tomlagier (u/tomlagier)

tomlagier commented on Google's ChatGPT Competitor Will Have to Wait gizmodo.com/google-s-chat... · Posted by u/rntn

danans · 2 years ago

> Outside the tech bubble everyone hears AI, but not a lot are clued in that hatGPT is even a thing.

The moment people realize that this tool allows you to enhance the volume and quality of your work output with little effort, whether it is authentic or not, it's use will catch on like wildfire.

Arguably it already has with students and knowledge workers, even outside tech centers. Schools and universities everywhere are suddenly contending with how to evaluate students in light of the availability of LLMs.

Why is it catching on? In the best light because it actually is a tremendous productivity accelerator. In the worst light, because we live in a world that incentivizes "fake it til you make it".

tomlagier · 2 years ago

> Why is it catching on? In the best light because it actually is a tremendous productivity accelerator. In the worst light, because we live in a world that incentivizes "fake it til you make it".

It's great at a few things and pretty good at a lot of things. In my view, the thing that it's the absolute best at is churning out low value, rarely-read communication. There is a massive amount of that type of communication - spam, student essays, procedural documents for compliance. There are loads of jobs that need to do that sort of thing regularly and it's a godsend for them.

tomlagier commented on Next.js 14 nextjs.org/blog/next-14... · Posted by u/creativedg

jowday · 2 years ago

We've had an awful experience with Next. There are undocumented, broken things all over the place. Migrating to the App Router was a huge mistake. 'use client' didn't work as expected, and we had to install workarounds and try out different hacks to get access to the most pedestrian features we could expect from any other web framework.

This is the broad consensus among everyone else I know using Next - they felt like the Next 13 release and the app router was a rug pull from a previously pleasant experience.

And whenever you complain about this or ask for support, some devrel guy from Vercel shows up in your replies, saying something to the effect of "Wow! That's crazy, we worked really hard on Next 13! This is my first time hearing about this!"

Edit: Since I know the devrel guys are in this thread: If you want people to keep using Next, something fundamental about how you guys write the framework needs to change. The instability and lack of documentation makes developing with your framework a massive pain in the ass - anyone I know who can is migrating off it as quickly as possible.

tomlagier · 2 years ago

Honestly, I've had a great experience because I've read a lot of experiences like yours and stuck with pages router & Next 12, which works nicely for everything I've needed it to do.

There might be a point where app router is stable & smooth but it's pretty clearly not right now, so havn't really seen the need to upgrade. I think there was a pretty decent comms issue with the stability of it from both the Next and React teams, but I have a hard time faulting an otherwise fairly stable and useful framework for adding features when they're not breaking the existing stable path.

Hooks was a bit of a bumpy transition as well, but I do think that I prefer the code written with them to the code before them. I think it's OK to wait a year or two to let the rough edges get filed down when these types of frameworks release big new feature sets.

Edit: I'll note that we don't use next/image or API routes either, both of which I've seen some churn / pain with. Possible I just hit on the framework when it was in a pretty happy place and most of the new features or suggested defaults have had pain points that I havn't experienced.

tomlagier commented on Show HN: I built a virtual tabletop for playing Dungeons and Dragons diceright.com/... · Posted by u/YakiSauce

rcarr · 2 years ago

Personally, I would market this and build it out for any other TTRPG system but Dungeons & Dragons. I absolutely love Dungeons & Dragons but I think the writing is on the wall that DnD Beyond is going to get the lion's share of all digital DnD spending, especially for newer players. There's always going to be holdouts who don't like the corporate direction, but the majority are going to use DnD Beyond because of how well integrated it all is, and that will include both 2d and 3d tabletops soon enough. So if you're planning on turning it into a side hustle, you're probably better off targeting say Call of Cthulu players, or Fiasco players or Fate players etc.

tomlagier · 2 years ago

My counterpoint to this is just that DDB is not a super usable piece of software (it's slow, buggy, and expensive). It's got the massive advantage of having the rights to sell D&D content, but there's definitely room for disruption in that market.

tomlagier commented on Show HN: I built a virtual tabletop for playing Dungeons and Dragons diceright.com/... · Posted by u/YakiSauce

treyd · 2 years ago

I always thought it was bizarre that there's no serious selfhostable FOSS virtual tabletop software [1]. The overlap between the two communities is very large and passionate. Foundry is selfhostable but it's a clunky proprietary node.js application and there's a ton of janky UI issues. Roll20 is far worse. I presume that this Diceright project is better since it's actually using a canvas. But why doesn't someone just use a proper game engine that can target the web (with wasm/emscripten/etc)? You're making a game after all, and it would mean that people who are happy downloading and running a native application locally for better UX would be able to.

[1] edit: That I was aware of when writing this comment initially.

tomlagier · 2 years ago

Nit: Foundry uses Pixi.js for rendering, so it's using more or less standard JS gamedev tools to draw on a WebGL context in a canvas.

Edit: See https://foundryvtt.wiki/en/development/guides/pixi

Edit2: For an example of why gamedev toolkits don't necessarily produce performant, highly usable software, check out Dungeondraft (https://dungeondraft.net/). It's built with Godot and gets the job done, but as an application it's a total mess. I'm working on an alternative but (surprise!) it's a challenge.

tomlagier commented on I’m a doctor: Here’s what I found when I asked ChatGPT to diagnose my patients inflecthealth.medium.com/... · Posted by u/blago

Genbox · 3 years ago

I've noticed a very weird trend when trying to incorporate GPT4 into my workflow. I lead a small team of developers and security consultants, and whenever someone runs into a problem, it is immediately searched for on the web. However, there is a real resistance/reluctance in using GPT for the same task.

