arctek (u/arctek) - Readit News

arctek commented on After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain albertofortin.com/writing... · Posted by u/a7fort

jclardy · 10 months ago

I don't get the whole "all-in" mentality around LLMs. I'm an iOS dev by trade, I continue to do that as I always have. The difference now is I'll use an LLM to quickly generate a one-off view based on a design. This isn't a core view of an app, the core functionality, or really anything of importance. It's a view that promotes a new feature, or how to install widgets, or random things. This would normally take me 30-60 min to implement depending on complexity, now it takes 5.

I also use it for building things like app landing pages. I hate web development, and LLMs are pretty good at it because I'd guess that is 90% of their training data related to software development. For that I make larger changes, review them manually, and commit them to git, like any other project. It's crazy to me that people will just go completely off the rails for multiple hours and run into a major issue, then just start over when instead you can use a measured approach and always continue forward momentum.

arctek · 10 months ago

Similar to my experience, it works well for small tasks, replacing search (most of the time) and doing alot of boilerplate work.

I have one project that is very complex and for this I can't and don't use LLMs for.

I've also found it's better if you can get it code generate everything in the one session, if you try other LLMs or sessions it will quickly degrade. That's when you will see duplicate functions and dead end code.

arctek commented on I use zip bombs to protect my server idiallo.com/blog/zipbomb-... · Posted by u/foxfired

kazinator · a year ago

I deployed this, instead of my usual honeypot script.

It's not working very well.

In the web server log, I can see that the bots are not downloading the whole ten megabyte poison pill.

They are cutting off at various lengths. I haven't seen anything fetch more than around 1.5 Mb of it so far.

Or is it working? Are they decoding it on the fly as a stream, and then crashing? E.g. if something is recorded as having read 1.5 Mb, could it have decoded it to 1.5 Gb in RAM, on the fly, and crashed?

There is no way to tell.

arctek · a year ago

Perhaps need to semi-randomize the file size? I'm guessing some of the bots have a hard limit to the size of the resource they will download.

Many of these are annoying LLM training/scraping bots (in my case anyway). So while it might not crash them if you spit out a 800KB zipbomb, at least it will waste computing resources on their end.

arctek commented on Discord's face scanning age checks 'start of a bigger shift' bbc.com/news/articles/cjr... · Posted by u/1659447091

Edmond · a year ago

https://certisfy.com/partnership/

Any number of entities can be certificate issuers, as long as they can be deemed sufficiently trustworthy. Schools, places of worship, police, notary, employers...they can all play the role of trust anchor.

arctek · a year ago

This just moves the issue elsewhere though. I do agree that adding an extra step of having to notarize documents will filter many people.

But outside of this if someone is determined they can issue fake documents at this level of provenance.

Drivers licenses for example you can buy the printing machine and blanks (illegally) so you actually need to check the registrar in that location.

arctek commented on AI is turning us into glue lincoln.swaine-moore.is/w... · Posted by u/lswainemoore

myhf · a year ago

Why do articles like this always say things like "I've used LLMs to get some stuff done faster" and then go on to describe how LLMs get them to spend more time and money to do a worse job? You don't need LLMs to frustrate you into lowering your standards, the power to do that was within you all along.

arctek · a year ago

Has anyone actually measured this yet?

Much of this feels like when they did studies on people who take mushrooms for example feel like they are more productive, but when you actually measure it they aren't. It's just their perception.

To me the biggest issue is that search has been gutted out and so for many questions the best results come from asking an LLM. But this is far different from using it to generate entire codebases.

arctek commented on Reasoning models don't always say what they think anthropic.com/research/re... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

no_wizard · a year ago

>internal concepts, the model is not aware that it's doing anything so how could it "explain itself"

This in a nutshell is why I hate that all this stuff is being labeled as AI. Its advanced machine learning (another term that also feels inaccurate but I concede is at least closer to whats happening conceptually)

Really, LLMs and the like still lack any model of intelligence. Its, in the most basic of terms, algorithmic pattern matching mixed with statistical likelihoods of success.

