nimithryn

Oh ok. So I'll just have to apply 4-5 times to every job to be sure I'm considered. Sounds like a good equilibrium!

I think that the problem is, at the end of the day, the engineer must specify exactly what they want the program to do.

You can do this in Python, or you can do this in English. But at the end of the day the engineer must input the same information to get the same behavior. Maybe LLMs make this a bit more efficient but even in English it is extremely hard to give exact specification without ambiguity (maybe even harder than Python in some cases).

Also Christianity was a Levantine religion, growing fast in Greece, Asia Minor, Egypt, Syria, and the Levant. The Eastern Roman Empire at the time was far richer, more urbanized, closer to the grain supply, and closer to Silk Road and Black Sea trade access.

Based on some of his other actions (like moving the capital), I'd speculate Constantine's conversion was part of a deliberate pivot to focus on the East (which paid off, as the centralized Byzantine state went on to survive much longer than its Western counterpart). I'm speculating because inferring his intentions has no historical evidence afaik.

I think there are more possible answers? Jason's mother differs depending on the author...

For example, Jason's mother was Philonis, daughter of Mestra, daughter of Daedalion, son of Hesporos. So Jason's maternal great-grandfather was Hesporos.

I agree that it felt hard to read. It also doesn't make sense that they're fishing in a storm. But from a prose perspective I don't think it's cringe, which is an improvement from my expectation. I'd share some of the writings I think are terrible but I don't like to pick on people.

If R1 one-shotted this then I revise my opinion somewhat. This doesn't give me a gut "this is awful" emotional reaction (although I don't think it's good - it's pretty cliche, and I found my eyes glossing over pretty quickly).

I was somewhat turned off of DeepSeek (the first few questions I gave it, it returned 100% hallucinated answers). But maybe I'll have to look into it more, thanks.

Am I the only one who thinks that R1 is awful at creative writing? I've seen a lot of very credulous posts on twitter that are super excited about excerpts written by DeepSeek that I think are absolutely absymal. Am I alone in this? Maybe people have very different tastes than I do?

(I have no formal training in creative writing, though I do read a lot of literature. Not claiming my tastes are superior - genuinely curious if other people disagree).

Any citation on the additive random noise?

An example:

I'm looking for a new job, so I've been grinding leetcode (oof). I'm an experienced engineer and have worked at multiple FAANGs, so I'm pretty good at leetcode.

Today I solved a leetcode problem 95% of the way to completion, but there was a subtle bug (maybe 10% of the test cases failing). I decided to see if Claude could help debug the code.

I put the problem and the code into Claude and asked it to debug. Over the course of the conversation, Claude managed to provide 5 or 6 totally plausible but also completely wrong "fixes". Luckily, I am experienced enough at leetcode, and leetcode problems are simple enough, that I could easily tell that Claude was mistaken. Note that I am also very experienced with prompt engineering, as I ran a startup that used prompt engineering very heavily. Maybe it's a skill issue (my company did fail, hence why I need a job), but somehow I doubt it.

Eventually, I found the bug on my own, without Claude's help. But leetcode are super simple, with known answers, and probably mostly in the training set! I can't imagine writing a big system and using an LLM heavily.

Similarly, the other day I was trying to learn about e-graphs (the data structure). I went to Claude for help. I noticed that the more I used Claude, the more confused I became. I found other sources, and as it turns out, Claude was subtly wrong about e-graphs, an uncommon but reasonably well-researched data structure! Once again, it's lucky I was able to recognize that something was up. If the problem wasn't limited in scope, I'd have been totally lost!

I use LLMs to help me code. I'm pro new technology. But when I see people bragging on Twitter about their fully automated coding solutions, or coding complex systems, or using LLMs for medical records or law or military or other highly critical domains, I seriously question their wisdom and experience.

Agree. Also, Kubrick's other works strongly emphasize lighting, composition, music, and effects over plot. Just look at Barry Lyndon's candlelit scenes (which look like paintings by the Dutch masters), Eye's Wide Shut's Christmas lights, Clockwork Orange's use of Beethoven, or 2001's match cut from a bone to a spaceship. You can't achieve those in a book, because they are purely audiovisual phenomena. And movies have different constraints: like time limits.

King doesn't have to worry at all about what the score is, or how to film a wall of blood. It's simply not part of the medium. The requirements and constraints are completely different.

Amazing quote. Can you share a link to the article, if it exists?

> It's not about efficiency. I think the current system is more efficient (hence economies of scale). It's just that the rent extraction/profits are concentrated among the platform owners rather than spread out among local venue owners and artists.

Chiming in again. In some ways, this is "efficiency". Serving the globally best stuff is more efficient. The problem is we are trading exploration/variety for exploitation/efficiency. Reasonable minds may differ as to how that should be handled.

> You've ignored the fact that discovery is now a new service component that really didn't exist before. We can tag music and artists and we can automatically discover related music and artists very easily. All the major services do this. Think of an expanded and federated (all the way back to the artist) open source version of this.

This is a good point. We have gone from diffusion-constrained to search-constrained. No clue what to make of that. I would submit to you that the amount of time people have to consume art has not changed, and that improved search now pushes people to consume the globally best art rather than niche content. Are there any domains or platforms that you think do a good job of surfacing specific niche content? Or am I misunderstanding your point?

>There's no reason to think that the previous model somehow produced the most efficient way of "determining who people listen to." It was almost certainly suboptimal. It's no surprise then that this suboptimal model was more or less copied onto the internet and all new players bought out so no new model could be revealed.

It's not about efficiency. I think the current system is more efficient (hence economies of scale). It's just that the rent extraction/profits are concentrated among the platform owners rather than spread out among local venue owners and artists.

> The lack of available artistry and market for it extends through multiple levels, and in this case, right into the software stack that _should_ exist for artists to self publish and for listeners to automatically discover.

I agree it should be possible, the problem is setting up the incentives correctly.

edit: clarity