unlikelymordant (u/unlikelymordant)

unlikelymordant commented on Two kinds of AI users are emerging martinalderson.com/posts/... · Posted by u/martinald

jjav · a month ago

> Isn't this true of any greenfield project?

That is a good point and true to some extent. But IME with AI, both the initial speedup and the eventual slowdown are accelerated vs. a human.

I've been thinking that one reason is that while AI coding generates code far faster (on a greenfield project I estimate about 50x), it also generates tech-debt at a hyperastonishing rate.

It used to be that tech debt started to catch up with teams in a few years, but with AI coded software it's only a few months into it that tech debt is so massive that it is slowing progress down.

I also find that I can keep the tech debt in check by using the bot only as a junior engineer, where I specify precisely the architecture and the design down to object and function definitions and I only let the bot write individual functions at a time.

That is much slower, but also much more sustainable. I'd estimate my productivity gains are "only" 2x to 3x (instead of ~50x) but tech debt accumulates no faster than a purely human-coded project.

This is based on various projects only about one year into it, so time will tell how it evolves longer term.

unlikelymordant · a month ago

In your experience, can you take the tech debt riddled code, and ask claude to come up with an entirely new version that fixes the tech debt/design issues you've identified? Presumably there's a set of tests that you'd keep the same, but you could leverage the power of ai in greenfield scenarios to just do a rewrite (while letting it see the old code). I dont know how well this would work, i havn't got to the heavy tech debt stage in any of my projects as I do mostly prototyping. I'd be interested in others thoughts.

unlikelymordant commented on You’re not burnt out, you’re existentially starving neilthanedar.com/youre-no... · Posted by u/thanedar

thanedar · 3 months ago

You get off the hedonic treadmill by getting into something deeper like politics.

I do feel like I'm an example of someone who's juggled marriage, kids, startups, etc. where how I finally got a clean source of sustainable energy was having a part of my life to truly chase my highest potential. And to me that's politics, and specifically anticorruption and Positive Politics.

Glad that the "go into politics" ideas piqued your interest!

unlikelymordant · 3 months ago

Would you mind expanding on what you do for anticorruption? It has been something ive been thinking about and wanting to get into lately. It seems like complete poison to democracy, and more should be done to bring it to light wherever it occurs

unlikelymordant commented on OpenAI's o1 Playing Codenames suveenellawela.com/though... · Posted by u/suveen_ellawela

deredede · a year ago

This is the take I thought I'd have, but in the last example, the guesser model reaches the correct conclusion using a different reasoning than the clue giver model.

The clue giver justifies the link of Paper and Log as "written records", and between Paper and Line as "lines of text". But the guesser model connects Paper and Log because "paper is made from logs" (reaching the conclusion through a different meaning of Log), and connects Paper and Line because "'lined paper' is a common type of paper".

Similarly, in the first example, the clue giver connects Monster and Lion because lions are "often depicted as a mythical beast or monster in legends" (a tenuous connection if you ask me), whereas the guesser model thought about King because of King Kong (which I also prefer to Lion).

unlikelymordant · a year ago

generally there is a "temperature" parameter that can be used to add some randomness or variety to the LLMs outputs by changing the likelihood of the next word being selected. This means you could just keep regenerating the same response and get different answers each time. each time it will give different plausible responses, and this is all from the same model. This doesn't mean it believes any of them, it just keeps hallucinating likely text, some of which will fit better than others. It is still very much the same brain (or set of trained parameters) playing with itself.

unlikelymordant commented on A three month review of kagi search and the orion web browser (2024) flatfootfox.com/a-three-m... · Posted by u/Apocryphon

unlikelymordant · a year ago

I have been using search for engines for 30 years, my queries are not vague, i put as many keywords and "inurl"s and whatnot in as i can manage. I dont use kagi blocklists. Google results for my specific queries are garbage. I am much happier with kagi. If you are happy with google, thats fine too. Perhaps we are just in different bubbles and mine are not well served by google.

