kovacs (u/kovacs) - Readit News

kovacs commented on Being “Confidently Wrong” is holding AI back promptql.io/blog/being-co... · Posted by u/tango12

corytheboyd · 11 days ago

Isn’t it obvious that the confidently wrong problem will never go away because all of this is effectively built on a statistical next token matcher? Yeah sure you can throw on hacks like RAG, more context window, but it’s still built on the same foundation.

It’s like saying you built a 3D scene on a 2D plane. You can employ clever tricks to make 2D look 3D at the right angle, buts it’s fundamentally not 3D, which obviously shows when you take the 2D thing and turn it.

It seems like the effectiveness plateau of these hacks will soon be (has been?) reached and the smoke and mirrors snake oil sales booths cluttering Main Street will start to go away. Still a useful piece of tech, just, not for every-fucking-thing.

kovacs · 11 days ago

This is the best analogy I've read to explain what's going on and takes me back to the days of Doom and how it was so transformative at the time. Perhaps in time the current generation will be viewed as the Doom engine as we await the holy grail of full 3D in Quake.

kovacs commented on Software development topics I've changed my mind on chriskiehl.com/article/th... · Posted by u/belter

dtquad · 7 months ago

>Frontend development is a nightmare world of Kafkaesque awfulness I no longer enjoy

As a backend/systems engineer I recently had to look at a React + Typescript + MobX app from 2019/2020. It is true that that some things, especially the webpack config and Typescript loading, were outdated but the overall design and architecture of the app was still understandable and modern. With some help from ChatGPT it took very little time to migrate to Vite and update dependencies. By 2019/2020 React Hooks had already been out for some time but there were still some class components in the app. They were easily migrated to functional components + Hooks using ChatGPT.

kovacs · 7 months ago

it's the best comment in the entire post IMHO and made me LOL

kovacs commented on Complete hardware and software setup for running Deepseek-R1 locally twitter.com/carrigmat/sta... · Posted by u/olalonde

drooby · 7 months ago

Idgi, optimization leaps are virtually guaranteed.

I think this is a deeper question about the bounds of human desire... which seem virtually limitless. We seem to have an unlimited appetite for answering questions on the complexity of existence. Pair that with arms race issues, and you have an obvious need for massive compute regardless of how efficient the algorithms are.

kovacs · 7 months ago

That's fair but look at the assumptions currently built into NVDA's stock price. Hard to say for certain but to some it's priced as if it has a monopoly on all things AI for a decade. If you can spend $6K (and less in the future) on a full system that runs a model for you where does that leave the assumptions baked into that stock price? I'm too lazy to have come up with a model myself but off the cuff it seems like there might be some dislocation in a lot of assumptions. I dunno. I'm kind of a luddite because of the .com bubble and this has the same feel.

kovacs commented on Sequence diagrams, the only good thing UML brought to software development mermaidchart.com/blog/pos... · Posted by u/knsv

kovacs · 2 years ago

I feel validated by this headline/post. I've said the same thing over and over in my career and am always astounded when I get pushback on using them as a means to describe systems and interactions, including from some managers (that weren't coders very long), that would claim "nobody uses them, just read the code".

I don't know how you communicate how systems work without them. You either create a terrible non visual version in the docs or a person ends up drawing them on a whiteboard from memory to pass that knowledge down.

kovacs commented on Ask HN: Has anyone switched from a professional job to a more manual one? · Posted by u/flave

brianwawok · 2 years ago

Have you seen the ending to the movie office space? If not - I highly suggest watching this lovely movie before making this move.

But yes, your future job could give you a more happy life balance. Or it could be worse. Or the same.

kovacs · 2 years ago

Uh yeah, Peter, I'm gonna need you to stop commenting on Hacker News and get back to work... mmmkay?

kovacs commented on Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails github.blog/2023-04-06-bu... · Posted by u/Lukas_Skywalker

ksec · 2 years ago

Unfortunately Github is the only product that uses Ruby inside Microsoft. So their incentive is pretty small. I do wish someone inside Github could push M$ to spend some money and collaborate with Shopify on their JIT effort though.

kovacs · 2 years ago

That's actually not true. There's at least one other product at MS that uses ruby... Yammer. Although I'm not sure how much more incentive that would add for MS.

kovacs commented on Remembering Bob Lee · Posted by u/aEJ04Izw5HYm

kovacs · 2 years ago

Like a couple of other mutual friends who've posted here, I've known Bob about 20 years. We met at a conference and became friends. While we never worked together we'd talk about whatever we were working on, or language/framework features, code style, etc. He was a machine that would delve deeply into anything out of an abundance of curiosity and he would sometimes be tough to keep up with on a topic he knew deeply that required a bit more context I didn't have.

That curiosity and enthusiasm spilled over into anything he did, including supporting his friends in their endeavors. He'd be the first to cheer you on and brag about you or what you were doing to other friends, almost to the point of embarrassment where he believed in you or your project more than you did, LOL.

It was like being around the sun and constant solar flares of positivity, almost like my golden retriever LOL... He was unlike anyone else I'd experienced in my 22 years in tech in SF. We had bonded over both being midwest boys and there was an unspoken bond between us that endured no matter how long it'd been since we last spoke. We knew and acknowledged that each of us was an oasis for one another from the funhouse mirror that is bay area technology. We could each exhale and be ourselves with no posturing. And if anyone had any reason to posture at all it was Bob. Everything he did was a winner and all that success never once went to his head.

So while Bob was a great engineer/technologist, he was a greater man who truly lived life by the golden rule and would've been successful in anything he chose to do. It still hasn't fully hit me that he's gone, and I can't imagine what Krista and the girls are going through right now along with the rest of Bob's family.

My heart goes out to all of them and anyone else that knew him well. Thank you Bob. Thank you for believing in me always and for being a great friend. The world needs you and more people like you. RIP... until we meet again buddy...

kovacs commented on FDIC Takes over Silicon Valley Bank fdic.gov/news/press-relea... · Posted by u/khuey

caddemon · 2 years ago

It is pretty predictable that they would experience a bank run given interest rates going up though. They locked the money up for way too long so it would've impacted the interest rates they could offer, meaning people would want to move their money outside of any panic instinct. Maybe if it were a bit more spread out over time they wouldn't have entirely collapsed, but they put 40% of their deposits in these things, it still definitely would've stung.

Not disagreeing that MBS is irrelevant, and yeah the risk rating of the bond wasn't a problem as this will pay what it said is would. Just saying it was a stupid move to buy such a large amount of such a long term bond when interest rates can't go anywhere but up and you're using borrowed money to do it. From that perspective it was a risky move.

kovacs · 2 years ago

It was stupid to not hedge that interest rate risk. I mean, the Fed telegraphed their moves well in advance. I don't work in finance but it doesn't take a genius to see how that dynamic would play out if that's your job. Not something I would've thought about till now but if banking is your business, you tend to think of ways it can break and this seems as elementary as anything if your job is to ensure solvency in all conditions. I just hope other banks weren't this stupid.

kovacs commented on An engineer has built and programmed an all-robot band guitarworld.com/features/... · Posted by u/metadat

jtvjan · 3 years ago

Going in exactly the opposite direction, the Electronicos Fantasticos have been making electronic instruments for humans to play: https://youtu.be/UB7ZyZSKLX8

kovacs · 3 years ago

LOL this is amazing! I love Japan :)