Readit News logoReadit News
what-the-grump commented on Show HN: I used Claude Code to discover connections between 100 books   trails.pieterma.es/... · Posted by u/pmaze
drakeballew · 2 months ago
This is a beautiful piece of work. The actual data or outputs seem to be more or less...trash? Maybe too strong a word. But perhaps you are outsourcing too much critical thought to a statistical model. We are all guilty of it. But some of these are egregious, obviously referential LLM dog. The world has more going on than whatever these models seem to believe.

Edit/update: if you are looking for the phantom thread between texts, believe me that an LLM cannot achieve it. I have interrogated the most advanced models for hours, and they cannot do the task to any sort of satisfactory end that a smoked-out half-asleep college freshman could. The models don't have sufficient capacity...yet.

what-the-grump · 2 months ago
Build a rag with significant amount of text, extract it by key word topic, place, date, name, etc.

… realize that it’s nonsense and the LLM is not smart enough to figure out much without a reranker and a ton of technology that tells it what to do with the data.

You can run any vector query against a rag and you are guaranteed a response. With chunks that are unrelated any way.

what-the-grump commented on Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far   burkeholland.github.io/po... · Posted by u/tbassetto
gf000 · 2 months ago
Well, where is your competitor to mainstream software products?
what-the-grump · 2 months ago
What mainstream software product do I use on a day to day basis besides Claude?

The ones that continue to survive all build around a platform of services, MSO, Adobe, etc.

Most enterprise product offerings, platform solutions, proprietary data access, proprietary / well accepted implementation. But lets not confuse it with the ability to clone it, it doesnt seem far fetched to get 10 people together and vibe out a full slack replacement in a few weeks.

what-the-grump commented on Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far   burkeholland.github.io/po... · Posted by u/tbassetto
rcoder · 2 months ago
In ~25 years or so of dealing with large, existing codebases, I've seen time and time again that there's a ton of business value and domain knowledge locked up inside all of that "messy" code. Weird edge cases that weren't well covered in the design, defensive checks and data validations, bolted-on extensions and integrations, etc., etc.

"Just rewrite it" is usually -- not always, but _usually_ -- a sure path to a long, painful migration that usually ends up not quite reproducing the old features/capabilities and adding new bugs and edge cases along the way.

what-the-grump · 2 months ago
When an LLM can rewrite it in 24 hours and fill the missing parts in minutes that argument is hard to defend.

I can vibe code what a dev shop would charge 500k to build and I can solo it in 1-2 weeks. This is the reality today. The code will pass quality checks, the code doesn’t need to be perfect, it doesn’t need to be cleaver it needs to be.

It’s not difficult to see this right? If an LLM can write English it can write Chinese or python.

Then it can run itself, review itself and fix itself.

The cat is out of bag, what it will do to the economy… I don’t see anything positive for regular people. Write some code has turned into prompt some LLM. My phone can outplay the best chess player in the world, are you telling me you think that whatever unbound model anthropic has sitting in their data center can’t out code you?

what-the-grump commented on 2025: The Year in LLMs   simonwillison.net/2025/De... · Posted by u/simonw
snigsnog · 2 months ago
The internet and smartphones were immediately useful in a million different ways for almost every person. AI is not even close to that level. Very to somewhat useful in some fields (like programming) but the average person will easily be able to go through their day without using AI.

The most wide-appeal possibility is people loving 100%-AI-slop entertainment like that AI Instagram Reels product. Maybe I'm just too disconnected with normies but I don't see this taking off. Fun as a novelty like those Ring cam vids but I would never spend all day watching AI generated media.

what-the-grump · 2 months ago
A year after the iPhone came out… it didn’t have an App Store, barely was able to play video, barely had enough power to last a day. You just don’t remember or were not around for it.

A year after llms came out… are you kidding me?

Two years?

10 years?

Today, by adding an MCP server to wrap the same API that’s been around forever for some system, makes the users of that system prefer NLI over the gui almost immediately.

what-the-grump commented on AI Withholds Life-or-Death Information Unless You Know the Magic Words   substack.com/home/post/p-... · Posted by u/llamataboot
Nevermark · 3 months ago
After going through a period in life in which I only survived due to one person who knew me well, and knew how to take care of me, I ran into a group fundraising for an anti-suicide initiative at a winery.

