Beware that the notion of "quality" is entirely different for AI companies: they don't seek entertainment, but sentences in a language to train an LLM.
6,016 karma · joined March 18, 2020
AI research professor during the day, startup CTO at night, coder, avid reader and book collector.
Wrote my first compiler during high school. Systems I've had a hand in are used by folks ranging from London traders to the Justices of the U.S. Supreme court.
• Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
• David Goodsell, The Machinery of Life
• William W. Cohen, A Computer Scientist’s Guide to Cell Biology
• Horace Freeland Judson, The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology
• Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher
In his lifetime, Michie published impactful papers in genetics, biology, statistics and computer science -- and classical philology.
A liberal arts education and a science education are not mutually exclusive, but complementary.
The code of the O.P. is actually not so bad for a teenager; however, the variables in Spanish do not help: "[isq]" and "[der]" probably stood for "isqierda" and "derecha", so the index of the left and right subtree of an expression.
Speaking of Transputers, Dr. Tim King, founder of Perihelion, was another big name of the Transputer times; he sadly passed away last month (he also wrote Tripos, which turned into AmigaDOS).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27440093
[2] https://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings-article/dcc/2000/0...
Apparently, they produce the phones in batches, not sure when the next one is due?
Now you can do a lot better with a simple LLM+RAG setup.
Knowledge Mgt. (which I also teach) is one of the most neglected areas, privately, professionally and in corporations. A lot of companies' intranet is utterly useless - and everyone knows.
I seriously hope that one day, whether during our lifetime or not, Israelis and Palestinians can dance with one another, without having fear.
The answer is there can be dramatic difference running a benchmark one time, because LLMs are not deterministic. A proper methodology would ask each question 20 times and calculate the mean correctness across experiments.
The reason is that the temperature parameter introduces random behavior.
I am intellectually curious whether "intelligence" and "consciousness" are simply layers that can be separated from the hardware they operate on or first emerged from, but I never had the urge or saw the point to practically replace human beings by machines.
Not everything that can be done should be done.
When I go to a supermarket, I always avoid self check-out. Why? First, I enjoy human interaction, even if machines may be more efficient (not yet the case). Second, I don't want the people working at the checkout to lose their jobs.
When we purchased a GPU cluster, I felt bad when I learned that the electricity bill was going to be north of 60 000 EUR every year (that number apparently assumes no jobs are running - so 100% idle time).
Note that there is a certain level of arbitrariness involved in this association game. For instance, if a household regularly is in need of both parsley and also condoms, the fact that they are purchased together may be a result of the pure coincidence that both were empty/used up at the same time (which is also a function of the package sizes of both items). We would be much less surprised at the mined associations if we took a longitudinal, per-household look.
Furthermore, a shopping basked is per-household, but not per-person: the parsley and the condom may be used by different members of the household, or be shared, or be part of a gift to someone outside.
The human brain also tends to make up "causal" connections between any two items, when the real reason is often much more mundane.
(What I particularly enjoy is that one can contribute to the database of quotations.)
Has anyone tried this? Are the translations good? Is the material sentence-aligned so that it is easy to switch between reading the original and the translation?
[1] https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Short-Stories-Bilingual-English-R...
Sorry, but it looks exactly like Zed.
And I'm not going to try out Zed again until they finally introduce auto-save, which Sublime has had for a long time and Emacs had since last century (because losing a file hurts you more than GPU rendering pleases you).
Where are those "big ideas"?
That's pretty much the only disagreement with the SQLite developer, who is an amazing guy that wrote an amazing tool!
Thanks for the personal take on Scheme history.
> It ran on Vaxes & 68000's, which had also just come out.
It ran on Vaxen and 68000s, which had also just come out.
> All hot compilers do DFA.
Note here, DFA stands for Data Flow Analysis (not Deterministic Finite Automata, another compiler acronym).
> the deepest and most powerful part of my diss, in my opinion, is the part (a) about which no one seems to know and (b) which is on the shakiest theoretical ground: environment reflow analysis. I would surely love it if some interested character one day takes that piece of my diss and really takes it someplace.
I know that feeling. But my experience is the author is best-suited to do that themselves.
Love the pressure due to the timer, and the best aid to help is say it aloud.
Pascal is simple and clear, and can be translated easily to anything from LISP, Fortran, Python to C or C++ (in fact, subsets of Pascal are often used as sample language in books about compilers, including in Pascal inventor N. Wirth's own compiler book (which, unlike Knuth's, was completed timely):
Wirth, Niklaus, Compilers (1996), 101pp., 2rd revision, 2017, online: https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/CompilerConstruction/Compil..., last accessed 2026-07-07).
It does not matter that Pascal is not much in use anymore, because due to its readability, it's timeless. It nearly reads like English prose, yet is automatically executable. It has also been standardized, and there is a book-sized language description available, as are several -- commercial and open source -- implementations.
In contrast, his pseudo-assembler is arcane. Whenever I wanted to implement an algorithm following Knuth TACOP, I had to work off his English pseudo-code description rather than the associated pseudo-assembler code.
Now, half a century later, he is chickening out...
I believe that while underlying high complexity is certainly logically necessary for consciousness, but it is not logically sufficient, and I am undecided (slightly "pro" intuitively) on the question of separability of consciousness from its hardware.
Will a LLM ask an original question on day? I doubt it.
Note that AI models do not have to be conscious to be useful (or to take away millions of jobs)!