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mwarkentin commented on PYX: The next step in Python packaging   astral.sh/blog/introducin... · Posted by u/the_mitsuhiko
mavamaarten · 12 days ago
The problem for me: a non-python developer, is that I just don't know what to do, ever, to run an existing script or program.

It seems every project out there uses a different package manager, a different version of python, a different config file to set all of that up.

Most of the time, I just have a random .py file somewhere. Sometimes it's a full project that I can look at and find out what package manager it's using. Sometimes it has instructions, most of the time not. _That's_ the situation I struggle with.

Do I just run ./script.py? python script.py? python3 script.py? python3.12 script.py? When inevitably I miss some dependencies, do I just pip install? python pip install? pipx install?

As a developer I'm sure that you just set it up and forget about it. And once things work, they probably keep working for you. But man, it really reflects negatively upon Python itself for me. I don't hate the language, but I sure hate the experience.

mwarkentin · 12 days ago
Uv solves this (with some new standards). ./script.py will now install the python version, create a venv, and install dependencies (very quickly) if they don’t exist already.

#!/usr/bin/env -S uv run --script # /// script # requires-python = ">=3.12" # dependencies = [ # "ffmpeg-normalize", # ] # ///

mwarkentin commented on Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge   businessinsider.com/anthr... · Posted by u/pyman
markhahn · 2 months ago
why are you saying "memorize"? are people training AIs to regurgitate exact copies? if so, that's just copying. if they return something that is not a literal copy of the whole work, then there is established caselaw about how much is permitted. some clearly is, but not entire works.

when you buy a book, you are not acceding to a license to only ever read it with human eyes, forbearing to memorize it, never to quote it, never to be inspired by it.

mwarkentin · 2 months ago
> Specifically, the paper estimates that Llama 3.1 70B has memorized 42 percent of the first Harry Potter book well enough to reproduce 50-token excerpts at least half the time. (I’ll unpack how this was measured in the next section.)

> Interestingly, Llama 1 65B, a similar-sized model released in February 2023, had memorized only 4.4 percent of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. This suggests that despite the potential legal liability, Meta did not do much to prevent memorization as it trained Llama 3. At least for this book, the problem got much worse between Llama 1 and Llama 3.

> Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone was one of dozens of books tested by the researchers. They found that Llama 3.1 70B was far more likely to reproduce popular books—such as The Hobbit and George Orwell’s 1984—than obscure ones. And for most books, Llama 3.1 70B memorized more than any of the other models.

mwarkentin commented on My AI skeptic friends are all nuts   fly.io/blog/youre-all-nut... · Posted by u/tabletcorry
keeda · 3 months ago
> Core to Ptacek's point is that everything has changed in the last 6 months.

This was actually the only point in the essay with which I disagree, and it weakens the overall argument. Even 2 years ago, before agents or reasoning models, these LLMs were extremely powerful. The catch was, you needed to figure out what worked for you.

I wrote this comment elsewhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44164846 -- Upshot: It took me months to figure out what worked for me, but AI enabled me to produce innovative (probably cutting edge) work in domains I had little prior background in. Yes, the hype should trigger your suspicions, but if respectable people with no stake in selling AI like @tptacek or @kentonv in the other AI thread are saying similar things, you should probably take a closer look.

mwarkentin · 3 months ago
AI posts (including this one) are all over his employers blog lately, so there’s some stake (fly MCP, https://fly.io/blog/fuckin-robots/, etc).
mwarkentin commented on My AI skeptic friends are all nuts   fly.io/blog/youre-all-nut... · Posted by u/tabletcorry
jhatemyjob · 3 months ago
Yea probably..... I wonder when the plateau is. Is it right around the corner or 10 years from now? Seems like they can just keep growing it forever, based on what Sam Altman is saying. I'm botching the quote but either he or George Hotz said something to the effect of: every time you add an order of magnitude to the size of the data, there is a noticeable qualitative difference in the output. But maybe past a certain size you get diminishing returns. Or maybe it's like Moore's Law where they thought it would just go on forever but it turned out it's extremely difficult to get the distance between two transistors smaller than 7nm
mwarkentin · 3 months ago
Yes, some think it’s happening now: https://www.aisnakeoil.com/p/is-ai-progress-slowing-down
mwarkentin commented on Uv's killer feature is making ad-hoc environments easy   valatka.dev/2025/01/12/on... · Posted by u/astronautas
meitham · 7 months ago
This must have moved recently! I looked at this around end of December and it was hosted on https://github.com/indygreg/python-build-standalone/releases which had nothing to do with UV. If you read through the docs now it still references indygreg and still shows this https://github.com/indygreg/python-build-standalone so I guess the move has not completed it, but yes it's a positive change to see UV taking ownership of the builds.
mwarkentin commented on Accident Forgiveness   fly.io/blog/accident-forg... · Posted by u/piperswe
turok · a year ago
We incurred a 6 figure bill when the API an authentication token handling lambda was updating from was taken down. The lambda went into a crazy loop self invoking, as it had a retry mechanism and a CRON schedule, which piled invocations on top of retries. (over worked team, poor design, etc.)

So far we have gotten no concessions from AWS, and we have annual bills in the millions, just not for this application whose budget now has an awkward and obvious spike.

mwarkentin · a year ago
mwarkentin commented on Verified Rust for low-level systems code   github.com/verus-lang/ver... · Posted by u/gz09
lsuresh · a year ago
I assume by deterministic simulation you mean: use a harness wherein you can deterministically run specific executions of a distributed system (e.g., force specific event interleavings, failures etc?)?

If so, yes it's more accessible. The previous paper I linked (Sieve) used such a technique to reliably execute test plans so any bugs we find can be reproduced. But when it comes to correctness, I still think verification is just much more powerful.

W.r.t tooling, I think there's still quite the usability and knowledge gap to cross. The way I see it, we've had decades to figure out how to engineer complex software systems from simpler parts, with a lot written about software engineering and testing in general.

Full-system verification in contrast is still really young, and breaking up a system into an implementation, specification and proofs currently requires quite some creativity and even awareness of how the verifier works. The Anvil project I mentioned above had a team of systems, distributed computing, reliability and verification experts (including Verus authors) team up to do this.

mwarkentin · a year ago
Probably talking about something like https://antithesis.com
mwarkentin commented on New GitHub Copilot research finds 'downward pressure on code quality'   visualstudiomagazine.com/... · Posted by u/ceejayoz
Ferret7446 · 2 years ago
So it's basically StackOverflow except you get answers instantly and without having to deal with "closed as duplicate" nonsense.
mwarkentin · 2 years ago
Yes.

Although it’s also hollowed out the group of people using StackOverflow (and perhaps stack overflow has restricted open access to its data for further scraping), so future iterations of LLMs will have less up to date training data to use.

u/mwarkentin

KarmaCake day695November 29, 2010
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