8,802 karma · joined August 15, 2007
> I told Banach about an expression Johnny had used with me in Princeton before stating some non-Jewish mathematician's result, "Die Goim haben den folgenden satz beweisen" (The goys have proved the following theorem). Banach, who was pure goy, thought it was one of the funniest sayings he had ever heard. He was enchanted by its implication that if the goys could do it, then Johnny and I ought to be able to do it better. Johnny did not invent this joke, but he liked it and we started using it.
https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2021/12/adventures-of-mathemat...
(In Austin it covers what looks to me like the whole city but not the surrounding smaller towns.)
I took a fully-autonomyous Cybercab to a coffee shop yesterday; it doesn't even have a steering wheel. It was just a short drive, but it handled various complications (a garbage truck, double-parked cars, construction, unpainted speed bumps) with aplomb. The driving felt extremely smooth and human-like (better, in my experience, than Waymo, which can still be a bit jerky).
So all these years later AI is real, I see the story again, and I figure, hey, why not read it. And how very surprised I was to find out it's basically a horny kink story with a little bit of AI/SF window dressing!
Granted, a bit of AI-influencing phrasing in human writing is common, but the idea that someone sat down, worked hard, and came back with an entire page of a pitch-perfect AI slop is simply incredible.
BUT I have had great success using AGENTS.md and becoming better at prompting to get it to not be like this.
Basic approach in AGENTS.md: don't code defensively, yada yada, we have a validation layer at X, no need to check for anything behind that layer. Works well.
An approach I've found helpful when prompting: What would be the best architecture for this change? If you say "do X" it'll tend to just do the hackiest, shortest path thing. If you say, "what's the best way to do X?" it will think more holistically.
That said, who knows, maybe when it's PHP it just really wants to hack ;-)
(Also, yes, you still need to review the code -- it will still do stupid things, so you can't just be pure hands off w/o ending up with quality degredations. The same is true of humans too though in my experience...)
(the ux of ds4 is fantastic too -- it's dead-easy to get a known-good model, great quant. llamacpp you're much more hacking in the wilderness, w/ many many knobs.)
Edit: no, it won't...