carlmr

Trying to hit guardrails is a fair point though. If they can think, they should be able to think through guardrails by understanding what is part of the language for language construction reasons, and what is prompt input.

We could have both by introducing another keyword than "default" here.

In some cases you want "default" handling, in other cases it's a runtime detection of a code issue. E.g. you could add a "fallback" case which is the same as "default" yet if your code doesn't exhaustively handle all sealed class cases won't compile. This would still create a fallback, if your sealed class is widened later on, but still allow you to error out if it's already the case right now.

If LLMs really were to "think" in the broader sense, and not pattern match on a huge database, adversarial features shouldn't pose a problem to them. E.g. humans are naturally bad at doing math. Barring some exceptional humans, we derived mechanisms to get math results that we can't easily do in our head on paper.

If the LLMs were thinking in the sense that some people say they are, they will easily recognize the adversarial nature (e.g. letter counting in the language) and build their own tools to write conformant code right away. As a normal human would also build tools to solve the things we know we're not naturally good at.

The effect should be that a few tokens are spent on building the tool, and then the rest of the problem can be solved with a "normal" amount of tokens without brute-forcing the solution.

If the LLMs are glorified pattern matchers they might not find enough patterns in the corpus of human knowledge and remain inefficient at it.

The weakness I see is rather that this kind of problem-solving can be pattern matched on the corpus of existing human knowledge, so it may be that pattern matching on human thinking might still be enough to solve these problems.

Completely agree, but sadly I have seen platform projects with 0 real internal customers. Only an idea.

The more dogfooding projects the better. And yes, rule of three applies.

>This ended up hurting me because object initialization touched three separate cache lines (obvious in hindsight, but the advice of using SoA failed me here).

I mean this is kind of what happens with any advice that has nuance to it, that's not carried with the advice.

E.g. if you have a point in 3D space with x, y, z coordinates. Array points as SoA of individual dimensions makes sense only if you do a lot of averaging and such on the individual dimensions.

If you mostly use the 3 coordinates together, SoA will have bad caching behavior.

So the better advice would be to try to keep things that are used together in the same cache line, whether it's on dimension or all 3. Usage makes the difference.

If we're talking about something old, sure, but MCP and AI is new enough that any software interfacing with it that hasn't changed in 6 months it's a fair suspicion that it's abandoned.

>arguably, yes, they should RTFM

Agreed. Good design is when the things do what you expect them to do without reading the manual, don't reuse wording with other meaning in the wrong way. That way if you do encounter nee wording, you know you should read the manual.

> I find these days I prefer to write using a cheap mechanical pencil

I know this is contrary to your advice but mechanical pencil, get a Kuru Toga, it's a really nice improvement and not very expensive. It auto-rotates the pencil tip, so you don't have the sharp end at some point.

For permanent writing get a Uni ball gel writer, it's supremely smooth to write with. Also not hugely expensive.

They're both not the cheapest option, but an amazing writing experience without being the fancy kind of expensive.

>Fun fact! Lime putty is anti-mold even in humid conditions because upon exposure to moisture, CaOH2 + H20 becomes too basic for mold to grow on.

Can we use this instead of grout in the bathroom somehow?

>(Apparently that particular department was the wrong one, to ask a question like that!)

Yes, the math department.

In any case linear algebra, stochastics, calculus; plenty of engineering and science applications for all these.

Garmin pay if you're ok with Garmin is one possibility.

>There is something deeply disturbing in it that makes me feel I'm not talking to a self sufficient entity.

It makes you feel that way because it is that way. They're not self-sufficient.