winternewt

What kind of evidence would satisfy you. Referring to benchmarks is apparently not sufficient because "you won't notice the difference in your everyday tasks", but saying "I do notice the difference in my everyday tasks" is just vibes.

When a measurement becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

I see stuff along the lines of:

  if (x == 0) {
      return y;
  }
  
  y += 25*x;
  return y;

and skipping the if just makes the function shorter and simpler, while also not involving the CPU branch prediction. Another one that doesn't necessarily skip all branching but at least drops one - and more importantly makes the code simpler and easy to verify, is removing the if statement in code like

  if (count == 0) {
      return;
  }

  for (int i = 0; i != count; i++) {
    puts("hello");
  }

Only a few of these are actual programming tricks. The problem with sharing them is that they'll typically seem obvious to you, since you know them. It's difficult to know what is actually unknown to other people, and if you share stuff everybody knows you risk coming off as arrogant.

Here's one that I think more people should know: avoid branches. If I can do the same thing without an if statement and even a logical expression, the code typically both becomes easier to understand for people and easier to run for the CPU.

I keep my skills in a Home Manager repo and install them into my .claude / .codex / whathaveyou directory through the home manager config. I'll know if they don't work because they are specific instructions on how to git commit, how to merge code, how to author text (without the typical AI tells), or API usage documentation for specific libraries, etc. If they didn't work the agent would do things incorrectly and I'd notice.

And sometimes it doesn't follow the instructions well. I have a skill for that too: it tells the agent, given what it knows about attention and LLM:s in general, to evaluate the instructions and the mistake the LLM made, try to diagnose why it didn't follow the instructions as expected, and come up with an improvement of the skill based on that diagnosis.

Humans are general intelligence, not artificial general intelligence. :)

Capacity for inference isn't a cost issue, it's an availability issue. There just isn't enough hardware out there.

From the article:

> What is happening here is that leading AI labs are charging not only for inference but also for research in model architecture, training data collection and curation, model training cost (which can be tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars), paying their employees and recovering the marketing costs.

That's what's being subsidized.

> Adding an in-product tip to recommend running /clear when re-visiting old conversations (we shipped a few iterations of this)

I feel like I'm missing something here. Why would I revisit an old conversation only to clear it?

To me it sounds like a prompt-cache miss for a big context absolutely needs to be a per-instance warning and confirmation. Or even better a live status indicating what sending a message will cost you in terms of input tokens.

Instead of just dropping all the context, the system could also run a compaction (summarizing the entire convo) before dropping it. Better to continue with a summary than to lose everything.

What version of Claude Code is this? I don't have the /cost command mentioned here.

Unless the bubble bursts and tons of failing AI companies dump used graphics cards on the market.

And if you don't want to buy a Mac? A 80 GB NVidia GPU costs $10,000K (equivalent to 30 years of ChatGPT Plus subscription) and will probably be obsolete in 5-7 years anyway. What are my options if I want a decent coding agent at a reasonable price?

No need to speculate. The article was published in 2019 and the movie is now six years old.

When I was a kid reading Marvel comics, Spiderman seemed like a bad and relatively uninteresting super hero. His problems were trivial personal issues and he rarely left NYC, fighting local crime or villains like Green Goblin who were just broken humans. Meanwhile the Fantastic Four were in regular contact with government institutions, went into space, and fought interstellar aliens. They just seemed better and more important. Not to mention the Avengers.

As an adult, while Marvel isn't my favorite thing anymore, I find Spiderman to their most interesting superhero.