stenecdote

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Was this written by an LLM? I'm not highly confident, but there are some telltale signs. For example, the negative preceding multiple positive contrasting examples pattern is quite common in LLM-written text, and it appears multiple times throughout the text.

> They didn’t ask permission. They reverse engineered. They read RFCs like scripture. Their idea of “AI” was Eliza on the school computer lab’s terminal—and they probably rewrote it in Perl for fun.

> Today’s AI dev isn’t dropping shellcode into memory via a buffer overflow—they’re fine-tuning GPT on sentiment-labeled customer complaints for a mid-tier CRM startup. The tools are slick. The stacks are vast. The logs are in JSON. And the energy is… agile.

Also, I like em dashes still but the number here seems high. --- As an additional test, I asked Claude to write a post on the topic given just the title, so it couldn't copy the style from a snippet. Here's a snippet from the conclusion. Notice the similar style and structure between it and one of the OP's concluding paragraphs:

Claude:

> The hacker ethic hasn't died; it has evolved. Where once it meant breaking into systems, now it might mean breaking open black boxes. Where once it meant sharing code, now it might mean sharing compute. The tools and targets have changed, but the fundamental drive—to understand, to share, to democratize—remains.

OP:

> What the 90s hackers did with port scanners and punchy manifestos, today’s AI rebels do with open weights, privacy-preserving algorithms, and Git repos that mysteriously disappear from major platforms.

Look, I'm not in principle opposed to posting LLM writing, but it does seem like bad form to post an LLM's output on the topic of LLMs and not at least call it out as such. This is doubly true given that if I had to guess, not very much curation was done on top of this.

Comment · 6 years ago

I don't think this is true having read some of the later chapters and not knowing measure theory. And if you don't trust me, Gelman doesn't know measure theory either (https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2008/01/14/what_to_le...) and he wrote the book...

Current Thoughts on Stoicism an1lam.github.io

1 stenecdote 7 years ago 0 comments

Comment · 8 years ago

Knuth has said that the story as told above is apocryphal. I quote from here (http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1193856): > Donald: The story you heard is typical of legends that are based on only a small kernel of truth. Here’s what actually happened: John McCarthy decided in 1971 to have a Memorial Day Programming Race. All of the contestants except me worked at his AI Lab up in the hills above Stanford, using the WAITS time-sharing system; I was down on the main campus, where the only computer available to me was a mainframe for which I had to punch cards and submit them for processing in batch mode. I used Wirth’s ALGOL W system (the predecessor of Pascal). My program didn’t work the first time, but fortunately I could use Ed Satterthwaite’s excellent offline debugging system for ALGOL W, so I needed only two runs. Meanwhile, the folks using WAITS couldn’t get enough machine cycles because their machine was so overloaded. (I think that the second-place finisher, using that "modern" approach, came in about an hour after I had submitted the winning entry with old-fangled methods.) It wasn’t a fair contest.

> As to your real question, the idea of immediate compilation and "unit tests" appeals to me only rarely, when I’m feeling my way in a totally unknown environment and need feedback about what works and what doesn’t. Otherwise, lots of time is wasted on activities that I simply never need to perform or even think about. Nothing needs to be "mocked up."

Comment · 8 years ago

I like Andrew Ng's short article (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140320175655-176238488-lear...) about this topic. Recommends taking short videos of elements of your speech and then watching them, tweaking, and repeating.

Comment · 8 years ago

Yeah, this was me posting first, which ironically garnered much less interest than someone else's post (number 2 I believe).

Comment · 8 years ago

I learned yesterday that Ken Thompson used to host readings of Unix source code at Berkeley where they would go through the code line-by-line (https://www.salon.com/2000/05/16/chapter_2_part_one/): >And from the very beginning, Unix benefited from a communal vibe that spread directly from its creators, Ritchie and Thompson. > > Fabry recalls grasping the hidden wonders of Unix one week in 1975 when Thompson conducted a "reading" of Unix over several successive nights. > >"The first meeting of the West Coast Unix User's Group had about 12 or 15 people," recalls Fabry, a mild man, now 60 years old, who clearly delights in his 25-year-old memories. "We all sat around in Cory Hall and Ken Thompson read code with us. We went through the kernel* line by line in a series of evening meetings; he just explained what everything did ... It was wonderful."

Comment · 8 years ago

Upvoted for careful scholarship and a useful addendum (I'm OP)!

I sometimes wonder whether a lot of Knuth's greatness comes from doing more of the stuff everyone knows they should do but don't. If you read this interview (https://github.com/kragen/knuth-interview-2006) with Knuth, he talks about how he was nervous he wouldn't be able to learn calculus so just decided to do all the problems instead of just the assigned ones. Unsurprisingly, partly because he's Knuth and we all know Knuth can do math, he ends up really good at calculus: > But Thomas’s Calculus would have the text, then would have problems, and our teacher would assign, say, the even numbered problems, or something like that. I would also do the odd numbered problems. In the back of Thomas’s book he had supplementary problems, the teacher didn’t assign the supplementary problems; I worked the supplementary problems. I was, you know, I was scared I wouldn’t learn calculus, so I worked hard on it, and it turned out that of course it took me longer to solve all these problems than the kids who were only working on what was assigned, at first. But after a year, I could do all of those problems in the same time as my classmates were doing the assigned problems, and after that I could just coast in mathematics, because I’d learned how to solve problems. So it was good that I was scared, in a way that I, you know, that made me start strong, and then I could coast afterwards, rather than always climbing and being on a lower part of the learning curve.

Comment · 8 years ago

To push back on this point a little bit, I think we agree that a map is one of the most useful things you can have but disagree on what the right type of map is.

While I'm not anti-abstraction, I think people often impose poorly chosen high-level abstractions on top of messy lower-level components (akkartik calls this Authoritarian High Modernism in a comment (https://lobste.rs/s/gtxi5y/nobody_s_just_reading_your_code_h...) on Lobsters). This approach leaves readers having to understand a bad abstraction and its internals, a map, its territory, and inconsistencies between the two.

As I understand it (please correct me if I'm wrong), you want people to do the work to find better high-level abstractions. I agree that it would be good if we could do this more often. I just also think we can find other ways to give people maps that work with our existing, messy codebases that don't have good, minimal abstractions already.