leshow (u/leshow) - Readit News

leshow commented on Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind” twitter.com/karpathy/stat... · Posted by u/rishabhaiover

johnfn · a month ago

I don't really see how my site is "falling apart in the real world". It is a real site used by real people in the real world. It is not falling apart.

leshow · a month ago

I am agreeing with you, LLMs can be useful for simple code generation where you're primarily plugging existing components together.

leshow commented on Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind” twitter.com/karpathy/stat... · Posted by u/rishabhaiover

viraptor · a month ago

I'm not sure who generates random code without a goal or checking if it works afterwards. Smells like a straw man. Normally you set the rules, you know how to validate if the result works, and you may even generate tests that keep that state. If I got completely random results rather than what I expect, I wouldn't be using that system - but it's correct and helpful almost every time. What you describe is just not how people work with LLMs in practice.

leshow · a month ago

I don't think you understood my comment, I didn't say anything about how to use the tool.

The parent comment was making the case that humans are as non-deterministic as the LLM is, and I was explaining why that is not true.

leshow commented on Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind” twitter.com/karpathy/stat... · Posted by u/rishabhaiover

johnfn · a month ago

Well, I don’t really think it’s “simple”. The code uses React, nodejs, realtime events pushed via SSE, infra pushed via Terraform, postgres, blob store on S3, emails send with SES… sure, it’s not the next Google, but it’s a bit above, like, a personal blog.

And in any case, you are moving goalposts. OP said he had never seen anyone serious claim that they got productivity gains from AI. When I claim that, you say “well it’s not the next level of abstraction for all SWE”. Obviously - I never claimed that?

leshow · a month ago

If you want my opinion, I think LLMs can be pretty good at generating simple code for things you can find on stackoverflow and require minor adjustments. Even then, if you don't really understand the code you can have major issues.

Your site is case in point of why LLMs demo well but kind of fall apart in the real world. It's pretty good at fitting lego blocks together based on a ton of work other people have put into React and node or the SSE library you used, etc. But that's not what Karpathy is saying, he's saying "the hottest programming language is english".

That's bonkers. In my experience it can actually slow you down as much as speed you up, and when you try to do more complicated things it falls apart.

leshow commented on Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind” twitter.com/karpathy/stat... · Posted by u/rishabhaiover

viraptor · a month ago

It's not something that suddenly changed. "I'll generate some code" is as nondeterministic as "I'll look for a library that does it", "I'll assign John to code this feature", or "I'll outsource this code to a consulting company". Even if you write yourself, you're pretty nondeterministic in your results - you're not going to write exactly the same code to solve a problem, even if you explicitly try.

leshow · a month ago

It's not the same, LLM's are qualitatively different due to the stochastic and non-reproducible nature of their output. From the LLM's point of view, non-functional or incorrect code is exactly the same as correct code because it doesn't understand anything that it's generating. When a human does it, you can say they did a bad or good job, but there is a thought process and actual "intelligence" and reasoning that went into the decisions.

I think this insight was really the thing that made me understand the limitations of LLMs a lot better. Some people say when it produces things that are incorrect or fabricated it is "hallucinating", but the truth is that everything it produces is a hallucination, and the fact it's sometimes correct is incidental.

leshow commented on Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind” twitter.com/karpathy/stat... · Posted by u/rishabhaiover

johnfn · a month ago

I am a professional engineer with around 10 years of experience and I use AI to work about 5x faster on a site I personally maintain (~100 DAU, so not huge, but also not nothing). I don’t work in AI so I get no financial benefit by “reinforcing this meme”.

leshow · a month ago

Oh, well if it can generate some simple code for your personal website, surely it can also be the "next level of abstraction" for the entirety of software engineering.

leshow commented on Async DNS flak.tedunangst.com/post/... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

01HNNWZ0MV43FF · 2 months ago

It's weird to me that event-based DNS using epoll or similar doesn't have a battle-tested implementation. I know it's harder to do in C than in Rust but I'm pretty sure that's what Hickory does internally.

leshow · 2 months ago

I use hickory a lot and have contributed to it. It does have a pretty robust async DNS implementation, and its helpfully split into multiple different crates so you can pick your entry point into the stack. For instance, it offers a recursive resolver, but you can also just import the protocol library and build your own with tokio.

leshow commented on A Look at Rust from 2012 purplesyringa.moe/blog/a-... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

vablings · 2 months ago

I feel async is in a very good place now (apart from async trait :[ ) As a regular user who isn't developing libraries async is super simple to use. Your function is async = it must be .await and must be in an async runtime. Probably as simple and straightforward as possible. There are no super annoying anti-patterns to deal with.

The ecosystem being tokio centric is a little strange though

leshow · 2 months ago

I love Rust and async Rust, but it's not true that there aren't annoying things to deal with. Anyone who's written async Rust enough has run into cancel-safety issues, the lack of async Drop and the interaction of async and traits. It's still very good, but there are some issues that don't feel very rust-y.

leshow commented on Google Antigravity antigravity.google/... · Posted by u/Fysi

SR2Z · 3 months ago

> they push into total dominance with the help of sleazy methods

Ah, yes. The famously sleazy "automatic security updates" and "performance."

It is amazing how people forget what the internet was like before Chrome. You could choose between IE, Firefox, or (shudder) Opera. IE was awful, Opera was weird, and the only thing that Firefox did better than customization was crash.

Now everyone uses Chrome/WebKit, because it just works. Mozilla abandoning Servo is awful, but considering that Servo was indirectly funded by Google in the first place... well, it's really hard to look at what Google has done to browsing and say that we're worse off than we were before.

leshow · 3 months ago

Have you read about the process of "enshittification"?

leshow commented on 'Fear really drives him': is Alex Karp of Palantir the world's scariest CEO? theguardian.com/technolog... · Posted by u/mellosouls

graemep · 3 months ago

"If you want peace, prepare for war."

leshow · 3 months ago

modern american history shows how wrong this is. US has been at war almost every year since the end of WW2.