dlevine (u/dlevine) - Readit News

dlevine commented on OpenBSD 7.8 cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenB... · Posted by u/paulnpace

dlevine · 2 months ago

When I was in the college in the early 2000s, I had a friend who ran OpenBSD. He always sang its praises, mostly because it was the most secure operating system.

I tried a bunch of Linux Distributions and FreeBSD before mostly settling on MacOS, but never actually got around to running it.

Glad to see OpenBSD is still being actively developed.

dlevine commented on It is worth it to buy the fast CPU blog.howardjohn.info/post... · Posted by u/ingve

dlevine · 4 months ago

Something I find weird is that this article compares a 9950x with two different laptop CPUs and concludes that performance has increased massively in the past few years. If you compare the 9950x with its two Desktop predecessors (released 2 and 4 years before), you see about a 6% increase from the 7950x and a 45% increase from the 5950x. So you should consider upgrading regularly, but potentially not every single generation. I think it makes sense to consider the performance and offer an upgrade when you see a 50% or so cumulative improvement. Everywhere I have worked has upgraded developers every 3-4 years, and it might make sense to upgrade if there is a massive change (like when Macbooks went to M-series).

As for Desktop vs Laptop, that is relevant too. Desktops are typically much faster than Laptops because they are allowed much larger power envelopes, which leads to more cores and higher clock speeds for sustained periods of time. However, there is always a question as to whether your use case will be able to use all 16/32 cores/threads in a 9950X CPU. If not, you may not notice much difference with a smaller processor.

Source for CPU benchmarks: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/6211vs5031vs3862vs5717/...

dlevine commented on Study mode openai.com/index/chatgpt-... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

omega3 · 5 months ago

I've had good results by requesting an llm to follow socratic method.

dlevine · 5 months ago

I haven't done this that much, but have found it to be pretty useful.

When it just gives me the answer, I usually understand but then find that my long-term retention is relatively poor.

dlevine commented on It's rude to show AI output to people distantprovince.by/posts/... · Posted by u/distantprovince

dlevine · 5 months ago

If someone uses AI to generate an output, that should be stated clearly.

That is not an excuse for it being poorly done or unvetted (which I think is the crux of the point), but it’s important to state any sources used.

If i don’t want to receive AI generated content, i can use the attribution to filter it out.

dlevine commented on Prompting LLMs is not engineering dmitriid.com/prompting-ll... · Posted by u/Bluestein

dlevine · 5 months ago

My theory is that, when done properly, it’s much closer to science than engineering.

And by “done properly,” i mean done in a regimented way with evals to verify that a wide range of inputs produce the desired outputs.

Prompting is much closer to discovering the properties of an already existing system than building something using engineering methods.

dlevine commented on Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator snowemu.com/... · Posted by u/ColinWright

nmdeadhead · 6 months ago

In compatibility, it's MUCH worse than all the others, but there's also Executor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executor_(software) which you can use to run a Macintosh version of solitaire in your browser by having the browser emulate MS-DOS which then runs Executor/DOS: https://archive.org/details/executor

In addition to Executor/DOS, a non-released version ran on the Sun 3 workstations (they too had 680x0 processors) and Executor/NEXTSTEP ran on NeXT machines, both the 680x0 based ones and the x86 powered PCs that could run NEXTSTEP.

Executor was the least compatible because it used no intellectual property from Apple. The ROMs and system software substitutes were all written in a clean room--no disassembly of the Apple ROMs or System file.

Although Executor ostensibly has a Linux port, it's probably hard to build (I haven't tried in a couple decades) in part because to squeeze the maximum performance out of a 80386 processor, the synthetic CPU relied on gcc-specific extensions.

I know a fair amount about Executor, because I wrote the initial version of it, although all the super impressive parts (e.g., the synthetic 68k emulator and the color subsystem) were written by better programmers than I am.

dlevine · 6 months ago

I had a licensed copy of Executor back in the mid-90s. It was the coolest thing ever. Thanks for being one of my inspirations to go into software development.

dlevine commented on Ask HN: Anyone struggling to get value out of coding LLMs? · Posted by u/bjackman

dlevine · 7 months ago

I think of LLMs as knowing a lot of things but as being relatively shallow in their knowledge.

I find them to be super useful for things that I don't already know how to do, e.g. a framework or library that I'm not familiar with. It can then give me approximate code that I will probably need to modify a fair bit, but that I can use as the basis for my work. Having an LLM code a preliminary solution is often more efficient than jumping to reading the docs immediately. I do usually need to read the docs, but by the time I look at them, I already know what I need to look up and have a feasible approach in my head.

If I know exactly how I would build something, an LLM isn't as useful, although I will admit that sometimes an LLM will come up with a clever algorithm that I wouldn't have thought up on my own.

I think that, for everyone who has been an engineer for some time, we already have a way that we write code, and LLMs are a departure. I find that I need to force myself to try them for a variety of different tasks. Over time, I understand them better and become better at integrating them into my workflows.

dlevine commented on Rules for Negotiating a Job Offer (2016) haseebq.com/my-ten-rules-... · Posted by u/rzk

silisili · 8 months ago

Has that been recently? I've read the market has been brutal lately, but I haven't had to look myself, thankfully.

dlevine · 8 months ago

I’m job searching right now, and it’s definitely not the doom and gloom that I’m hearing about.

I think it’s a challenging environment for developers who are either inexperienced or who have skills that are out of date. I have found that companies are a bit more picky than i remember about knowing the exact tech stack they use, but they are still making offers and those offers are pretty good.

Note that I’m applying mostly to mid-sized non-public companies. I’m not sure what it’s like applying to MAANG-types right now.

dlevine commented on I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs twitter.com/skdh/status/1... · Posted by u/ksec

dlevine · 9 months ago

I think of LLMs like smart but unreliable humans. You don't want to use them for anything that you need to have right. I would never have one write anything that I don't subsequently go over with a fine-toothed comb.

With that said, I find that they are very helpful for a lot of tasks, and improve my productivity in many ways. The types of things that I do are coding and a small amount of writing that is often opinion-based. I will admit that I am somewhat of a hacker, and more broad than deep. I find that LLMs tend to be good at extending my depth a little bit.

From what I can tell, Sabine Hossenfelder is an expert in physics, and I would guess that she already is pretty deep in the areas that she works in. LLMs are probably somewhat less useful at this type of deep, fact-based work, particularly because of the issue where LLMs don't have access to paywalled journal articles. They are also less likely to find something that she doesn't know (unlike with my use cases, where they are very likely to find things that I don't know).

What I have been hearing recently is that it will take a long time for LLMs will be better than humans at everything. However, they are already better than many many humans at a lot of things.

dlevine commented on SheepShaver is an open source PowerPC Apple Macintosh emulator emaculation.com/doku.php/... · Posted by u/janandonly

dlevine · 9 months ago

The name SheepShaver is a play on ShapeShifter, which was a Mac II emulator for Amiga. I remember running an Amiga Emulator (UAE) AND Shapeshifter on top of that since it was the best Macintosh Emulation at one point in the late 90s.