plif

I started experimenting 2-weeks ago on using LLMs in a pseudo-deterministic way. I kept getting results that proved my hypothesis, which is that LLMs could be harnessed deterministically, but I could not prove why, so I kept going.

I may now have proven why. If you start your prompt input with many compiled JS binaries, it will force the LLM to take an abstract logical reasoning path that we have not seen before. I have run this thousands times against Llama-4-Maverick-17B-128E-Instruct-FP8 and Gemini-3-Flash with consistently working results.

For example, when I uploaded all Facebook binaries (i.e., FB-Static folder when loading facebook.com) at the start of my prompt, then provided my code and abstract brief, Llama-4-Maverick-17B-128E-Instruct-FP8 was able to render a fully contextual working view, considering client attributes, at a cost of of 1200 compute tokens (given 380,000 prompt input tokens).

The punchline: LLMs that we know as "math" models, significantly outperformed LLMs that we know as "abstract reasoning" models, at a small fraction of compute cost. And this may only be the beginning of the punchline.

Seeing is believing. All detailed on the link, including examples you can click and try for yourself: https://terminalvalue.net/

My experience is that it's much better than the alternative of games running natively on your phone. I would say better than the switch too in most cases for me (more battery life, shorter load times) though may depend on the game.

I also noticed a significant improvement running it on WiFi after I upgraded to a mesh network. I've only tried over cloud a few times, can appreciate connection requirements may very high, but even being able to load it up wirelessly in different parts of the house or backyard is a big plus for me.

There's no way you're going to get top quality like those sites at a place like Fiverr either. They've spent millions on branding and marketing.

I can see Midjourney already replacing the low end. The question is how good can it get, and then as the bar is raised what can be done to differentiate. Answer to the latter ironically may be going back to old school human interfaces.

I wouldn't say useless. He'll look to buy other smart peripherals that fit into the Alexa ecosystem, not a competitor's. It helps build up the brand. There's also a lot of data there to collect.

Maybe not the most lucrative revenue stream, but not nothing.

Yep, this is a feature, not just for tracking but also containment when navigating to external links. Big reason why all of those apps and others aggressively push users from web to mobile.

I've been using it. It's gotten a lot better than when it first came out. Super annoying that they released a product that was far inferior (and probably still is inferior) to Google Play music and forced everyone to switch.

Also includes YT Music, making it not much more expensive than other streaming music services if you're willing to use it over something like Spotify.

Yeah, this is the biggest reason I switched to MacOS. Not enough time / mental energy to deal with scaling fonts on external displays.

Heh, SA was a huge part of my formative years, spent a ton of time (years / many many hours) lurking there. Sad to see the spiral that happened with Lowtax. Feeling very melancholic...

Accessibility.

I can't game on PC anymore because of RSI when using mouse. Even for cross platform games, the console version usually has far superior controller support.

I had a very similar experience around the same timeframe. I was also heavily discouraged by relatives in the field.

How wrong they ended up being...

Something about the savings math doesn't check out, especially given the NEET aspect. 200k savings in 4 years out of school is a lot.

It's a rubber stamp like many other things in this development model.

Not saying their QA is useful, but it's not tough to imagine their QA being many layers removed from decision making. ie: Program Manager -> Product Owner -> Project Manager -> Business Analyst -> QA -- not even mentioning reporting lines.

That person in QA at the end of the chain is likely following a script written & approved by the layers above them to a T. It's highly unlikely that they are empowered to go off script or raise tangential issues. Doing so may even cost them their job.

Not trying to defend anyone, but I'm sure we can find many other reasons why there are so many bugs here unrelated to QA :)

Seems high, but this is par for the course for this type of work. You would usually estimate this in terms of months for a team. Let's say a team of 4 for simplicity -- that brings it to ~3 months.

I'd also be careful with the term "programming hours". I'm not sure how the news article got that or who said that initially, but it seems like a misrepresentation of the type of work needed. That estimate almost certainly includes everything involved in getting the code to production. You can imagine that means a lot of QA, red tape and holding the code's hand through environments.

Which car and what did you drive before? And can you quantify how much benefit you see over adaptive cruise / lane assist / etc that is standard on many cars these days?

