timdellinger

agreed - America went through a "mandolin mania" in ~1880s, and even in the 1900s and 1910s, the guitar was by no means an established instrument.

As a matter of fact, the "tenor guitar" was made for people who knew how to play the very popular four string banjo, but wanted to play a guitar without learning new chords.

Instruments were in a state of change, and the "harp" nomenclature (and styling) for a 12-string guitar was more a marketing flourish than a family lineage.

“sort by year” is buried on the site, but definitely a fun way to sort

there should also be a “you can spot the villain early since they’re the only one not using Apple” sub-list

The difference is that CEOs fired a lot of people, using "AI can replace human coders" as an excuse. Also: there are claims all over the headlines along the lines of "We built something amazing without human coders."

Both claims are loud and are flooding the discussion, but under the hood it's mostly a slop disaster.

So the negative sentiment is a natural response (and a dose of realism).

Bayesian optimization of, say, hyperparameters is the canonical modern usage in my view, and there are other similar optimization problems where it's the preferred approach.

My take is that the Rasmussen book isn't especially approachable, and that this book has actually held back the wider adoption of GPs in the world.

The book has been seen as the authoritative source on the topic, so people were hesitant to write anything else. At the same time, the book borders on impenetrable.

This perspective under-appreciates the role of a leader's charisma when it comes to attracting staff that will actually execute the ideas of that leader.

Anyone who has worked in a presidential administration (or a congressional office) can tell you that a leader is effective if and only if they have staff that believes in their message and agenda, and that is willing and able to execute on that agenda.

The practical reality here is that charisma isn't just a way of gaming the "getting elected" part of the job, it's also a requirement to be effective at the job.

for perspective, monodisperse spheres max out at 74% (hexagonal close packing)

Oh, indeed - for instance, the "Brooks Brothers 346" product line is manufactured specifically and exclusively for the outlet stores.

This cries out for a histogram.

You could grab the top 10 posts by each author, and report the average score of those 10.

I find that I have to steer the AI a lot, but I do have optimism that better prompting will lead to better agents.

To take an example from the article: code re-use. When I'm writing code, I subconsciously have a mental inventory of what code is already there, and I'm subconsciously asking myself "hey, is this new task super similar to something that we already have working (and tested!) code for?". I haven't looked into the details of the initial prompt that a coding agent gets, but my intuition is that an addition to the prompt instructing the agent to keep an inventory of what's in the codebase, and when planning out a new batch of code, check the requirements of the new tasks against what's already there.

Yes, this adds a bunch of compute cycles to the planning process, but we should be honest and say "that's just the price of an agent writing code". Better planning > ability to fix things.

Totally agree here. I tried the following and had a very different experience:

"Answer as if you're a senior software engineer giving advice to a less experienced software engineer. I'm looking for a Rust crate to access PostgreSQL with Apache Arrow support. How should I proceed? What are the pluses and minuses of my various options?"

an eternal truth, but like all eternal truths, there are many people seeing it for the first time

I would perhaps perhaps articulate it as:

you find your tribe by hoisting a flag and seeing who rallies around.

choose action over perfection - you'll be happier in the long run.

so: write on the internet.

an opinion, and a falsifiable hypothesis:

call me old-fasahioned, but two spaces after a period will solve this problem if people insist on all-lower-case. this also helps distinguish between abbreviations such as st. martin's and the ends of sentences.

i'll bet that the linguistics experimentalists have metrics that quantify reading speed measurements as determined by eye tracking experiments, and can verify this.

This sounds like a prompting issue.

If your prompt instructs the model to ask such questions along the way, the model will, in fact, do so!

But yes, it would be nice if the model were smart enough to realize when it's in a situation where it should ask the user a few questions, and when it should just get on with things.