DawnPaladin's recent activity

  1. Comment on Team behind Twitterrific launches a multi-feed app called Tapestry in ~tech

    DawnPaladin
    Link
    Runs on iPads, but not Intel-based Macs. :(

    Runs on iPads, but not Intel-based Macs. :(

  2. Comment on The day I taught AI to read code like a Senior Developer in ~comp

    DawnPaladin
    Link Parent
    Fair enough. I haven't examined their HN behavior.

    Fair enough. I haven't examined their HN behavior.

    1 vote
  3. Comment on The day I taught AI to read code like a Senior Developer in ~comp

    DawnPaladin
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    I think "almost" is a weasel word that lets people say what they think without needing to stand behind their words. If you literally meant "it's good that you wrote this, because its quality is...

    I think "almost" is a weasel word that lets people say what they think without needing to stand behind their words. If you literally meant "it's good that you wrote this, because its quality is very slightly above the threshold of not being worth the electrons it's printed on," then fine, but that's not how it comes across.

    I can see where you're coming from about blogs. When you make your living as a developer, the line between altruistic knowledge-sharing and cynical self-promotion can be blurry. I too have seen lots of low-quality blogs. But I get enormous value out of the good ones, and I think you can't get the good without the bad.

    2 votes
  4. Comment on The day I taught AI to read code like a Senior Developer in ~comp

    DawnPaladin
    Link Parent
    Why would they want to interact here when this is the kind of comment they get? If you don't like the way someone is posting (or not posting) on Tildes, it's fine to say so. If you object to what...

    Finally, whenever they post their own blog on here they post it and bail without any interaction.

    Why would they want to interact here when this is the kind of comment they get?

    If you don't like the way someone is posting (or not posting) on Tildes, it's fine to say so. If you object to what they're saying, talk about that - we are here for discussion, after all. But telling someone their ideas aren't worthy of blogging about makes the internet worse. When you tell people not to blog, you get fewer blogs. Blogs are the best place to find humans writing in depth and at length to share knowledge. When they go away, all that's left is spam and corporations.

    You might think "okay, but we only want to encourage the good blogs, not the bad ones." That doesn't work. As with every other creative endeavor, you usually have to write a bunch of garbage before you can attain brilliance. If you discourage bad bloggers, you will never get any good ones.

    I don't think this blog post is bad. But even if I did, I would never tell the author they shouldn't have written it. Telling someone "this blog post isn't a good fit for our discussion forum" or even "your idea needs refinement" can be part of valid, constructive criticism that helps people improve. Telling someone "you shouldn't have bothered writing this" is not constructive, and it's out of line.

    3 votes
  5. Comment on The day I taught AI to read code like a Senior Developer in ~comp

    DawnPaladin
    Link Parent
    I found the post helpful. I'm not a senior developer, so the technique nmn describes for how to review PRs was new to me; I think it will come in handy. I'm surprised that grouping the files in a...

    I found the post helpful. I'm not a senior developer, so the technique nmn describes for how to review PRs was new to me; I think it will come in handy.

    I'm surprised that grouping the files in a PR by function would make such a difference. I'm going to have to experiment with my prompting more.

    Finally:

    This isn't groundbreaking. In fact I feel it almost shouldn't even be worthy of a blog post.

    What the fuck? Don't ever tell people their discoveries aren't good enough to blog about. Everyone is at different stages of learning. Something that reads as uninsightful to you is helpful for someone like me, because we're at different points in our learning journey. That's doubly true for a field like LLMs where tons of stuff is brand new and people are figuring out the basics every day.

    23 votes
  6. Comment on How to feel bad and be wrong in ~science

    DawnPaladin
    Link
    This guy is great. Adding him to my RSS feed.

    This guy is great. Adding him to my RSS feed.

    2 votes
  7. Comment on Are LLMs making Stack Overflow irrelevant? in ~tech

    DawnPaladin
    Link Parent
    I agree. StackOverflow has launched an AI product; I haven't found it useful yet. But I think there's tons of potential to have LLMs doing the unglamorous janitor work that's so essential to a...

    I agree. StackOverflow has launched an AI product; I haven't found it useful yet. But I think there's tons of potential to have LLMs doing the unglamorous janitor work that's so essential to a well-functioning forum.

    2 votes
  8. Comment on Are LLMs making Stack Overflow irrelevant? in ~tech

    DawnPaladin
    (edited )
    Link
    From what I remember lurking on StackOverflow Meta (where sitewide issues are discussed), Stack Exchange the company has spent several years trying to make StackOverflow more newbie-friendly....

    From what I remember lurking on StackOverflow Meta (where sitewide issues are discussed), Stack Exchange the company has spent several years trying to make StackOverflow more newbie-friendly. They've improved the ask-a-question screen to help people ask better questions. They've instituted policies aimed at reducing the number of questions that get immediately closed by moderators. In 2018 they announced a change to community standards requiring that users and moderators be less hostile toward askers.

