polyrand

Joined 6 years ago

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4,355
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414
Member since
Mar 16
Medical doctor and machine learning/software engineer.

ricardoanderegg.com

Twitter: [at] ricardoanderegg Contact: hn [at] polyrand [dot] net

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Recent submissions

Comment · 3 months ago
I'm already quite excited about Turso being SQLite-compatible, but adding many features on top.

And when a feature is not directly compatible with SQLite (ie: you can't directly read the file with `sqlite3`, it's straightforward to convert). This is great because you know you'll always be able to continue working with that database. Even if Turso stopped working, it's still a valid SQLite database.

A combination I would be excited about is:

- Full support for Postgres protocol/wire format (ie: Postgres, but in-process, backed by a single file). - Optional: Client/server architecture for further scaling and remote management using existing Postgres tooling - All backed by a SQLite-compatible file

They are already adding MVCC to SQLite anyway. So their effort seems doable, and I hope they succeed.

Comment · 3 months ago
On one hand, this had to happen at some point. I feel the split between ChatGPT vs. Codex wasn't helping OpenAI.

Anthropic did it right from the beginning by unifying everything in the same application. From my perspective, Codex is much better than any other app, but for non-technical users they were still stuck in ChatGPT only, and "nobody" knew about Codex. Anthropic also did it better by putting everything under the "Claude" brand: Claude Code, Claude Cowork, etc. Compared to ChatGPT vs Codex. OpenAI seems to be trying to revert that unwanted split.

With that said, I share the sentiment that it's 100% unclear what's the difference between Codex and Work. Chats now are a second-class citizen of the app. Although the "Attach to task" feature of chats looks useful. Putting "Chats" below the "Tasks" section would have been much better.

This may end up badly. Most people use ChatGPT just for regular chats, and they are not used to "agentic" interactions. It may take people time to adapt, and you can definitely lose users during that transition.

This also seems to have indirect implications regarding pricing. Codex (and Work) consume credits. Chats were also limited before, but you could mostly use ChatGPT without thinking about it. Now people will inevitably use Codex/Work more, simply because that's what the UI shows them, thus consuming credits. This will force you to keep an eye on credits a lot more.

Others have mentioned that the old ChatGPT can't be installed any more. Only if you had it installed before, it now became ChatGPT Classic. However, you can still add the chatgpt.com page as a Web App. You'll need an internet connection to use it, but the old ChatGPT app wasn't working properly without internet anyway... so the overall experience may not be that different. I'd even say that, to me, the web UI has always felt more polished than the native app.

Comment · 4 months ago
I believe that's like saying we should only have a single "throw" event in athletics. Or why having hurdles events when you already have regular running ones.

I like that we can have more variety, more people competing, and overall different modalities to test human performance.

Comment · 4 months ago
Finswimming is actually a separate sport, just not an olympic sport. Although it has some exciting characteristics like very fast 50 meter races, which I enjoy as a "regular" (non-fins) swimmer.
Comment · 8 months ago
I find this a very exciting release. I was actually hoping we would somehow get macOS on mobile 'A' chips some day. And I think this is better than putting 'M' chips on an iPad.

My iPad with an 'M1' chip actually consumes more battery than much older iPads when both are locked and with the screen off. I ended up figuring it was probably because, in the 'M' chip, the lowest possible energy usage is way higher than the 'A' chip. So even small background wake-ups used more energy.

I'm still hoping one day we have an iPad with macOS.

Comment · 8 months ago
I do this, and it's a huge quality of life improvement. No so much because of shadowing existing binaries, but for better command auto-complete. For example: I have a bunch of tmux utilities and all start with `,t` which is not a polluted command-name prefix compared to just `t`.

But I'm now facing the problem that LLM agents don't like this, and when I instruct them to run certain tools, they remove the leading comma. It's normally fixed with one extra sentence in the prompt, but still inconvenient.

Comment · 8 months ago

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