cmarschner

Not comparable - drivers and space in a city is inherently limited, while there is no limit on GPU manufacturers, datacenter probividers, or LLM companies

It was written with zero human edits. All Claude Code.

The initial version (dictionary based on a Hash Array Mapped Trie) was done in 2 hours. The second version (5 data structures, including red-black-tree-based sorted map) took 46 commits over the last two weeks, done in between other things. Mostly a little prompt, enter, on to other things.

Almost 10000 lines of code, 300 tests. CI, 3 platforms, publishing to pypi.

Needless to say this would have taken me weeks a year ago.

You can try it out here: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1LWHEmvKZ-IS2raeg0RJ...

One of the biggest relevations: Claude debugged like a human.

Implementing the red-black tree yielded a lot of segfaults. It first tried to reason about the logic, couldn't find the bug. Then tried to run debuggers and stuff. This also went nowhere. I had to tell it to add printf statement to trace state changes, and write them to a file. This made finding the bug quite easy.

Since hundreds of people were involved the most likely explanation is incompetence

Befuddling that this happened again. It’s not the first time

- Paul Manafort court filing (U.S., 2019) Manafort’s lawyers filed a PDF where the “redacted” parts were basically black highlighting/boxes over live text. Reporters could recover the hidden text (e.g., via copy/paste).

- TSA “Standard Operating Procedures” manual (U.S., 2009) A publicly posted TSA screening document used black rectangles that did not remove the underlying text; the concealed content could be extracted. This led to extensive discussion and an Inspector General review.

- UK Ministry of Defence submarine security document (UK, 2011) A MoD report had “redacted” sections that could be revealed by copying/pasting the “blacked out” text—because the text was still present, just visually obscured.

- Apple v. Samsung ruling (U.S., 2011) A federal judge’s opinion attempted to redact passages, but the content was still recoverable due to the way the PDF was formatted; copying text out revealed the “redacted” parts.

- Associated Press + Facebook valuation estimate in court transcript (U.S., 2009) The AP reported it could read “redacted” portions of a court transcript by cut-and-paste (classic overlay-style failure). Secondary coverage notes the mechanism explicitly.

A broader “history of failures” compilation (multiple orgs / years) The PDF Association collected multiple incidents (including several above) and describes the common failure mode: black shapes drawn over text without deleting/sanitizing the underlying content. https://pdfa.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/High-Security-PD...

For me it‘s the opposite. I do have a good feeling what I want to achieve, but translating this into and testing program code has always been causing me outright physical pain (and in case of C++ I really hate it). I‘ve been programming since age 10. Almost 40 years. And it feels like liberation.

It brings the “what to build“ question front and center while “how to build it“ has become much, much easier and more productive

Completely failed for me running the code it changed in a docker container i keep running. Claude did it flawlessly. It absolutely rocks at code reviews but ir‘s terrible in comparison generating code

$$$$$

In this case it’s the model. There’s an insane amount of computation that should happen in milliseconds but given today’s hardware might run 10 times too slow. Mind you these models take in lots of sensor data and spit out trajectories in a tight feedback loop.

It is a well-known fact that 99% of architecture schools are about making students follow a particular set of tastes we call “modernism” - an ideology that states that buildings need to be innovative, that traditional methods should be neglected. It favors minimalist forms, neglects art forms like ornament, idealizes the “genius architect”, and favors “modern” materials like concrete.

If you don’t follow this stream, more often than not you will get bad grades or fail tests.

Some people said “architecture is not about education, it is about entering a cult”.

Some more details here: https://youtu.be/syQMTZyzqcg?si=NTz362TrktrIEBhr

Your reasoning follows the exact playbook that is repeated by architecture professionals around the world. It is exactly these kind of statements that lead me to comment in the first place.

No, architecture is not high art. It is the most public of arts and hence needs to serve the people. And people know very well which environments they like and which ones they don‘t. Where they find emotional well-being. That is not a political question at all. The studies are consistent.

We also don‘t need a theory. Architecture is a bunch of patterns and insights into human nature that has been known for thousands of years.

Academia here is highly dysfunctional.

For one, you don‘t need academics to build houses.

It‘s an idea of the 20th century that you would.

Previously architecture schools were part of the art departments. A bit of engineering, maybe, but that‘s it.

Now that you have academics, they need to be innovative.

The old doesn‘t count. Architecture becomes like fashion. Students are scolded if they want to produce anything traditional.

This is true for 99% of architecture schools worldwide. Notre Dame is a noticeable exception, as are several summer schools in Europe (by INTbau for example).