I agree with your sentiment, just unsure what your point of reference is and how much impact the fancy AI actually has. My car (2017 model) has the features I mentioned from the factory and is great on long trips too.

If I break something, it usually means it wasn't built strong enough to begin with. I've broken a lot of stuff over the years...

Based on my experience, this statement scares me :)

Not to pass any judgment on your impact or abilities, however the types of devs that have been the most challenging for me to work with are those with this attitude that aren't quite as good as they think they are. It can be incredibly toxic to the rest of the dev team and generally bad for business.

You need to have a very strong handle of both the business side an tech side to do this type of work effectively. Meaning: no matter how much technical debt there may be, some stuff cannot afford to be broken. Judging risk there is quite challenging as you need a holistic view. I would strongly caution people from diving in and making sweeping changes if they don't have this.

The other internal flag that went off is refactors that improve parts of the codebase in isolation while leaving a less cohesive / congruent codebase a whole. This is often worse in the long run than just patching it and actually can make changes harder.

Disclaimer: I am in mostly a management role now so you can take the above with an appropriately sized grain of salt.

Great idea. Could you explain what differentiates it from Tock? https://www.exploretock.com/ -- not that there isn't room for two solutions here, but just curious.

We've used Tock a few times in the way you described (recreate resto exp at home) and it's been awesome.

In order to have a net positive effect, such a program would need to be able to generate an income, not necessarily a engineer market-level one (because you could have students working on this) but at least something above the minimum wage[1], not just tips.

The pay scale is going to be tough. Looking quickly through the top bounties, none of them are really student level. Issues that are truly good for beginners or someone unfamiliar with the codebase in any moderately popular open source project usually get scooped up immediately for resume building.

I can see this as being useful for abandoned projects, or as a way to promote something new. It's a much better signal that the ticket is actually meaningful and impactful than a GitHub tag.

Whether that is enough to get past psychological barriers behind transactions, I don't know. I do like the "buy the author a coffee or two" mentality of support, which I think does remove some of the transaction aspect of it. Not sure if this is what Rysolv was going for -- it feels a bit more formal.

Point well taken about culture and great examples. I completely agree with your premise.

However, tone is an extremely important part of cross-cultural training, and the tone of this article takes its premise from: _you may have a conflict of interest with group B_ to something between _group B is out to get you_ and _group B is evil_. I personally wouldn't recommend it to anyone because of this.

As a footnote, quotation marks suggest you're quoting someone. Your claimed quote doesn't exist in the source article. Your point would be stronger if you commented on what the author wrote than your (somewhat inaccurate) read-between-the-lines.

The original post has always had the exact paragraph that I derived my subtext from in it. Emphatic quotes are a bad habit of mine, so I removed those, but c'mon -- this is a pretty common grammar mistake and the sentence preceding it pretty clearly "implies" (emphatic quotes) that it's only my interpretation :)

That's another place cultures differ a lot: how things are implied and subtexts. People misread subtexts, which I think you did here.

Can you please explain how you would otherwise interpret the exact paragraph that I quoted? I'm usually pretty good at seeing the other side, but I genuinely can't see this one. Maybe it's because I've been in management too long (or maybe I'm too Canadian). Either way, I'm genuinely curious.

I'll quote the paragraph again directly from the article for you:

Expert gaslighters, they are. What really makes me wonder is how the people keep doing these jobs. Many of them are in the very classes that get abused by other people regularly. How can you honestly keep doing that job when you are just enabling the abusers?

The only other interpretation I can think of is the author was referring to the people in the previous example. However, she switches from singular ("person A" / "person B") tense in the example to plural ("gaslighters" / "abusers") tense in this paragraph, so it's either an uncharacteristic grammar mistake or a generalization applied to a broader group.

The generalization is that HR people are "gaslighters" and managers are "abusers".

With that in mind, how would you interpret this sentence? "What really makes me wonder is how the people keep doing these jobs."

I can only see: _how can these people live with themselves_. How is that subtext not correct here?

Wouldn't an ecosystem of smaller / walled off news services promote polarization? Genuinely asking -- what you are describing strikes me as an echo chamber that may have the opposite effect.

