ftcHn

Sounds great. I'll watch it with the kids. We've recently done this podcast about the history of the cup and it was funny and fascinating. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUZmk_G6rFE

I'm developing a Revit add-in that and using the LLM to help write the code. I use AI in the development process but no AI is used at runtime.

The Revit API is a challenge to build against. The documentation isn't great and often API calls will fail for mysterious reasons.

The old school, non-AI workflow for developing an add-in for me was: read the docs, write some code, run Revit which loads your add-in, do some actions within Revit to test your code, figure out what failed and repeat until you get the desired result. There was a lot trial and error involved and the loop was slow. Revit takes long time to start even on high-spec machines and the user actions required to test take some time.

I'm trying to use LLMs to speed up this development process by allowing it to run this loop. Things that are required to enable the loop without human intervention:

- a cli tool that allows Revit to be started, running a single addin. There's a couple of ways to do this: using a master add-in that dynamically loads child add-ins or manipulating the .addin files.

- a way to capture logs from within the running Revit addin and feed this back to the LLM. This is just logs in a standard location.

- a way to capture screenshots from within the running Revit addin. Revit has a image export functionality that can be triggered from within the code.

The loop is still slow but once setup it allows you to prompt, set it to run and come back later with some hope that it has achieved your goals.

Modelling is part of what I'm doing but it's also trying to get figure out how to work with extrusions, dimensions, views, etc, etc.

Hope that helps.

Great article. I've been trying to achieve something similar with a Revit. It's an old CAD application for Windows which means there's a few additional hurdles in exposing a cli interface that allows the LLM to drive it. However, once that is done, the loop of "write code, take a screenshot, repeat" works pretty well.

I'm going to try to get it to generate extrusions in Revit based on images of floor plans. I've tried doing this in bunch of models without success so far.

Great science communication. This is another really good Spectrum article that was on HN a while back.

The Tiny Star Explosions Powering Moore’s Law https://spectrum.ieee.org/euv-light-source

Felt it in Kyoto we think. Slightly swaying power lines and light fixtures. First earthquake experience on holidays

what trackball are you using?

If you like le Carre, British TV Series "The Sandbaggers" is in a similar vein. I've watched a bunch of episodes on youtube and they are great with a focus on dialog and schemes as opposed to action.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhRH76fepKg

Agree.

For now, you can get a reasonable DU via an [external library](https://github.com/mcintyre321/OneOf).

[Nick Chapsas Video on Usage](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7z-xjijYfcI).

Other failing math I tested this morning....

---

Prompt: Pick two random 5 digit numbers and multiply them together

Response: Sure, here are two random 5-digit whole numbers multiplied together: 47581 x 69204 = 3291492324

Correct Answer: 3292795524

---

Prompt: Pick two random numbers between 0 and 1 and multiply them together

Response: Sure! Here are two random numbers between 0 and 1 multiplied together:0.475 x 0.821 = 0.390575

Correct Answer: 0.389975

---

I'm surprised it did so well on the Math tests.

+1

Some of my best ideas that ended up being company changing started as a conversation walking to lunch with colleagues.

Initially these ideas were just undeveloped thoughts and I would never dream about booking a meeting to present them. Having a chance to develop them in a casual conversation might have been the difference between successfully building the thing and not doing it at all.

I love working from home but miss the unstructured collaboration.

I got the same feeling. Would have loved to see more of that shot as they followed the path from the summit down.

Best holiday of my life was riding the Pyrenees with my wife. Your comment about eating a meal after riding really rang true for me. Meals after a big ride are something special and when the French are doing the cooking... That's something to remember forever!

Yes. Good experience here.

Thanks for this. Great timing as school holidays have just started in Australia and I like to get my boys watching some interesting educational content.

Trolling Australians surely

I rarely use recursion/for loops

Same here. I use c# and Typescript mostly. In c# you can use Select for map, Aggregate for reduce and there's a huge selection of other list processing operations that make use of lambda expressions. In typescript/javascript there map, reduce, etc

I imagine we are approaching a tipping point where the cost of connection to the grid is more expensive than provisioning a home with enough solar + battery capacity to go fully off grid.

It was used in the semi-historical Cryptonomicon

https://books.google.com.au/books?id=Lw-00wTgBy8C&pg=PA173&l...

e.g. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.data.data...

Would it "get rid of the need to be in a VPC"? I think yes.

It looks like by enabling Data API, you expose that endpoint to the entire internet - which is secured like all the other AWS services with HTTPS, IAM, etc.

Pricing is opaque.

https://www.wolfram.com/engine/commercial-options/

How can I figure out if it's worth investing the time if it's impossible to price a production license?

Thanks for the DBT tip. I've always wanted composable SQL statements but never known how to achieve it.

https://docs.getdbt.com/docs#section-what-makes-dbt-so-power...

My grandfather used cane toads for pregnancy tests in Australia. https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/blogs/dr-karl-need-t...

I've looked at using f# in production but got hung up on the fact there's no autoformatting support that I'm used to in c#, JavaScript etc.

Maybe I'm being petty and it's not really required but it would make f# are more compelling option for me if it were available.

Lost in Larrimah Podcast https://www.theaustralian.com.au/podcasts/lost-in-larrimah/n...

Just before the landing at 85s in: https://youtu.be/zhOUkBZrO1E?t=85

Anyone have inside knowledge of the infrastructure used?

It's hard to imagine a better use case for using AWS, Azure or Google Cloud and spinning up a huge fleet of servers for 24 hours.

I suppose some misguided ideas around data security would have been used to shoot down the first engineer to suggest the cloud.

EDIT: just read to wluu's post. Sounds like we (tax payers) paid for an IBM "private cloud" that couldn't scale.

A story on innovation in Australia by ABC's "The Science Show" made a comparison between the attitude to entrepreneurs in Israel & US vs Australia. In Israel & US it was viewed as a positive thing for an entrepreneur to have had 3 failed ventures as the 4th is more likely to succeed due to the experience gained in the previous ventures. In Australia it is viewed as a negative because past failures are predictive of the future.

Doesn't look like it likes xkcd hand lettering or the font that approximates it. I had better luck with a this...

curl https://ocr.a9t9.com/api/Parse/Image --data "apikey=helloworld&url=http://www.uky.edu/Providers/ScannedText/page1s.jpeg" {"ParsedResults":[{"FileParseExitCode":1,"ParsedText":"In 1830 there were but twenty-three \r\nmiles of railroad in operation in the \r\nUnited States, and in that year Ken- \r\ntucky took the initial step in the work \r\nwest of fhe Alleghanies. An Act to \r\nincorporate the Lexington & Ohio \r\nRailway Company was approved by \r\nGov. Metcalf, Jarinary 27, 1830.. It \r\nprovided for the construction and reÔÇó \r\n","ErrorMessage":"","ErrorDetails":""}],"OCRExitCode":1,"IsErroredOnProcessing":false,"ErrorMessage":null,"ErrorDetails":null}