bumbledraven
Joined 18 years ago
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Comment · 15 days ago
Herbert seemed to think that to be human is to be essentially 'open-ended', capable of undiscovered, indeterminate evolution, both personally and as a species.
Indeed.
Comment · 21 days ago
> I guess [the term “autoformalization”] came from a chatbot?
The term dates back at least to 2020, years before the release of ChatGPT.
https://research.google/pubs/a-promising-path-towards-autofo...
Comment · 21 days ago
Did anyone consider keeping the current name but changing the pronunciation to “coke”?
Comment · 1 month ago
I tried multiple English translations of The Count of Monte Cristo, and the Robin Buss translation was the only one I enjoyed. (Unfortunately, there is no audiobook of this translation, but I had Codex create one for me.
If you're unconvinced, try comparing a few random passages to see which one you prefer, or just check the beginning of Chapter 1. You could also show a few translations of a passage to an LLM and ask it which one best conveys the nuance of the original French.
Comment · 1 month ago
Compared to chess, Magic: The Gathering ability transfers much better to real life. MtG has:
- dealing with imperfect information
- bluffing
- thinking ahead with an enormous number of possible moves (especially when you consider deck construction)
- tracking board state
- mentally implementing "triggers"
Comment · 1 month ago
Deep Blue vs Garry Kasparov (1997) and AlphaGo vs Lee Sedol (2016) marked the first defeats of a world champion by a machine in a chess or Go match. Coincidentally, both machines played an iconic move on Move 37 of Game 2:
• Deep Blue played Be4, declining a pawn capture to achieve a long-term positional advantage and fueling Kasparov’s suspicions of human intervention.
• AlphaGo played P10, a brilliant 5th-line shoulder hit that live commentators initially dismissed as a blunder or misclick.
https://franky07724-57962.medium.com/amazing-coincidence-in-...
Comment · 3 months ago
Does Tailscale offer a "security checkup" function? Best practices evolve over time, and it would be nice to know if I'm using the recommended configuration.
Comment · 5 months ago
Comment · 5 months ago
TFA links to https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/tailwind-is-smart-steering, which is about Tailwind, but makes multiple distinctions and points that could just as well apply to LLMs, e.g.:
> Builders value getting the work done as quickly and efficiently as possible. They are making something—likely something with parts beyond the frontend—and are often eager to see it through to completion. This means Builders may prize that initial execution over other long-term factors.
> Crafters are more likely to value long-term factors like ease of maintainability, legibility, and accessibility, and may not consider the project finished until those have also been accounted for.
> In my view, the more you optimize for building quickly, the more you optimize for homogeneity.
Comment · 5 months ago
800-word response by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Lucovsky, who was on the team that built Windows NT: https://nitter.net/marklucovsky/status/2052828852490285390#m.
It begins:
> In David Crawshaw’s recent post “The agent principal-agent problem” there’s a lot of insight beneath the headline “Code review is broken.” Worth reading carefully.
> Toward the end, David reflects on what he calls the old “cowboy” development culture at Microsoft in the 80s/90s. Not much has been written about that era, mostly because there was no social media, no laptops everywhere, no phones recording daily engineering life.
> A few thoughts from someone who lived it.
Conclusion:
> A lot of software quality did not come from pre-commit review gates.
> It came from tight teams, deep ownership, brutal integration pressure, system-wide stress, and developers who fully understood the machinery they were standing on.
Comment · 6 months ago
This article has one neat Google search trick I hadn't known about: `AROUND(#)`. But I am skeptical of much of the rest of it.
Searching for `“can anyone recommend”` to get unfiltered recommendations is an interesting hack, but I feel it's not too reliable. At reddit, you could ask this, and an unknown percentage of responses could be shills or bots.
I'm also skeptical of how much the suggested `@reddit` differs from just `reddit`. The description says it's for social media handles, but reddit is a platform, not an individual user's handle. I suspect google looks for the user's intent to see results from a particular site or social media platform and uses that signal to influence the ranking, and I doubt '@' has much of an effect on that process.
> The results Google omits tend to be less trafficked and less search-optimized, which frequently means they’re more substantive and written for readers rather than algorithms
Really? I call BS. Every time I've looked at the omitted results they've been very similar to ones I've already seen.
I stopped reading after that.