compilers aren't probabilistic models though
True. The question is whether that's relevant to the trajectory described or not.
Readit Newsmwigdahl commented on AI helps ship faster but it produces 1.7× more bugs coderabbit.ai/blog/state-... · Posted by u/birdculture
mwigdahl commented on I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me marcusolang.substack.com/... · Posted by u/florian_s
mwigdahl commented on Upcoming Changes to Let's Encrypt Certificates community.letsencrypt.org... · Posted by u/schmuckonwheels
>I'm still rotating password
A bit off-topic, but I find this crazy. In basically every ecosystem now, you have to specifically go out of your way to turn on mandatory rotation.
It's been almost a decade since it's been explicitly advised against in every cybersec standard. Almost two since we've done the research to show how ill-advised mandatory rotations are.
But that would mean doing less, and that's by default bad. We must take action! Think of the children!
I tried at my workplace to get them to stop mandatory rotation when that research came out. My request was shot down without any attempt at justification. I don't know if it's fear of liability or if the cyber insurers are requiring it, but by gum we're going to rotate passwords until the sun burns out.
mwigdahl commented on String theory inspires a brilliant, baffling new math proof quantamagazine.org/string... · Posted by u/ArmageddonIt
Why colonize Mars? Why not Moon?
Mars has larger deposits of water and volatiles, which help with early space expansion.
You can start with a single Moon base but generally it isn't worth the mission control investment once you start to build out Mars.
mwigdahl commented on Bringing Sexy Back. Internet surveillance has killed eroticism lux-magazine.com/article/... · Posted by u/eustoria
mwigdahl commented on Three Years from GPT-3 to Gemini 3 oneusefulthing.org/p/thre... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross
Junior's grow into mids, and eventually into seniors. OSS contributor's eventually learn the codebase, you talk to them, you all get invested in the shared success of the project and sometimes you even become friends.
For me, personally, I just don't see the point of putting that same effort into a machine. It won't learn or grow from the corrections I make in that PR, so why bother? I might as well have written it myself and saved the merge review headache.
Maybe one day it'll reach perfect parity of what I could've written myself, but today isn't that day.
I wonder if that difference in mentality is a large part of the pro- vs anti-AI debate.
To me the AI is a very smart tool, not a very dumb co-worker. When I use the tool, my goal is for _me_ to learn from _its_ mistakes, so I can get better at using the tool. Code I produce using an AI tool is my code. I don't produce it by directly writing it, but my techniques guide the tool through the generation process and I am responsible for the fitness and quality of the resulting code.
I accept that the tool doesn't learn like a human, just like I accept that my IDE or a screwdriver doesn't learn like a human. But I myself can improve the performance of the AI coding by developing my own skills through usage and then applying those skills.
mwigdahl commented on Over-reliance on English hinders cognitive science cell.com/trends/cognitive... · Posted by u/DrierCycle
Wasn’t Sapir-Whorf pretty much debunked? Is there a difference in what is being claimed here or is it resurrecting it under a different name?
mwigdahl commented on Claude Code can debug low-level cryptography words.filippo.io/claude-d... · Posted by u/Bogdanp
> Many developers subscribe to their $200/month plan.
There's no way "many developers" are paying $2,400 annually for the benefit of their employers.
There's no way companies are paying when they won't even fork out $700 a year for IntelliJ instead pushing us all onto VSCode.
My company is paying for Claude Max for me and a dozen other developers. The others are using the API. If their API usage cost hits a level where it's cheaper to move them to Max, they're moved to Max.
There's no hard mandate to use Claude Code, but the value for us is clear to exec management and they are willing to foot the bill.
mwigdahl commented on Signs of introspection in large language models anthropic.com/research/in... · Posted by u/themgt
Misanthropic periodically need articles about sentience and introspection ("Give us more money!").
Working in this field must be absolute hell. Pages and pages with ramblings, no definitions, no formalizations. It is always "I put in this text and something happens, but I do not really know why. But I will dump all dialogues on the readers in excruciating detail."
This "thinking" part is overrated. z.ai has very good "thinking" but frequently not so good answers. The "thinking" is just another text generation step.
EDIT: Misanthropic people can get this comment down to -4, so people continue to believe in their pseudoscience. The linked publication would have been thrown into the dustbin in 2010. Only now, with all that printed money flowing into the scam, do people get away with it-
Why would it be any more "hell" than the kind of science practiced by natural philosophers? You can still do science on things you don't fully understand.
mwigdahl commented on Show HN: ISS in Real Time – 25 Years Aboard the International Space Station issinrealtime.org... · Posted by u/bfeist
Incredible, such a clear labor of love! Thank you for sharing it with the world!