capyba

I just don’t understand - Apple decided to implement a more capable SIMD instruction set and just … didn’t document it? SIMD is hugely important in anything remotely HPC related. My first gen apple silicon laptop still favorably competes against Intel’s current best, years later. Why would they hide such an advantage?

This is my thought, exactly. Reading has always been a contract between the person who wrote the text and the person who’s reading it: “these are my thoughts, recorded to share with you.” When reading LLM-generated text that purports to be a real person’s that contract is broken. Verification that even just the basic ideas are the author’s is impossible. It feels cheap and deceitful.

Your last sentence describes my thoughts exactly. I try to incorporate Claude into my workflow, just to see what it can do, and the best I’ve ended up with is - if I had written it completely by myself from the start, I would have finished the project in the same amount of time but I’d understand the details far better.

Even just some AI-assisted development in the trickier parts of my code bases completely robs me of understanding. And those are the parts that need my understanding the most!

I wish I knew more about cattle to add to the analogy but I do very much appreciate it as is.

I’ve been a longtime competitive athlete and my best deadlift was 545 lb. I’ve been in many gyms in my life and I’ve only met maybe a dozen men lifting more than say 350 or so.

Expecting the “average” man to get to a 400 or even 300 lb deadlift is absurd. Sure, most people could be in better shape but a 4 plate deadlift is much more strength than most people need… and more than most people’s bodies can safely handle regularly. The risk of serious injury rises exponentially when you put on weight like that.

Building and maintaining strength, especially into the older ages, is certainly important but not to the levels you describe here. I suspect your comments here are based on neither personal experience nor proper education and training.

tkinter is the best kept secret in the Python std lib.

Pair it with numpy and matplotlib (two external dependencies that personally I consider part of Python itself), and you’ve got 80% of an interactive scientific simulation environment.

What exactly is an “AI working competency”? How to have a conversation with a chatbot? How to ask a chatbot a question that you confirm with a Google search and then confirm that with a trusted online reference and confirm that with a book you check out of the library three weeks later?

Perhaps the world is going the direction of relying on an AI to do half the things we use our own brains for today. But to me that sounds like a sad and worse future.

I’m just rambling here. But at the moment I fail to see how current LLMs help people truly learn things.

Same here! That’s a great blog with a lot of good advice.

Hearing someone proudly describe themselves as a libertarian always reminds me of the ol’ twitter quote that goes something like “libertarians are like house cats - fiercely self-assured of their own independence, yet completely reliant on a system they don’t appreciate or understand.”

I’d argue that in many of these instances, less is far more.

I want my car to just be really good at being a car, reliably get me from A to B. A Bluetooth connection to the stereo system is nice, but I don’t need a freaking 20” phablet right next to my face when I’m driving.

When I go to a website, I’m usually looking for information, to read something. I don’t often want fancy scroll and animations, I just want clear readable text free of distractions.

More and more these two examples seem to be going away, we’re losing the plot of what the point of these things are.

I feel for the author. I do both mechanical and software engineering and I’m in this career(s) because I love making things and learning how to do that really well. Been having the most difficult time accepting the idea that there isn’t a good market for people like us - artisans, craftsmen, whatever the term might be - who are obsessive about exceptional quality and the time and effort it takes to get there. In this day and age, and especially when LLMs look ever more like they can produce at least a cheap, dollar store approximation of the real deal, “doing things really well” is going to be relegated to an ever more niche market.

Radiation does not work “incredibly well”, especially at the temperature range of interest. Forced convection (what every large terrestrial electronics system uses, from gaming laptops to terrestrial data centers) is orders of magnitude more efficient at pulling heat out of electronics than radiation. Normally electronics generate heat in a very small area relative to the entire package size, and conduction+radiation offers many practical issues to efficiently dissipating that heat to deep space.

Source: many years of practical engineering experience solving this exact problem.

Agreed that some level of gatekeeping and some level of friction to protect quality are useful things.

I only personally know one Rust programmer (works in scientific HPC) and he’s fantastic, but in general I do get the sense that most Rust devs migrated from JS and are just now figuring out “omg strong typing and compiled code native to the client hardware is really nice!” and think it’s a ground breaking revelation.

Saying this as someone who is cautiously optimistic about Rust for my own work.

Honestly hadn’t even thought of that - easy to say “more is better, right?” or miscalculate what the dose should be.