There is zero reason for neglecting or denying traditional architecture. The Romans have already known how to live well. Without artificial air condition. Perfectly climate adapted. Natural materials.

Second, architecture schools are not about education, it‘s about becoming part of a cult. It‘s about telling a story, about winning competitions, and about convincing investors. Not so much pleasing the users of a building.

Not true, there are many places with traditional courtyard blocks and 3-5 stories that reach the population density of Manhattan

It‘s not under-explored at all. Millions of people work in architecture and city planning. Every city has several departments that deal with planning and construction.

It‘s just completely dysfunctional. Architecture professors have focused on “innovation” for 100 years and have achieved little. We still flock to the old, 19th century (or older) city centers and love it. We spend thousands to spend a week or two there on holidays.

Very few modern places exist where this is the case.

In survey after survey, 80% of the people prefer traditional over modern(ist) designs.

So the whole profession has failed, since about the introduction of the Bauhaus.

Well just that it’s none of these things, as expressed by countless people, online and offline. It was voted as world’s ugliest building more than once etc. etc…

In the end it is a matter of economics. Right now there is no path towards nuclear becoming competitive again against wind, solar, battery.

Plus, storage and cleanup costs in case of failures are not even priced in and left to taxpayers.

This leaves nuclear to government actors influenced by lobbyists.

My prediction is that the world will stabilize somewhere around 80% renewables and 20% nuclear. Maybe less. Prove me wrong

At planetary scale it seems to be quite important not having to replace the whole fleet every few years don‘t you think? Just from a resource perspective this planet shouldn‘t drown in defunct solar panels.

Weird how you can operate such a service anonomously. Even the whois entry goes through whoisproxy.

In the EU you have to put an address on every website that makes you reachable by courts.

Just lately there was an article about one of the last 50 surviving video stores in Germany that has recently seen an uptick in customers. They have a huge collection of DVDs. They get a lot more requests for DVDs rather than Blu-rays.

https://www.br.de/nachrichten/bayern/dvd-vs-streaming-eine-d...

The problem with these tools is that despite having worked with computers for 35 years, I don‘t get them. My brain is not made for them.

I only use out of the box vim when I work on consoles (which is still a fair amount of the time), I can exit (hey!), mark/cut/copy/paste (ok, yank!), save, and find/replace if I must. Everything else is just beyond what my brain wants to handle.

A lot of Jupyter lab and some VSCode otherwise. I can‘t say I know all about those either.

The last IDE that I knew pretty well was Eclipse, in about 2004. I even wrote plugins for it for my own use. That wasn‘t too bad for its time, I don‘t quite get why it got out of fashion.

The metal support for pytorch is a real sh*t show at this point - all APIs are either legacy or unfinished. Also, app memory is about 3GB even for the largest phones. It really still feels that it‘s all in its infancies.

Rest assured 6-digit salaries are quite common in areas like Munich, and if you work for US companies like Google or Microsoft they can be double or triple that, or even more, through stocks. The sad truth as well is that there are not enough successful and large tech companies in Germany that you would see those there as well.

Two words: Botched release

An org's learning curve. First time it happened on this scale. They will probably do a thorough post-mortem to make sure processes are improved next time.

Also, I hope they look at Twitter/X.

Ok. But written in Haskell? Why would you write this kind of stuff in anything but python - it’s trivial after all, and it should stay trivial through all layers…

I did this when I was still by myself, but a) having family and b) having more and more micro transactions (like coffee, transit, lime scooters…) and c) more and more accounts (amazon, paypal) means I had to declare time bancruptcy meanwhile

I envy you, this has been my dream for years. But obscure payment gateways make this a task for the chosen few in this country. If somebody could point me to a workable solution (on Linux / cross platform) for Germany it would be highly appreciated.

“Every financial system is broken in its own way” (ex-coworker who had worked in financial services)

Totally I would love this feature. Even to the point where you could use reverse incentives. Pay a fee for having fewer apps. Pay for freedom.

Only short term, as increased prices give incentives to produce things without carbon emissions.

Besides, these prices have always been there as external costs. You just never paid them. This needs to stop anyway.

Unfortunately our democracies have a blind eye when it comes to internalizing external costs and executing on policies that might take 20, 30 years to get implemented. It is a process with many setbacks every other election cycle. This is one place where a king or queen actually makes sense - their interest is to leave a heritage for their firstborn. But even monarchs need to fear the wrath of the people when they do it, and besides, they might be too stupid.