    The response from the mods and high-ranking posters on StackOverflow Meta was overwhelmingly negative. StackOverflow has two core problems:

    1. The ratio of dedicated mods and experts to newbies has always been very low, creating burnout. I'm trying to clear out a hundred low-effort dumbass questions before lunch just to break even - now you're telling me I have to be nice to these people?
    2. The founding promise of the reputation system - work hard, contribute well, and you'll be rewarded with power and influence - had an unspoken limitation: all of the actually important policy decisions are made by Stack Exchange the company, and they don't care what your reputation score is.

    So while company leadership was trying to solve the problem of "newbies are being driven away by unfriendliness, causing site traffic and revenue to go down", mods were trying to solve the opposite problem: "We have too many dumbass questions, causing moderation and quality to suffer and therefore driving away experts."

    StackOverflow's mods and its corporate leadership have never gotten along. The mods frequently ask for more powerful moderation tools which never materialize; the corporate leadership dictates unpopular policy changes, and the mods get outraged and go on strike.

    This tense and unhappy state of affairs showed every sign of continuing indefinitely. Then ChatGPT enters the picture. ChatGPT answers questions instantly, doesn't yell at you for asking, doesn't require you to extract your software bug into a minimum reproducible example, and will answer as many follow-up questions as you want. It's not always correct, but then neither is StackOverflow. It hits like a bombshell, leading to the state of affairs we see today.

    So as the number of daily questions on StackOverflow trends quickly downwards, it's nice to know that the mods of StackOverflow have gotten exactly what they want.

    27 votes
  9. Comment on Recommend your social/softer science fiction books in ~books

    DawnPaladin
    Link
    A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys is my favorite book in years. I posted a writeup last March, but that might have more plot details than you want; if you want to go in completely unspoiled,...

    A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys is my favorite book in years. I posted a writeup last March, but that might have more plot details than you want; if you want to go in completely unspoiled, I'll just say that it grapples seriously with climate change while also being doggedly hopeful about—even insistent upon—our ability to overcome it. Humanity is organized less into nations and more by watersheds. It's very leftist and eco-centric while also being very tech-positive. (@sparksbet, you might like this!)

    3 votes
  10. Comment on Nepenthes: a tarpit intended to catch AI web crawlers in ~tech

    DawnPaladin
    Link Parent
    100% agree that trying to destroy or boycott new technologies are completely ineffective strategies. I also agree that AI has the potential to centralize power and increase inequality. That's why...

    100% agree that trying to destroy or boycott new technologies are completely ineffective strategies.

    I also agree that AI has the potential to centralize power and increase inequality. That's why I'm studying math in the evenings, working toward getting a degree in AI. If we want good outcomes from this technology, we're going to need people using this technology to produce good outcomes.

  11. Comment on Nepenthes: a tarpit intended to catch AI web crawlers in ~tech

    DawnPaladin
    Link Parent
    Does it, though? The Luddites destroyed a few machines. "Members of the working class overthrowing the system that oppresses them all" gave us communist Russia and China. If you're going to...

    Does it, though? The Luddites destroyed a few machines. "Members of the working class overthrowing the system that oppresses them all" gave us communist Russia and China. If you're going to advocate for socialist revolution, you need a really solid reason why this time it's not going to degenerate into authoritarianism.

    When you say "developing class consciousness", do you have a plan for that beyond posting on social media? It's easy to get into a habit of doing stuff that feels good but doesn't ultimately accomplish anything.

    Looking at the recent MAGA victory, it seems to me that an important element of their victory was that they went beyond filter-bubble social media and developed very popular broadcast media, like for example the Joe Rogan show. (I don't think Rogan self-identifies as MAGA, but I have heard he's been very effective at pushing the younger generation right.) Conservative billionaires are happy to pour money into conservative media because it creates a steady supply of marks, increasing their wealth and creating a positive feedback loop. It's much more difficult for the Left to fund such projects because creating wealth for rich donors is not a goal of leftist media. You could try crowdfunding it, but I predict such a project would be subject to leftist purity testing and infighting.

    I think you are right to criticize the Luddites for doing stuff that doesn't work. I am sympathetic to your goals of stopping oppression. But the "developing class consciousness" project has been going on for some time now and it doesn't seem to be working in the United States.

    2 votes
  12. Comment on HTML is the most significant computing language ever developed. Underestimate it at your peril. in ~tech

    DawnPaladin
    Link Parent
    Are you talking about this? Today you can't do these with HTML alone, but back in the day, you could, with the <blink> and <marquee> tags. Browsers have since stopped supporting these elements,...

    Are you talking about this?

    With a few tags you can write your name on a webpage, make it bigger or smaller, add “is awesome” in bold or italics, and even—for those of us who came of age in better times—make it blink or scroll across the screen.

    Today you can't do these with HTML alone, but back in the day, you could, with the <blink> and <marquee> tags. Browsers have since stopped supporting these elements, because they're annoying. But in the early 90s, you could very easily do this in pure HTML. Simpler times!

    7 votes
  13. Comment on OpenAI boss Sam Altman denies sexual abuse allegations made by sister, Ann Altman in ~tech

    DawnPaladin
    Link Parent
    Yeah, I meant it the way @Arlen phrased it. After I got some responses I did some research, and I'm better informed now. Sorry for my bad phrasing.