And that can get things really really far. There are entire businesses built on doing that kind of work (particularly in finance) with very high accuracy and usefulness, but its not AI.

arctek · a year ago

This is also why I think the current iterations wont converge on any actual type of intelligence.

It doesn't operate on the same level as (human) intelligence it's a very path dependent process. Every step you add down this path increases entropy as well and while further improvements and bigger context windows help - eventually you reach a dead end where it degrades.

You'd almost need every step of the process to mutate the model to update global state from that point.

From what I've seen the major providers kind of use tricks to accomplish this, but it's not the same thing.

arctek commented on Our interfaces have lost their senses wattenberger.com/thoughts... · Posted by u/me_smith

hinkley · a year ago

When iOS had a couple gestures to get away from needing physical buttons, things were pretty good.

However once you realize that you can add new gestures without having to defend adding a physical or screen real estate button, it takes a lot of discipline to avoid adding more. I like to think that Steve would have told most of their people to fuck off and we’d have one or two new gestures now, instead of twice as many. They would have found some other way.

arctek · a year ago

Even Google ended up adding more stuff to their homepage in the end. For a long time they tried to keep it super minimal- and it still is, but there's footer links and signed in header and a whole bunch of other links as well.

Mind you in the early days pages used to have hundreds if not thousands of text links all over the place, the only sites that do this now are the hardcore conspiracy sites where the author just adds several new links a day.

So in this dimension at least web UIs have changed for the better.

arctek commented on Phyllis Fong, who was investigating Neuralink, "forcefully removed " timesofindia.indiatimes.c... · Posted by u/iancmceachern

malfist · a year ago

What part of the cure is illegally firing someone who was investigating you for a valid, non political reason?

There's no cure in that, just corruption.

arctek · a year ago

Except that nothing is illegal now, Biden showed that with blanket pardons. So for all intents and purposes they will do what they like and Trump can just wipe it clean at the end.

arctek commented on Playground Wisdom: Threads Beat Async/Await lucumr.pocoo.org/2024/11/... · Posted by u/samwillis

huem0n · a year ago

_

    function blockingSleep(amt) {
        let start = new Date().getTime()
        while (start + amt > new Date().getTime()) {}

    }

arctek · a year ago

This is horrible - I love it.

I did forget you could do this, though I'm fairly sure in the case of a browser (at least it used to) this will block the entire UI.

arctek commented on Hey, wait – is employee performance Gaussian distributed? timdellinger.substack.com... · Posted by u/timdellinger

stoperaticless · a year ago

There is no way to unambiguosly decide who is responsible for which earnings.

Hipothetical two people cooperative that produces simple hammers. One specializes on wooden part, the other on metal part. How much each of them earned to the company? (Or producing and selling; or one spending his lifesavings to buy pricey hammer-making-equipment while other presses buttons on said equipment)

arctek · a year ago

Goes further than that too, suppose the one working on the wooden part is slow and the one on the metal part is faster. And surely the value of one part or another is also different, even though its the combined value that's relevant.

Suppose as well there are a thousand people lined up to make the wooden part but hardly any for the metal, then surely the ones who work on the metal part will (try to) command a higher wage too.

arctek commented on Playground Wisdom: Threads Beat Async/Await lucumr.pocoo.org/2024/11/... · Posted by u/samwillis

arctek · a year ago

I actually think out of any language async/await makes the most sense for javascript.

In the first example: there is no such thing as a blocking sleep in javascript. What people use as sleep is just a promise wrapper around a setTimeout call. setTimeout has always created microtasks, so calling a sleep inline would do nothing to halt execution.

I do agree that dangling Promises are annoying and Promise.race is especially bad as it doesn't do what you expect: finish the fastest promise and cancel the other. It will actually eventually resolve both but you will only get one result.

Realistically in JS you write your long running async functions to take an AbortController wrapper that also provides a sleep function, then in your outer loop you check the signal isn't aborted and the wrapper class also handles calling clearTimeout on wrapped sleep functions to stop sleeping/pending setTimeouts and exit your loop/function.