unlikelymordant commented on A three month review of kagi search and the orion web browser (2024) flatfootfox.com/a-three-m... · Posted by u/Apocryphon

wahnfrieden · a year ago

intext: and quoting solves this…

unlikelymordant · a year ago

I haven't found quoting helps much. I also feel like i shouldnt have to craft search queries with a lot of inurl or other tags or quoting. Kagi just seems to work better. Its worth 10$ a month to me to not have to worry about it, I use search engines a lot.

unlikelymordant commented on A three month review of kagi search and the orion web browser (2024) flatfootfox.com/a-three-m... · Posted by u/Apocryphon

unlikelymordant · a year ago

I have used kagi for quite a while now, and i use it pretty much exclusively. I was unhappy with google ignoring many terms in my search queries and giving me results that I generally considered to be 'intro' pages and generic content, even when my searches were very specific. I have found kagi much better. I dont use any of the advanced stuff like summarisation or ai stuff, i just want search results that have my keywords in them.

unlikelymordant commented on We fine-tuned Llama 405B on AMD GPUs publish.obsidian.md/felaf... · Posted by u/felarof

unlikelymordant · a year ago

are you at all confident that this isn't hallucinated? I'd never trust an answer like this from an LLM

unlikelymordant commented on Was early modern writing paper expensive? (2018) folger.edu/blogs/collatio... · Posted by u/Bluestein

jfengel · 2 years ago

Something I've been unable to figure out: what is the trick you have to invent to make wood pulp paper? Is it chemical, or do you just need to keep smashing at wood chips in water?

unlikelymordant · 2 years ago

You need to break down the lignin without damaging the cellulose. Boiling and mashing doesnt do this very well, you still get bundles of fibres sticking together, you really need them all to separate. The bonds holding lignins together are slightly different between grasses and wood. For grasses sodium carbonate or hydroxide dissolves the lignin pretty well (i havnt tried but you could probably get away with wood ash and some salt for this, to provide sodium and high ph), and allows you to make some pretty nice paper. This as far as i know includes things like papyrus, sugarcane etc. Wood is different, you need sodium hydroxide and sodium sulfate to dissolve the lignin. This contributes to the smell of the paper making process where wood is used. I dont think the ancients knew about the use of sulfates, so their papers were mostly made of grasses or leather (vellum).

unlikelymordant commented on Mangrove trees are on the move, taking the tropics with them scientificamerican.com/ar... · Posted by u/alexahn

verisimi · 2 years ago

You're not on point. They probably only started to 'physically lift up' because the climate warmed. It says so in the second line. /s

I get that the human lifespan is quite a short thing, but it's it so hard to conceive of nature itself being in continuous flux? Is it really anthropogenic global warming? The historical record indicates huge changes..

I tend to think it was ever thus, and that 'climate change' is better considered a a corporate marketing initiative to get the consumer to happily accept more expensive yet inferior products.

unlikelymordant · 2 years ago

Of course there has been 'climate change' and 'global warming' before, caused by things like large volcanic eruptions (deccan traps) or meteorites. But they have pretty universally coincided with mass extinctions. And when we say glabal warming is anthropogenic, we mean this time humans are causing the warming by emitting a lot of co2 (and methane and no2 etc). It is fairly unequivocal at this point. This time its entirely within our power to prevent another mass extinction, because this this time we are causing it. Why wouldnt we try?

unlikelymordant commented on House prices are surging once again economist.com/finance-and... · Posted by u/belter

contingencies · 2 years ago

https://archive.is/ejnxk

As an Australian house owner, I consider the local perception that house prices have recently been increasing[0] to be largely based on domestic misconception. Rationale: If you take in to account USD/AUD currency shift[1] over the recent period, house prices are functionally flat or thereabouts. This view also accords better with cost of living shifts. Given this 'boots on the ground' view, I find it strange and remarkable that the Economist, which usually has fairly well reasoned journalism (and excellent editing), selects Australia as a stand-out market casually based upon some inspecific Goldies' analysis.

[0] https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/economy/price-indexes-and-... [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/2551/australian-us-dollar-exchan...

unlikelymordant · 2 years ago

Australian houses aren't bought with american dollars though. If this were the case wouldnt we see a big correlation between house prices and USD exchange rates? Why wouldn't the correlation be with other currencies such as china. Honest questions, it seems to me like massive immigration/low supply seems to e plain things pretty well.