5,913 karma · joined April 21, 2016
Whether a compiler implements the standard is up to the compiler developers and maybe its users.
In an era where code portability was of utmost importance, maybe this made a lot of sense.
But now we can pretty much treat a compiler and its libraries the standard for the language, like Rust does.
It's something like that for sure, but we don't really have the theory yet, not even the jargon for it.
At $dayjob we were preparing some features that are aimed at agents more than humans.
When it came to evaluating how well agents can use this, we saw all sorts of novel cheating (/collaboration) attempts that made it pretty much impossible to evaluate it.
> random chance
Ah there is the rub, it’s not random. It’s biasing it a tiny bit.
Let me try to come up with another analogy. Suppose you’re flying a plane into Siberia and start out in a specific direction. And I want you to fly over a specific town.
Storing the information would be giving you the exact coordinates of the town and instructions to reach it. What happens here is closer to bumping into the plane with a tiny rock so the trajectory is moved in a direction where you naturally see this town on the new route.
This was pretty much a 2D analogy, can you imagine a 1024 dimensional version of this? That gets pretty close to what happened.
There’s not enough space to store things like this.
If you have a 100 things to store, but only 5 slots, whatever mechanism you use to try and rediscover those 100 things using the 5 slots is not storing much.
If the things you have to memoize are super-linear, suppose you need to store some value related to all subsets of an input set of size n.
There’s no way you can do this in O(1), even assuming infinitely large memory.
If you subtract the list of numbers representing hot from the one representing lava, you’ll get something close to rock.
There are word games where you can lead smart (presumably) humans to answer a question incorrectly by biasing them with words rhyming with the wrong answer beforehand.
Not even close.
For example, a BMW X5 weighs about 2200 Kgs without passengers, and it's GVWR is 2800 Kgs.
If you have five people and heavy bags, you can comfortably exceed the GVWR. You can absolutely break control arms and suspension components in that scenario if you go over a speed bump or hit a pothole (which are real things that exist in the real world, like people doing something unintended and crashing software).
If this needed a 2x safety factor, there would have been no way to build this car.
Even the toughest cars like land cruisers are limited in this way.
> [...] vs something that's rickety
A 100 percent of modern bridges are rickety. There has been dozens of high profile incidents because of this.
> Just because you built something that might fall apart at any moment doesn't mean it's been engineered with narrow tolerances.
Here the software they are building falls apart in ..say.. two days of use, but can be updated in 5 seconds at close to zero marginal cost. The software is useful enough that people keep updating and using it. This iteration gives them a competitive advantage over the safer choice of rigorously testing every new thing for several weeks.
We were overbuilding trivial parts of the software like the Romans overbuilt small bridges.
Modern engineering is about making the thing that barely works. If you disagree, learn a little bit about bit narrow the tolerances of modern cars and bridges are.
I got AI to build me a Qt frontend that has the Lightroom features I actually use. The result is significantly snappier than Lightroom. I’m pretty happy with how this turned out.
And some layer and masking stuff from photoshop. Photography related work doesn’t need heavier weight photoshop features in general.
It's not that you can build a photoshop clone by spending 2000$ in claude API credits. Adobe is going to do a better job than you.
What works out easier is that you can build and maintain a version that only has the features you need, with a ~20$ subscription of any of the good AI coding harnesses.
I have done this for my photography workflow and discontinued my Adobe subscription.
Don't make it difficult for your brain to get food to look less fluffy.
Especially if you want to do things in your life that require using your brain.
But yeah, more accountability from governments and other organizations imposing a mandatory fee on you would be great.
Everyone doing any kind of gatekeeping is convinced that it’s for a great reason.
It’s sad, but also makes some sense.
Nobody wants to maintain someone else’s AI slop when they could do their own version of the slop.
What's stopping you?
Raise some funding, shouldn't be difficult if you can convince people it's urgent enough.
Some math PhDs would spend a year or so doing things with AI and lean, and graduate. And keep doing more math afterwards.
Some others, with more stubborn advisors, will keep trying to find a gap where there's no AI progress.
CS subfields go through this every ten or so years.
Thanks, I had no idea this was possible!
Sure.
The article we are commenting on has the "for software engineers", so I assumed the software use case is the primary one here.
Funnily enough, stopping this 'race mixing' is one of the explicit goals of some pretty horrible people and they have historically tried all sorts of things from eugenics to genocide.
I'd not put it past someone in the future to try and end modern industrial civilization to this end.
If someone would figure this out, the theoretical advancements they would discover on the way would likely earn them a Turing award.
If you want to master it and use it effectively for something real, yeah some reading would help.