sixtram

"I am your existential crisis", that's a good one.

Oh, I'm glad I don't work in the oven business. We're just starting a stealth startup that's revolutionizing dishwashers, and the prototypes are amazing. They use less water, less detergent, and this weekend we're hoping to solve the last remaining issue: occasionally, they break glasses.

So you're saying I can absolutely have a deep, nuanced discussion with an LLM, as long as I don't ask how he arrived at his conclusions?

You say you can have increasingly nuanced discussions with stronger models.

What I say is, when I asked Claude why he applied a certain change I didn't understand, and boy, it was a small change, he said he "reasoned from first principles" based on the code paths. But it didn't work, and when I asked, "Okay, describe the steps of your reasoning from first principles," it literally answered that it had just made it up.

So, nuanced discussions with models, I don't buy it.

Is it really cheating if you work hard and memorize all the questions? That's basically learning.

Just 300 a day? That's only one ticket every 1.5 minutes. I hope in a year we can fix an issue under 30 seconds with ZERO supervision.

Why does the AI need SQL queries? Who needs that? It will just write its own ACID-compliant database with its own language, and while it's at it, reinvent the operating system as well. It's turtles all the way down.

To continue, this design has additional benefits:

The code is not littered with dry-run flag checks; the internal code doesn’t even know that a dry run is possible. Everything is rolled back at the end if needed.

All database referential integrity checks run correctly.

Some drawbacks: any audit logging should run in a separate transaction if you want to log dry runs.

I use a similar strategy for API design. Every API call is wrapped in a large database transaction, and I either roll back or commit the transaction based on dry-run or wet-run flags. This works well as long as you don’t need to touch the file system. I even wrap emails this way—emails are first written to a database queue, and an external process picks them up every few seconds.

love the title of Windows recovery process screen: uninstall latest quality update

could you share an anonymized desk photo?

I've just got a new Samsung and it's wobbling too. I hate this. Why can't they at least put the cameras in the middle? Or maybe horizontally centred? Or they could just put another bumper on the other side to make it symmetrical. I'm looking for a cover to balance this out, but no luck so far.

When I started high school in the early '90s, there was a compulsory summer reading list of 10–12 books, each ranging from 300–800 pages. Then we had to write essays about them. This was just our summer homework before the new school year started. I didn't enjoy it at all; at the same time, I read lots of easy fiction, sometimes several hundred pages a day.

My six year old (who is still in kindergarten) reads about 70–100 pages per week of books aimed at eight to nine year olds.