glhaynes

Joined 17 years ago

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Comment · 19 days ago
I wish there were anywhere that adults could talk about interesting stuff intelligently without a thousand stupid and/or I've-already-thought-about-this-and-the-basic-talking-points-aren't-going-to-change-my-mind arguments taking up 99% of the space.

I feel like maybe the answer is browser-integrated LLM plugins tasked with "I don't ever want to see anything having to do with this topic of argument ever again."

Comment · 19 days ago
Sarcastic? wdym?
Comment · 25 days ago
yet AI companies scrape them constantly

Do we have reason to think that they scrape them more often than they scrape other stuff? (Honest question, I have no idea.)

Doesn't Stackoverflow exist because people can in fact not read the documentation or source code, at least not to the point where it helps them understand their problem.

Yes; not sure how this is relevant to LLMs. One of the most impressive things I've seen change in the last few months is that they don't think twice about cloning a repo of linked-to-my-app code to analyze it to determine a solution. Or even disassemble closed-source object code to find an answer!

With agentic speed/capability, the calculus of "eh let's experiment and explore from the outside a little first" vs. "let's just read the dependencies (whose codebases I'm not familiar with), potentially including the binary itself, and figure out exactly what's going wrong" changes. So I think what's valuable in terms of ancillary info for technical topics is changing.

Comment · 25 days ago
They can read the web/repos just like anyone else.
Comment · 25 days ago
I dunno. I know it makes me an enemy of humanity and all, but LLMs have mostly replaced Stack Overflow and dev blogs for me. A dialog with something that writes well (or can take a totally different swing at an explanation if the first one isn't so good), has expert-level knowledge, and isn't egotistical. But maybe most of all the dialog part.

Anyway, I'm learning so much more so much better than I ever have before. Turns out the ultimate slop tools are also the ultimate learning tools if you use 'em right.

Comment · 1 month ago
And if you're building something of any importance, you need to have verification steps at checkpoints. It's honestly just engineering.

Weak models tasked with review can catch a decent amount of the mistakes that weak models make and help them be much better, especially if you have them verify against authoritative sources. Strong models make far fewer mistakes to begin with. And, for the mistakes they do make, a swarm of reviewers (same model or somewhat weaker, reviewed by the stronger model) can really help reduce the error rate further.

Comment · 2 months ago
And at the end of the experiment I usually have my solution
Comment · 2 months ago
Yes, I experiment much more. It's easier to justify, and, perhaps more importantly, just WAY psychologically easier to throw away a 20 minute experiment that your robot wrote for you than the same when it took you a week of tedious manual coding.
Comment · 2 months ago
We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.

Could gone to some great parties.

Did that instead.

— Elon Musk

Comment · 2 months ago
Ironically, by predicting the most chaotic outcome you're falling for the narrative that AI will transform the economy overnight, which is exactly what AI companies' marketing divisions want you to believe.

You're using a rhetorical device to imply that they're "falling for" a narrative. "Falling for" only follows if that's why they are making the prediction; this construction doesn't allow that they may have come to this belief on their own.

Comment · 2 months ago
You probably don't expect an employee to engage in wrongdoing but you don't give everyone access to the company bank account.
Comment · 2 months ago
Or maybe it's not just a craze and we'll soon look back and think "I wonder what we might've done differently if we'd been clear-eyed about what was happening."

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