rryan

HN is not your therapist, but possibly your decision making is driven by branding instead of judging technology on its merits? Easy mistake to make ;)

CircleMUD was my first intro to C and network programming. I was at a computer camp for 8-10 year olds that taught BASIC. One of the counsellors was doing their undergrad at caltech and pulled the students who were bored by BASIC into a separate group to learn C by editing CircleMUD.

Hacking up a pre-existing MUD was the perfect mix of immediacy / interactivity and fun to hook me. So thankful to that guy, wherever he is. He probably changed the course of my life.

Heh, not really

Disagree. The abstractions they are talking about aren't like, the y-combinator. They're talking about boring software engineering abstractions.

I know nothing about the PhD candidate and professor who co-authored this, but I don't think this statement makes sense in general.

Typically CS labs at universities contain people who have not spent a significant amount of time exposed to large industry codebases and the corresponding complexity. I think the post would have more credibility coming from e.g. the platforms team at a tech company with a monorepo.

agents are unlike humans in many ways but they have their own limitations. it's magical thinking to believe that they are able to cope with zero software abstractions, especially as a codebase increases in size and complexity

and today's agents increase codebase size and complexity much faster than humans do via traditional software engineering methods, so this is likely to hit a wall faster than if human software teams were to do this experiment.

No longer the case

As a human emdash enjoyer, I'm pretty damn grumpy that everyone assumes I'm a chatbot now. :P

I think the super long timelines in automotive make it really hard to succeed. Really impressed with what ClearMotion accomplished given that

Don't make me tap the sign: There is no such thing as "bytes". There are only encodings. UTF-8 is the encoding most people are using when they talk about modeling "raw bytes" of text. UTF-8 is just a shitty (biased) human-designed tokenizer of the unicode codepoints.

RMSNorm is pretty insigificant in terms of the overall compute in a transformer though -- usually the reduction work can be fused with earlier or later operations.

ML 101: Do not evaluate on the training data.

Yes of course it can, because they fit in the context window. But this is an awful test of the model's capabilities because it was certainly trained on these books and websites talking about the books and the HP universe.