Glad to see this at the top.

This is a very cynical take that applies wildly general negative sentiment and statements to a huge group of people. It's not just about workplace dynamics. I couldn't keep reading after the ~5th paragraph where the (not so subtle) point is: how can _these people_ live with themselves?

I'll copy the relevant paragraph below:

Expert gaslighters, they are. What really makes me wonder is how the people keep doing these jobs. Many of them are in the very classes that get abused by other people regularly. How can you honestly keep doing that job when you are just enabling the abusers?

Sorry, but this is insane. You're generalizing millions of people here. Imagine this type of statement made towards a cultural subgroup rather than a profession. What would we call it?

edit: removed quotes in the first paragraph to reduce confusion around attribution, as per post below. I don't have time to reply in-depth right now but I appreciate the rebuttal and I'll give it a shot later.

A lot of this is, as Aqua mentioned, an exercise for their conscience.

Just as important to build (some...) trust and preserve culture among remaining employees.

Imagine this from the lens of remaining employees: A) The new big boss wrote an algorithm to fire our friends B) The new big boss had to make a tough decision to fire our friends but went out of his way to do right by them

Which one sounds better? I think the algorithm was a good idea to explore possibilities, but I'm not sure about the subsequent blog post.

There are recent examples of these layoffs among tech companies who had to make a pivot due to Covid and took approach B. Ritual is the one that immediately comes to mind for me.

I assumed that it was an internal promotion. If it was an outside hire, yikes. Although to be fair, we don't know how much time he was given to make the decision.

Yeah, me too. If they don't have this in 2021 their IT staff should be fired.

Not just email / text comms -- it's not hard to fake voice and video now either. Maybe PGP in its current form is too complex for your mother, but that is one of the reasons her generation needs it the most.

I agree that it's a no brainer in a professional context, however I can see there being a ton of value in having a simple / cross-platform / cross-medium personal signing mechanism as well. It's something that we could have used yesterday.

Microsoft is also mostly purely tech. Amazon and Google (Alphabet) are more pervasive and threatening to other industries.

For that reason, I'm not surprised. I've seen the decision come down to not wanting to give money to the other two many times. MS is in a great position there.

I don't think #2 is that big of a deal if all requests happen async, which they should with a client side ORM, and if you're using http2.

I think the bigger problem there is how those multiple REST calls map to your data stores. Very rarely will there be clean separation of data between endpoints, and the stateless nature of REST makes it harder to optimize each call -- meaning, there will almost certainly be redundant queries.

That said, with GraphQL, your front end dev may not realize they are executing the equivalent of many REST calls, which is another problem :) I wouldn't say it's harder to optimize if you look at the application as a whole, though.

When I was at Google it amazed me how many pieces of infrastructure were 'hot messes' in the sense that the people maintaining them didn't really know anything about how they worked, just how to run a test and revert if they broke. But there was no senior leadership pushing to understand the component interfaces and how the 'fleet' was at risk or interconnected. Just a bunch of fiefdoms. And inevitably people who kept things complicated so that they were "irreplaceable" for their own job security anxieties.

This is the curse of a large bureaucracy. It seemed like Google was immune to this for a while, perhaps due to the engineering culture, but it's only a matter of time when there's enough money and organizational inertia at play. Once things reach a boiling point, the transformational programs pop up, and the cycle continues.

Your last sentence nailed it: this is a society problem, not a university problem. It's insane how much emphasis is put on these measures by parents from a very young age.

School boards here, and I'm sure many other places, decided to nix grades from March onwards after the pandemic hit. The announcement wasn't made until closer to the end of the term. I remember some parents being furious claiming that their kids "wasted their time" on remote school if a grade wasn't being assigned.

I've had this discussion many times, and as a university drop out, my opinion has always been similar to yours. One thing I've learned is that debating the merits of the higher education system is right up there with religion and politics in terms of topics to avoid at a dinner party.

People take great pride in their educations (read: pieces of paper). They can take great offense to the institutions and systems that produced those pieces of paper being challenged. These values have been passed on and hardened through generations. This is the first thing that needs to change before there's meaningful reform, and it's going to take time.