I think it is a combination of factors. The wrong answers are part of it, but I think another part is the anthropomorphization of it makes it almost like asking another human for help, which is somehow 'less good' than asking a search engine.

For better or worse, LLMs are here to stay.

tomlagier · 3 years ago

For me, the reason I prefer Google to GPT is that it's much easier for me to assess the credibility of a Google answer vs a GPT one. There are so many signals in any primary source. Some obvious ones are things like number of upvotes, site reputability, presence of (working) examples, when was the answer written? More intangible things are like how closely does this solution match my problem statement, does the author write in a trustworthy manner are also easy for me to pick up at a glance.

With GPT, I don't have any of that (or maybe I just need to re-learn it?)

Also, I get a useful answer from most Google queries. GPT performs at a significantly lower bar (at least right now) - it works well for some stuff but not others, and the time it takes to figure out whether it's going to do a good job (and maybe do a couple of rounds of prompt refinement) is much more than just Googling.

tomlagier commented on Best D&D map makers for dungeons, cities and worlds dicebreaker.com/games/dun... · Posted by u/webmaven

zug_zug · 3 years ago

Played a solo-campgain with GPT4 for 1-2 hours yesterday, summary:

- Created character sheet for me, at desired level with spells and abilities

- Was able to add a cat to the game upon request

- Took hints.

- Was an outstanding writer, far better than any DM in terms of sensory descriptions and articulation

- Had to ask it to only tell 5 paragraphs at a time

- Performed combat rolls and math, all apparently correctly for a long while

- The first 20 rolls were all greater than 10, asked it give more random rolls and it seemingly did for a while

- Added elements on the fly consistently without losing track mostly

- Used puzzles and challenges and created a sense of danger. Adapted well on the fly to unusual character behavior (guessing an unreasonable answer for a puzzle solution).

- After a few hours it started confusing classes in my party (I think there is some context window). It forgot I had agonizing blast after a few hours.

- Sometimes fudged distances

Overall for a DM with infinite patience and an entirely customizable campaign on the fly with no need to plan/recover it seems promising at first. But some sort of prompt engineering will eventually prove necessary i think.

tomlagier · 3 years ago

I wonder if there's something that you can do as you're nearing the end of the context window to summarize the "state" of the world so far and put it into context so that the model always has context on the most important details. I'd imagine that you'd lose some of the minor stuff by compressing context this way, but, hey, humans forget minor details too.

tomlagier commented on Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first” simonwillison.net/2023/Fe... · Posted by u/simonw

scarface74 · 3 years ago

I keep seeing this oversimplification of what ChatGPT is doing. But it does have some ability to “understand” concepts. How else would it correctly solve word problems?

“ I have a credit card with a $250 annual fee. I get 4 membership reward points for every dollar I spend on groceries. A membership reward point is worth 1.4 cents. How much would I need to spend on groceries to break even?”

Just think about all of the concepts it would need to intuit to solve that problem.

tomlagier · 3 years ago

It doesn't even "understand" basic math - trivial to test if you give it a sufficiently unique expression (e.g. 43829583 * 5373271).

tomlagier commented on Free Open Source Tailwind CSS Components hyperui.dev/... · Posted by u/njaaazi

george_ciobanu · 4 years ago

Forgive me if this is a dumb question: why would I use Tailwind over say ant design when the latter is free and has hundreds of components?

tomlagier · 4 years ago

Not a dumb question!

They cover different needs - Tailwind is a low-level CSS library that provides a different (and some claim better) way of styling HTML. It doesn't provide markup, interactivity, etc.

AntD is a high-level component library that provides components with pre-built markup, JS interactivity, accessibility, etc. Any of the component libraries in this thread are a good point of comparison.

You might use Tailwind if you're building out your own components, or styling a page that doesn't need much interactivity. It is fast, lightweight, and easy to integrate. You can compare it to any CSS-in-JS tool, SASS, and other styling solutions.

You'd typically turn towards a component library (like MaterialUI, Ant Design, or Tailwind UI) if you're looking to quickly build a webapp that needs a lot of interactivity out of the gate. These solutions are larger and heavier, but provide a lot more functionality (interactivity, accessibility).

tomlagier commented on Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again · Posted by u/thadjo

tomlagier · 4 years ago

I wonder if AWS will make more or less money from these outages?

Will large players flee because of excessive instability? Or will smaller players go from single-AZ to more expensive multi-AZ?

My guess is that no-one will leave and lots of single-AZ tenants who should be multi-AZ will use this as the impetus to do it.

Honestly, having events like this is probably good for the overall resilience of distributed systems. It's like an immune system, you don't usually fail in the same way repeatedly.

tomlagier commented on Opposition to High Density Development journals.sagepub.com/doi/... · Posted by u/gotmedium

tomlagier · 4 years ago

Morally, I'm very pro-high density housing. Just like I'm pro-public transit. But in reality, my expressed preference is a single-family house with a yard and the convenience a car brings. I'm not sure how to square these things.