I was immediately interested to hear of what interventions the group was spearheading, or intending to. I just couldn't imagine what well meaning strangers could have done that would have done anything but let me know that these were people I wouldn't want to mention my situation to.

Despite my genuine interest, nobody could tell me anything that they were aware of to help people at risk, except circle the strong implicit view that fundraising, fundraiser group recruitment, and anti-suicide fundraising-awareness campaigns enabled by fundraising, are all important ways to combat suicide. The only thing that made sense, was that the good wine they were drinking probably did help with all that.

They were a little put off that I expected them to know what the money was intended for, and had zero curiosity about my relevant experience, which just weirded them out. "It's for anti-suicide!"

what-the-grump · 3 months ago
The journey not the destination type of thing?

Ponzi schemes the new suicide prevention thing.

what-the-grump commented on Claude in Chrome   claude.com/chrome... · Posted by u/ianrahman
jazzyjackson · 3 months ago
I would personally feel a lot better with a container first approach, like attaching an LLM to QubesOS windows, so the non-deterministic chaos monkey can only effect what you want them to effect

This is easy enough with dev containers but once you let a model interact with your desktop, you should be really damn confident in your backup, rollback, and restore methods, and whether an errant rm rf or worse has any way to effect those.

IME even if someone has a cloud drive and a local external drive backup they've never actually tested the recovery path, and will just improvise after an emergency.

A snapshotted ZFS system pushing to something like rsync.net (which also stores snapshots) but I don't know of any timemachine-in-a-box solutions like Apple offers (is there still a time machine product actually? Maybe it's as easy as using that, since a factory reset Mac can restore from a time machine snapshot)

what-the-grump · 3 months ago
People are using these tools to write code, complete tasks, etc. your worry is that what... It will rm -rf /* something?

I am not trying to be funny but the Claude itself is smart enough to catch destructive actions and double check. Its not going to wake up and start eating your machine, googling a random script and running it which what a lot of people do in many cases leads to worse outcomes, here at least you can ask the model what might happen to my computer.

what-the-grump commented on SHARP, an approach to photorealistic view synthesis from a single image   apple.github.io/ml-sharp/... · Posted by u/dvrp
Traubenfuchs · 3 months ago
what-the-grump · 3 months ago
All this work to recreate a WinAmp viz from 20 years ago :) ?
what-the-grump commented on GPT-5.2   openai.com/index/introduc... · Posted by u/atgctg
bgwalter · 3 months ago
I have tried the models and in domains I know well they are pathetic. They remove all nuance, make errors that non-experts do not notice and generally produce horrible code.

It is even worse in non-programming domains, where they chop up 100 websites and serve you incorrect bland slop.

If you are using them as a search helper, that sometimes works, though 2010 Google produced better results.

Oracle dropped 11% today due to over-investment in OpenAI. Non-programmers are acutely aware of what is going on.

what-the-grump · 3 months ago
You pretend that humans don’t produce slop?

I can recognize the short comings of AI code but it can produce a mock or a full blown class before I can find a place to save the file it produced.

Pretending that we are all busy writing novelty and genius is silly, 99% are writing for CRUD tasks and basic business flows, the code isn’t going to be perfect it doesn’t need to be but it will get the job done.

All the logical gotchas of the work flows that you’d be refactoring for hours are done in minutes.

Use pro with search… are it going to read 200 pages of documentation in 7 minutes come up with a conclusion and validate it or invalidate it in another 5? No you still trying accept the cookie prompt on your 6th result.

You might as well join the flat earth society if you still think that AI can’t help you complete day to day tasks.

Dead Comment

what-the-grump commented on What if you don't need MCP at all?   mariozechner.at/posts/202... · Posted by u/jdkee
tptacek · 4 months ago
"Have your XYZ give the LLM some JSON" is pretty close to how all tool calling works with or without MCP.
what-the-grump · 4 months ago
What next you are going to tell me rest and async are implemented in code?! And not just willed into existence by the compiler!

u/what-the-grump

KarmaCake day479April 11, 2018View Original