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William_BB

136 karma · joined September 28, 2024

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William_BB··on Need for Speed Underground 2 online in the browser
> Also FYI for people on Linux, you need to enable unsafe WebGPU features for this to work.

Browsers on macOS do not require you to enable this feature. Does it mean it's on by default?!

William_BB··on Anthropic IPO buyers see valuation as low as $1.1T
The moat is the data they have collected. There is no way that the "de-identified" data from enterprise customers isn't making it into the training set one way or another.
William_BB··on C++26 Disapproved
Thanks for a detailed response, this is very educational
William_BB··on C++26 Disapproved
> If the caller is passing in something derived from their own arguments, or from I/O, all bets are off.

This is the part of contracts that I don't understand. I suppose you could (1) runtime validate any user input to the program and then (2) chain multiple functions like `safe_sqrt` that provide pre and post conditions.

In theory, this should allow the static analyzer to reason about any arbitrary input. However, this to me raises even more questions: is this practical, is this possible and why would I not try to achieve the same through types ("make invalid types unrepresentable"). Maybe I'm completely off the mark here.

William_BB··on C++26 Disapproved
> a static analyzer can easily make sure that all function calls satisfy the contract

How realistic is the "all function calls" part? Maybe I just don't see the bigger picture, but I would expect most function calls arguments to only be known at runtime, which of course makes static analysis not possible?

William_BB··on How we measured AI writing across arXiv, and where the measurement breaks
> It's better then incompetents code, worse then a motivated average dev...

That's well put.

> But good enough hence the real question is value aka time& money invested/quality.

There's time invested SO FAR and time that will have to be invested to maintain it. In my experience, even with Fable, it's not there yet. It's the reason why it's easy to vibe code an app from scratch, but at some point when complexity significantly increases, the codebase becomes a mess.

William_BB··on How we measured AI writing across arXiv, and where the measurement breaks
> I think "absolute crap but still useful to me" is a pretty high value and not worth neglecting

If I extrapolate this example to my professional life, this code now manages millions of dollars, a single mistake can wipe it all out, it has to be maintained by 5 other engineers and understood by 5 other domain experts.

William_BB··on Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture
AI is great at reducing the search space and using human-like reasoning (in a brute-force way) to carry out the brute-force search. I'm not surprised by this result. This is exactly what AI should excel at, with human guidance.
William_BB··on Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture
There's a big difference between one shotting a counterexample using AI and using AI to find a counter-example by brute-force.

Both are impressive, of course, but they're hardly comparable.

William_BB··on Claude Code uses Bun written in Rust now
> has fewer bugs

who claimed that? Are you suggesting that the rewrite did not introduce any new bugs? The correct answer is, by the way, that no one knows since it's millions of lines of code no one has properly read.

> smaller, faster

I thought this has already been debunked. You could just write better zig and make it smaller, faster (and have fewer bugs!)

William_BB··on Claude Code uses Bun written in Rust now
It's not even about requirements. It's about responsibility. Someone has to take responsibility for the code and the product. Someone has to hotfix a bug that's costing millions of dollars an hour and someone has to be blamed for a bug that's consting millions of dollars an hour.
William_BB··on GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization
Ever heard of the infinite monkey theorem?

This is basically what LLMs do on really hard tasks. Prompt it a million times on a really hard problem and it might output the correct answer once.

William_BB··on GPT-5.6
People will downvote you because this comment is "not appropriate" for HN, but there were countless conversations on HN about how important these benchmarks are.

I am literally LOLing at HN right now

William_BB··on GPT-5.6
> AI is also scarily good at writing tests

:-) I hope you read those tests before claiming it's "scary good"

William_BB··on Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5
> This is a forum filled with experts

Half of HN commentators probably work on basic CRUD. Armchair experts, maybe.

William_BB··on Poland is now among the 20 largest economies
This is such a bad take. I'm impressed how often this gets parroted online.

Next time, please check how many Poles left Poland for western EU since they joined.

William_BB··on GPT-5.5
yeah. In the future when? 2, 3, 5 years from now on? Do you think current LLMs don't get confused by shitty code?

That code they're writing now will need fixing tomorrow, not 5 years later.

William_BB··on Show HN: A Karpathy-style LLM wiki your agents maintain (Markdown and Git)
I have the same feeling ever since his infamous LLM OS post
William_BB··on GPT-5.5
> I'll make more progress than mentally wearing myself out reading a bunch of LLM generated code trying to figure out how to solve the problem manually.

Most engineers realize that there's currently more tech debt being created than ever before. And it will only get worse.

William_BB··on GPT-5.5
> I'll make more progress than mentally wearing myself out reading a bunch of LLM generated code trying to figure out how to solve the problem manually.

I feel sorry for whoever has to work on that codebase. This is the literal definition of tech debt.

William_BB··on GPT-5.5
Totally agreed, this has been and will continue to be a problem for all existing models.

> Like are programmers and engineers using LLMs completely differently than I'm doing

No, but the complexity of the problem matters. Lots of engineers doing basic CRUD and prototyping overestimate the capabilities of LLMs.

William_BB··on GPT-5.5
Good luck arguing with SWE benchmark purists
William_BB··on GPT-5.5
> what's needed is knowledge of solution techniques

That's definitely in the training data

William_BB··on Codex for almost everything
Ah right! Reminds me of AGI by 2025 :D
William_BB··on Codex for almost everything
> The idea that code is something sacred and only devs can somehow do it is dying, and I personally love it, as I am watching it enable so many of my friends and family who have no idea how to code.

People on HN are seriously delusional.

AI removed the need to know the syntax. Your grandma does not know JS but can one shot a React app. Great!

Software engineering is not and has never been about the syntax or one shotting apps. Software engineering is about managing complexity at a level that a layman could not. Your ideal word requires an AI that's capable of reasoning at 100k-1 million lines of code and not make ANY mistakes. All edge cases covered or clarified. If (when) that truly happens, software engineering will not be the first profession to go.

William_BB··on Codex for almost everything
Yeah, good luck trusting the output!
William_BB··on Codex for almost everything
Yeah, that's indeed a hot take. I am curious what kind of code you write for a living to have an opinion like this.
William_BB··on Codex for almost everything
> well it actually implemented a normalization pipeline and a tax computing engine which then did the taxes, but close enough

You can't seriously believe laymen will try to implement their own tax calculators.

William_BB··on Claude Opus 4.7
Are you one of those naive people that still take these coding benchmarks seriously?
William_BB··on Two Months After I Gave an AI $100 and No Instructions
If you randomly sample letters from the alphabet and those letters make up actual words, then actual sentences. Did you think about it? Probably not
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