pbw

This will happen for real. But then a JIT-like process will generate regular code for efficiency, on the fly in the background.

Rather than “the book explains how bread is made” say “the sheets of paper which make up the book have ink in the shape of letterforms which correlate with information about how bread is made”.

I’m going to give this URL to Claude, ask it to propose uses of state charts in my codebase. Yes, it already has this in its training data, but I find giving it a URL brings it to top of mind.

This is only 33 years after I took a networking class and learned all about IPv6 and the IPv4 address space crisis.

There's certainly a risk that an individual will rely too much on AI, to the detriment of their ability to understand things. However, I think there are obvious counter-measures. For example, requiring that the student can explain every single intermediate step and every single figure in detail.

A two-hour thesis defense isn't enough to uncover this, but a 40-hour deep probing examination by an AI might be. And the thesis committee gets a "highlight reel" of all the places the student fell short.

The general pattern is: "Suppose we change nothing but add extensive use of AI, look how everything falls apart." When in reality, science and education are complex adaptive systems that will change as much as needed to absorb the impact of AI.

This sounds good, but I wonder if AI has changed the calculus on conflict resolution. It can not only chase down the conflicting changes, but also read those commit messages and PRs to divine intent. It might be that git is "good enough," given we have AI.

I have mixed feelings about the "Do X in N lines of code" genre. I applaud people taking the time to boil something down to its very essence, and implement just that, but I feel like the tone is always, "and the full thing is lame because it's so big," which seems off to me.

SO was built to disrupt the marriage of Google and Experts Exchange. EE was using dark patterns to sucker unsuspecting users into paying for access to a crappy Q&A service. SO wildly succeeded, but almost 20 years later the world is very different.

Gary Marcus, ha! He's generally not entirely wrong, but boy, is he annoying.

This is food for thought, but horses were a commodity; people are very much not interchangeable with each other. The BLS tracks ~1,000 different occupations. Each will fall to AI at a slightly different rate, and within each, there will be variations as well. But this doesn't mean it won't still subjectively happen "fast".

There's an HDR war brewing on TikTok and other social apps. A fraction of posts that use HDR are just massively brighter than the rest; the whole video shines like a flashlight. The apps are eventually going to have to detect HDR abuse.

Whether this exact approach catches on or not, it's turning the corner from "teaching AIs to develop using tools that were designed for humans" to "inventing new tools and techniques that are designed specifically for AI use". This makes sense because AIs are not human; they have different strengths and limitations.

Workday is a disaster, at least the version we have.

To capture the individual transistors on a modern CPU, you'd need an image tens of terabytes in size, and it'd have to be captured by an electron microscope, not an optical image. And even that wouldn't let you see all the layers. Some of the very old CPUs, I'm not sure what resolution would be required.

"I created the Alphanum Algorithm to solve this problem. The Alphanum Algorithm sorts strings containing a mix of letters and numbers. Given strings of mixed characters and numbers, it sorts the numbers in value order, while sorting the non-numbers in ASCII order. The end result is a natural sorting order."

https://web.archive.org/web/20210207124255/http://www.daveko...

And you think the comparison to book reviews is equally bad? Both are from GPT-5.

Essentially, Jenson's complaint is "When I ask an LLM to 'summarize' it interprets that differently from how I think of the word 'summarize' and I shouldn't have to give it more than a one-word prompt because it should infer what I'm asking for."