nice exercise in perspective to see how much or how little modern machine learning methods would have been capable of if you brought them by time machine to the 70’s and optimized them for that environment.

arglebarnacle

5 месяцев назадdiscuss

Interesting, when I've come across this before I have always interpreted it as "not from Hong Kong", especially in a context like this where it's raised in the context of engaging with a western counterpart's potential suspicion.

It's been my experience that westerners (I am a westerner) do have different assumptions about "mainland" Chinese people than people from Hong Kong who are assumed to be more cosmopolitan, "westernized", or even "politically neutral" from a western liberal capitalist perspective, so it seems reasonable to point it out in this context.

arglebarnacle

6 месяцев назадdiscuss

A really interesting article, and I'm likely to give it a shot a work. I'm grateful for it, and yet I found it difficult to get through because of a sense of "LLM style" in the prose.

I won't speculate on whether the post is AI-written or whether the author has adopted quirks from LLM outputs into their own way of writing because it doesn't really matter. Something about this "feeling" in the writing causes me discomfort, and I don't even really know why. It's almost like a tightness in my jaw or a slight ache in my molars.

Every time I read something like, "Not as an aesthetic choice. Not as nostalgia. *But as a thinking tool*" in an article I had until then taken on faith was produced in the voice of a human being feels like a let down. Maybe it's just the sense that I believed I was connecting with another person, albeit indirectly, and then I feel the loss of that. But that's not entirely convincing, because I genuinely found the points this article was making interesting, and no doubt they came originally from the author's mind.

Since this is happening more and more, I'd be interested to hear what others' experiences with encountering LLM-seeming blog posts (especially of inherently interesting underlying content) has been like.

arglebarnacle

6 месяцев назадdiscuss

Agreed, and the impact, culture, and law around the rise of distributed smartphone video by citizens is especially relevant in a universe where the Justice Department has called filming immigration officers "obstruction of justice" and even "domestic terrorism" (https://reason.com/2025/12/26/justice-department-says-filmin...)

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