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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • I prefer my tutorials without reading someone’s life story at the beginning. The intro contains so little info compared to the number of words being used. This reminds me of looking up a recipe and having to scroll past an essay on the history of someone’s grandmother. I like it when documentation is as dense as possible, and ideally formatted in a logical way so it’s easy to skim. Big paragraphs of English do not achieve this.



  • Also, a key part of how GPT-based LLMs work today is they get the entire context window as their input all at once. Where as a human has to listen/read a word at a time and remember the start of the conversation on their own.

    I have a theory that this is one of the reasons LLMs don’t understand the progression of time.



  • the kind of stuff that people with no coding experience make

    The first complete program I ever wrote was in Basic. It took an input number and rounded it to the 10s or 100s digit. I had learned just enough to get it running. It was using strings and a bunch of if statements, so it didn’t work for more than 3 digit numbers. I didn’t learn about modulo operations until later.

    In all honesty, I’m still pretty proud of it, I was in 4th or 5th grade after all 😂. I’ve now been programming for 20+ years.


  • xthexder@l.sw0.comtoProgrammer Humor@programming.devAI in reality
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    16 days ago

    I think part of the problem is that LLMs stop learning at the end of the training phase, while a human never stops taking in new information.

    Part of why I think AGI is so far away is because to run the training in real-time like a human, it would take more compute than currently exists. They should be focusing on doing more with less compute to find new more efficient algorithms and architectures, not throwing more and more GPUs at the problem. Right now 10x the GPUs gets you like 5-10% better accuracy on whatever benchmarks, which is not a sustainable direction to go.










  • I really enjoy programming, but generally I dislike cooking. I just want to eat, not spend time preparing to eat.

    My experience with cooking has been that because I don’t do it enough, I’m constantly dealing with food expiration dates and having to plan carefully around them.

    In comparison, I’ve got some servers that have been running maintenance free for 5+ years. (Probably not the most secure thing, but meh, I don’t have customers other than myself)

    I think programmers often have hobbies that are more physical though. For me, I like working on my car because turning bolts and working with my hands lets my brain turn off for a while. I could see cooking and following a recipe being in the same category for others.




  • It really depends on what you’re measuring. Good luck measuring the distance from a corner if you can’t get 0 to touch the end.

    Tape measures are almost always designed with this in mind, so you can hook the end over an edge, or butt it up against something and the measurement will be accurate both ways, since the metal end can slide in or out by just the right amount.