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maerch commented on GPT-5.2   openai.com/index/introduc... · Posted by u/atgctg
namesbc · 5 days ago
So the rosy biased estimate is OpenAI is saving 1 hour of work per day, so 5 hours total per-work week and 20 hours total per-month.

With a subsidized cost of $200/month for OpenAI it would be cheaper to hirer a part-time minimum wage worker than it would be to contract with OpenAI.

And that is the rosiest estimate OpenAI has.

maerch · 5 days ago
The closest I come to working with part-time, minimum-wage workers is working with student employees. Even then, they earn more and usually work more than five hours a week.

Most of the time, I end up putting in more work than I get out of it. Onboarding, reviewing, and mentoring all take significant time.

Even with the best students we had, paying around 400 euros a month, I would not say that I saved five hours a week.

And even when they reach the point of being truly productive, they are usually already finished with their studies. If we then hire them full-time, they cost significantly more.

maerch commented on The Cities Skylines Paradox: how the sequel stumbled   selix.net/notes/the-citie... · Posted by u/jhy
dfxm12 · a month ago
You can only sell a game once. Once you have your customers' money, you've achieved your goal. What else is there to do? DLC has a hard cap on your possible sales...

You could work on a totally new game, but, I think companies are looking to cut costs by reusing content.

maerch · a month ago
Factorio 2.0 seemed to pull it off. I think that as long as users don’t feel misled by a DLC that only adds a few skins, they generally appreciate larger updates to a game.
maerch commented on German industrial output falls to 2005 levels as auto sector craters   ft.com/content/745fff84-2... · Posted by u/tchalla
niffydroid · 2 months ago
But also their cars can cost too much. They're doing a lot of sharing with Ford. Take for example the T7 platform. Why pay VW prices for a Ford?
maerch · 2 months ago
Exactly this. I thought about getting a T7, but the price is just ridiculous. And it’s not even like you’re paying for quality, there are so many complaints about both minor and major issues.
maerch commented on Birth of Prettier   blog.vjeux.com/2025/javas... · Posted by u/garretruh
harimau777 · 2 months ago
I think it depends on the situation. If it's just not their preference then there's probably no need for a change. However, if it's going to prevent the new person from doing their job then a change is probably justified.
maerch · 2 months ago
People being prevented from doing their job because of code formatting? In my nearly 20 years of development, that statement was indeed true, but only before the age of formatters. Back then, endless hours were spent on recurring discussions and nitpicky stylistic reviews. The supposed gains were minimal, maybe saving a few seconds parsing a line faster. And if something is really hard to read, adding a prettier-ignore comment above the lines works wonders. The number of times I’ve actually needed it since? Just a handful.

Code style is a Pareto-optimal problem space: what one person finds readable may look like complete chaos to someone else. There’s no objective truth, and that’s why I believe that in a project involving multiple people, spending time on this is largely a waste of time.

maerch commented on Vibe engineering   simonwillison.net/2025/Oc... · Posted by u/janpio
waltbosz · 2 months ago
My experience is it often generates code that is subtlety incorrect. And I'll waste time debugging it.

But if I give it a code example that was written by humans and ask it to explain the code, it gives pretty good explanations.

It's also good for questions like "I'm trying to accomplish complicated task XYZ that I've never done before, what should I do?", and it will give code samples that get me on the right path.

Or it'll help me debug my code and point out things I've missed.

It's like a pair programmer that's good for bouncing ideas, but I wouldn't trust it to write code unsupervised.

maerch · 2 months ago
> My experience is it often generates code that is subtlety incorrect. And I'll waste time debugging it.

> […]

> Or it'll help me debug my code and point out things I've missed.

I made both of these statements myself and later wondered why I had never connected them.

In the beginning, I used AI a lot to help me debug my own code, mostly through ChatGPT.

Later, I started using an AI agent that generated code, but it often didn’t work perfectly. I spent a lot of time trying to steer the AI to improve the output. Sometimes it worked, but other times it was just frustrating and felt like a waste of time.

At some point, I combined these two approaches: I cleared the context, told the AI that there was some code that wasn’t working as expected, and asked it to perform a root cause analysis, starting by trying to reproduce the issue. I was very surprised by how much better the agent became at finding and eventually fixing problems when I framed the task from this different perspective.

Now, I have commands in Claude Code for this and other due diligence tasks, and it’s been a long time since I last felt like I was wasting my time.

maerch commented on Gemini 3.0 Pro – early tests   twitter.com/chetaslua/sta... · Posted by u/ukuina
maerch · 2 months ago
I still have a bad taste in my mouth after all those GPT-5 hype articles that claimed the model was just one step away from AGI.
maerch commented on The RAG Obituary: Killed by agents, buried by context windows   nicolasbustamante.com/p/t... · Posted by u/nbstme
maerch · 2 months ago
> The agent follows references like a human analyst would. No chunks. No embeddings. No reranking. Just intelligent navigation.

I think this sums it up well. Working with LLMs is already confusing and unpredictable. Adding a convoluted RAG pipeline (unless it is truly necessary because of context size limitations) only makes things worse compared to simply emulating what we would normally do.

Deleted Comment

maerch commented on Important machine learning equations   chizkidd.github.io//2025/... · Posted by u/sebg
cgadski · 4 months ago
> This blog post has explored the most critical equations in machine learning, from foundational probability and linear algebra to advanced concepts like diffusion and attention. With theoretical explanations, practical implementations, and visualizations, you now have a comprehensive resource to understand and apply ML math. Point anyone asking about core ML math here—they’ll learn 95% of what they need in one place!

It makes me sad to see LLM slop on the front page.

maerch · 4 months ago
Apart from the “—“, what else gives it away? Just asking from a non-native perspective.
maerch commented on Malicious versions of Nx and some supporting plugins were published   github.com/nrwl/nx/securi... · Posted by u/longcat
echelon · 4 months ago
Then safety and alignment are a farce and these are not serious tools.

This is 100% within the responsibility of the LLM vendors.

Beyond the LLM, there is a ton of engineering work that can be put in place to detect this, monitor it, escalate, alert impacted parties, and thwart it. This is literally the impetus for funding an entire team or org within both of these companies to do this work.

Cloud LLMs are not interpreters. They are network connected and can be monitored in real time.

maerch · 4 months ago
I’m really trying to understand your point, so please bear with me.

As I see it, this prompt is essentially an "executable script". In your view, should all prompts be analyzed and possibly blocked based on heuristics that flag malicious intent? Should we also prevent the LLM from simply writing an equivalent script in a programming language, even if it is never executed? How is this different from requiring all programming languages (at least from big companies with big engineering teams) to include such security checks before code is compiled?

u/maerch

KarmaCake day102May 22, 2014View Original