    Yeah, I meant it the way @Arlen phrased it. After I got some responses I did some research, and I'm better informed now. Sorry for my bad phrasing.

    8 votes
  14. Comment on OpenAI boss Sam Altman denies sexual abuse allegations made by sister, Ann Altman in ~tech

    DawnPaladin
    Link
    Is it relevant that Sam Altman is gay? He married Oliver Mulherin last January.

    Is it relevant that Sam Altman is gay? He married Oliver Mulherin last January.

    2 votes
  15. Comment on <deleted topic> in ~tech

    DawnPaladin
    Link

    A drum I’ve been banging for a while is that LLMs are power-user tools—they’re chainsaws disguised as kitchen knives. They look deceptively simple to use—how hard can it be to type messages to a chatbot?—but in reality you need a huge depth of both understanding and experience to make the most of them and avoid their many pitfalls.

    ...

    What are we doing about this? Not much. Most users are thrown in at the deep end. The default LLM chat UI is like taking brand new computer users, dropping them into a Linux terminal and expecting them to figure it all out.

    Meanwhile, it’s increasingly common for end users to develop wildly inaccurate mental models of how these things work and what they are capable of. I’ve seen so many examples of people trying to win an argument with a screenshot from ChatGPT—an inherently ludicrous proposition, given the inherent unreliability of these models crossed with the fact that you can get them to say anything if you prompt them right.

    There’s a flipside to this too: a lot of better informed people have sworn off LLMs entirely because they can’t see how anyone could benefit from a tool with so many flaws. The key skill in getting the most out of LLMs is learning to work with tech that is both inherently unreliable and incredibly powerful at the same time. This is a decidedly non-obvious skill to acquire!

    There is so much space for helpful education content here, but we need to do do a lot better than outsourcing it all to AI grifters with bombastic Twitter threads.

    23 votes
  16. Comment on <deleted topic> in ~tech

    DawnPaladin
    Link Parent
    Are you sure this is the same thing described in the article? The article describes something built in Unreal Engine. The thing this site is linking to is just a Miro board.

    Are you sure this is the same thing described in the article? The article describes something built in Unreal Engine. The thing this site is linking to is just a Miro board.

    3 votes
  17. Comment on In the real world, existing EV batteries may last up to 40% longer than expected from lab tests in ~transport

    DawnPaladin
    Link Parent
    You may get your wish. Universal Plug & Charge is in development.

    Second: The dependency on apps, even for many free chargers, is a major annoyance. I don't want to have to maintain balances and keep 5 different apps on my phone, but here we are. It also increases chances of a charging station being unusable.

    You may get your wish. Universal Plug & Charge is in development.

    5 votes
  18. Comment on Tom Merritt's opinion on if Mozilla should join Chromium in ~tech

    DawnPaladin
    Link Parent
    I wonder if Firefox would have been more successful if they'd made the Firefox engine easier for knockoff browsers to adopt. Chromium has several successful browsers (Edge, Vivaldi, Arc) and I...

    I wonder if Firefox would have been more successful if they'd made the Firefox engine easier for knockoff browsers to adopt. Chromium has several successful browsers (Edge, Vivaldi, Arc) and I think that contributes to Chrome's success. It's weird that Google (a very proprietary, monopolistic company) contributes to other browsers more effectively than Mozilla does.

    1 vote
  19. Comment on Tom Merritt's opinion on if Mozilla should join Chromium in ~tech

    DawnPaladin
    Link
    I am glad to see someone thinking outside the box and proposing big changes. Mozilla needs to change something or they're going to vanish completely into irrelevance. That said, I don't think this...

    I am glad to see someone thinking outside the box and proposing big changes. Mozilla needs to change something or they're going to vanish completely into irrelevance.

    That said, I don't think this proposal would actually make anything better. Mozilla needs two things: money and market share. I don't think this helps with either of those problems.

    A lot of people might switch to Firefox if it didn’t have the compatibility.

    I really don't think this is the problem. Firefox's compatibility is fine. Firefox's problem is the market dynamics that push people toward one browser or another. Firefox isn't the default anywhere, and Mozilla can't use the world's most popular website to nudge people toward Firefox.

    Maybe the forthcoming antitrust judgment against Google will force them to make people choose a browser. That's the only real hope I can see for Mozilla. Unfortunately that same judgement also has a good chance of killing their primary income stream, i.e. their deal with Google. So I'm afraid it's not looking good.

    8 votes
  20. Comment on Bomb threats made against US President-Elect Donald Trump cabinet nominees in ~society

    DawnPaladin
    Link Parent
    I agree that making stuff up is a key pillar of the Republican strategy, but that doesn't mean the truth doesn't matter. I would also argue that sending bomb threats (in addition to being wrong)...

    I agree that making stuff up is a key pillar of the Republican strategy, but that doesn't mean the truth doesn't matter.

    I would also argue that sending bomb threats (in addition to being wrong) has no strategic upside.

    5 votes