Dopamine is a primal reward system. It's useless in the evolved modern world that requires rational thought, discipline and hard work. You probably wouldn't get much done waiting for a dopamine reward.
Readit Newsbartimus commented on Fuck dopamine, we're voluntarily breaking our own brains anushkakarmakar.substack.... · Posted by u/ak_builds
bartimus commented on OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/swyx
I'd guess the prompts and employees.
I've found Windsurf more reliable/efficient than any other editors by leagues. How ever they have named the tools, crafted their prompts and generally how their internals reason is just on the money. I don't think that is easy to replicate, iterating on prompts over product releases whilst not pissing off your user base constantly is a feat in of itself.
Then perhaps it's about bringing in the human talent that wrote those prompts.
bartimus commented on OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/swyx
They didn't even buy an IDE since windsurf is more like a VS code plugin.
So what was it exactly that was worth the 3B that they couldn't replicate themselves? Their prompts? Their training sets? Their users or user data?
bartimus commented on The School Car Pickup Line Is a National Embarrassment collegetowns.substack.com... · Posted by u/trevin
I came in expecting this was going to be a methodological article. Maybe better let the kids wait as opposed to the parents in their cars?
bartimus commented on Show HN: Watch fascism unfold in realtime – an AI-powered tracker realtimefascism.com... · Posted by u/visekr
The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable" ― George Orwell, Essays
I would define fascism as:
"The pursuit of unity in its most extreme form, rejecting and eliminating alternative thoughts and ideas by any means necessary."
bartimus commented on DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via RL arxiv.org/abs/2501.12948... · Posted by u/gradus_ad
The censorship described in the article must be in the front-end. I just tried both the 32b (based on qwen 2.5) and 70b (based on llama 3.3) running locally and asked "What happened at tianamen square". Both answered in detail about the event.
The models themselves seem very good based on other questions / tests I've run.
When asking about Taiwan and Russia I get pretty scripted responses. Deepseek even starts talking as "we". I'm fairly sure these responses are part of the model so they must have some way to prime the learning process with certain "facts".
Basically, the world transitioned from “real value” to “perceived value”:
* Money valuation (vs. gold-backed value)
* Property valuation (vs. last transaction price)
* Stock market (speculation and perception)
* Individualism (perceived self-worth)
* Sexual revolution (vs. stable atomic family)
* Birth control (vs. unplanned family)
Everything got fluffy.
bartimus commented on Eric Schmidt deleted Stanford interview youtube.com/watch?v=3f6XM... · Posted by u/zniturah
And it got removed
bartimus commented on How to Know When It's Time to Go thecodist.com/how-to-know... · Posted by u/kiyanwang
> This is actually the hardest part. I can write detailed requirements about the car I need. Create a PowerPoint presentation that shows a schema of the system and subsystems; the engine block, transmission and steering wheel etc. with lines how they are connected.
> That's the easy part. Now you need the team of skilled engineers developing the actual car. And you need them to be experienced and good at it.
In this analogy, the engineers who design the car are the equivalent of the systems analysts. The programmers are the machinists on the shop floor actually building the car.
> You need at least one guy who is able to load a complete mental map of everything that's needed to be engineered. Who understands the business requirements and is able to create a vision for the product and technical solution. He needs to understand databases, web services, authentication, authorization, security, performance, web standards back- and front-end solutions. Be smart about what logical components are needed and have an high level idea how they could be implemented technically. Ideally that guy can also open a repository and read what's going on.
Yes -- that's your systems analyst! More importantly, they need to understand the business and the information needs of the people involved. A high-level, 10,000-foot understanding of technical requirements is important, but the details should be left to the programmers. That's what programmers are good at. It's the big-picture, business-centric, people-oriented view that's missing in today's culture, and prevents us from "building the right thing right".
> The programmers are the machinists on the shop floor actually building the car.
No, because with software there's no human execution. It's the computers that execute the design. The developers design the blueprints of what the computers need to execute. They are the architects.
For an analogy you can probably best compare this with 3D printed houses.
> A high-level, 10,000-foot understanding of technical requirements is important, but the details should be left to the programmers.
But why leave the details to the programmers? Why doesn't the systems analyst produce a proper CAD-like blueprint that leaves no room for interpretation? His system design should produce the exact same result regardless which contractor implements it. Yet that's never the case.
The reason is because he can't. The systems analyst doesn't have a clue what he's designing. If he would be able to write a proper blueprint we could just hand it off to the computer and have it executed. No need for programmers. But now the systems analyst has become a developer.
bartimus commented on How to Know When It's Time to Go thecodist.com/how-to-know... · Posted by u/kiyanwang
Doing software right will require a lot of planning, irrespective of whether that planning occurs up front or as you go. If you plan more up front, that will eliminate a whole lot of guesswork when the time to do the programming comes. You need systems analysts -- generalists who understand the business and work well with people -- to come in and characterize, in detail, how the business currently works in terms of systems and subsystems, and then propose and design new systems, again to a high level of detail. Once that's done, inasmuch as you need software, producing the software is a simple matter of translating the detailed requirements into language for the machine.
Unfortunately, modern methods are basically just institutionalized guesswork: this is what Agile is all about. It's a methodology designed by programmers for programmers, in order to bamboozle management and inflate the programmers' own sense of self-importance. The correct way to design a business's internal systems, including but not limited to its software, appears to have been forgotten, except a pastiche of it lives on as a strawman called "Waterfall" for Agilistas to take down.
> is a simple matter of translating the detailed requirements into language for the machine.
This is actually the hardest part. I can write detailed requirements about the car I need. Create a PowerPoint presentation that shows a schema of the system and subsystems; the engine block, transmission and steering wheel etc. with lines how they are connected.
That's the easy part. Now you need the team of skilled engineers developing the actual car. And you need them to be experienced and good at it.
You need at least one guy who is able to load a complete mental map of everything that's needed to be engineered. Who understands the business requirements and is able to create a vision for the product and technical solution. He needs to understand databases, web services, authentication, authorization, security, performance, web standards back- and front-end solutions. Be smart about what logical components are needed and have an high level idea how they could be implemented technically. Ideally that guy can also open a repository and read what's going on.
Especially with larger corporations there's still so much potential for automation. Yet what we see is a big fragmented mess. Systems and subsystems that are poorly integrated. Exactly the car you'd expect that was designed in PowerPoint by non-engineers.