tmountain

Yup, it’s a great UX and it makes the media experience feel finished, not hacky.

As a musician, I can agree with this 100%.

Cause all the kids are hooked on crack.

Floppy disks were ubiquitous when I was in college. When I got into Linux, I did an experiment raw writing zeros to floppies with dd to see what percentage of them had I/O errors. I tested with a stack of about 50 of them that were left in our computer lab over the years (different brands). The failure rate was staggering. Something like 30-40% of them had bad sectors. After that, I realized that I could never rely on them as a storage medium for anything important without regular backups.

We could probably debate this ad nauseam, so I'll just give you my most compelling arguments.

1) Writing code the "old fashioned" way (i.e., a Python program that does X, Y, Z) allows you to arrive at a battle tested solution that will not change over time. From a risk assessment perspective, the behavior is essentially immutable, allowing a business to guarantee consistent behavior over long periods of time.

2) Just because something hasn't happened to you do, does not mean that it will not happen. LLM are opaque. If you stay on the "happy path", you may see consistent behavior for long periods of time, but there's always potential for an edge case where something goes catastrophically wrong. This is without even opening the can of worms regarding prompt injection and intentional sabotage of a working system.

3) There are plenty of real world examples of an LLM spontaneously deleting data from a DB (or the entire DB) or otherwise going completely off the rails. These might seem hyperbolic, but it happened at our company (to a test DB, not production). The severity of errors that occur can be existential to a business' survival without the proper guard rails.

4) There's no concrete way to truly confirm understanding between an LLM and a human. It can tell you that it completely understands what you want, and then it can do exactly the opposite. Followed by, "my bad" (Claude's new favorite catch phrase). Code can be audited and even proven to be correct given the appropriate level of time and energy.

My best results have been gleaned in using LLM to produce deterministic systems. I recognize everyone has different use cases and needs, but this seems to be the best use of the technology in my experience.

The craziest for me is companies that sticking stochastic agents into automated business processes and expecting stable/reliable outcomes. Businesses want deterministic processes in the vast majority of cases.

It’s been wildly successful. Poorly run projects tend to fail.

Someone has to look out for the big guys! /s

Lots of people have solar. Green AI, imagine that!

There are plenty of honest millionaires, but no honest billionaires.

I have been working on a language learning app for myself, and I am using a textbook that I like as the basis for an Anki inspired “learning tree”. This is working pretty well because I can build progressions from the original table of contents.

Context here (Patrick Boyle):

https://youtu.be/IHD8BDFYyGI?is=dnpBeOoxH7LUJknm

A huge chunk of SoaceX value in their filing is attributed to their AI technology (aka Grok). I believe it’s 90% or more… Now, it seems they’re leasing the infrastructure required for Grok to scale to Anthropic and Google. I wonder how that math works…

Yeah, but then it’s either an arduous manual review or incurring a bunch of token usage to review something that may be slop.

Neurotone.ai || Remote (Americas East / Western Europe) || Full-time || neurotone.com

We build AI-assisted auditory training for people with hearing loss. Our product is live, in clinics, and growing internationally.

Backend Engineer: Postgres-heavy work on Supabase: PL/pgSQL functions, pgmq queues, Deno edge functions, billing and cron systems. You like databases enough to enjoy writing triggers and RLS policies, and you want to own systems end-to-end rather than just ship tickets.

QA Specialist: Manual testing of our iOS/Android app and web tools, working alongside our head of QA on a clinical product where data quality, platform stability, and accessibility are critical to our mission.

Note: Candidates must be in time zones no further west than EST; Western Europe is fine.

If interested, contact travis AT neurotone.com. Join us in making a difference!

Big dreamers, which is awesome, but they need a disciplined PM type team member to bring them down to Earth (ROI analysis on their roadmap).

I tend to agree, but the gains will come at the expense of the early adopters. Then again, this has been the case in so many industries throughout history.

For a preview of how this will go, take a look at this:

https://accounting.penrose.com/

Got it, thanks.

Overkill in what way exactly? The LOC of the project shouldn't have any bearing on most people's usage of the project. SQLite is one of the well tested and mature projects in the world. What exactly would motivate someone to use PeakSlab instead? What problem are you solving?

For someone complaining about slop, I found this unreadable.

A job from hell is a bad job by definition.

We can thank RFK for anti-vaccine leadership leading to changes to the childhood vaccine schedule which make preventable diseases harder to stop. You can celebrate more cures all you want, but as most people know, prevention is the best medicine, and the guy is lukewarm on one of our best defenses when it comes to keeping kids safe (vaccines).

And, let's not forget that RFK said: “every Black kid is now, just as a standard, put on adderall, [selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors], benzos, which are known to induce violence. And those kids are going to have a chance to go somewhere and get re-parented, to live in a community where there’ll be no cell phones, no screens, you’ll actually have to talk to people."

So yeah, according to RFK, every black kid in America deserves "re-parenting". He should resign today.

Related question, is it at all feasible to store cache locally to offload memory costs and then send it over the wire when needed?

Care to share the link? I'd like to take a look.

I completely agree. It makes something that was already very hard that much harder. I have a friend who played guitar in a "famous band". They made it. Meaning, they played on David Letterman and went on extensive tours, had a huge fanbase, etc. Some years back, he reached out to see if I had any leads on IT jobs. I was surprised to say the least, but his response was simple, "there's no money in it." That conversation really hammered it home that you can "make it" and still live without financial security. Fast forward to today, and the situation is even more dire given what is happening with AI.

Thanks to all of you for the positive feeedback! I'm happy to hear that the project landed with you.

I can relate here. I have son, who is now 3.5 years old. I haven't had the time or energy to produce any "finished work" since he's been born, and that marks a lull after 25 years of steady output. I don't feel sad or disappointed about this in the slightest. As my wife likes to say, "it's the season we're in." That said, I do really enjoy chaotic jam sessions with my son, as he's very interested in banging on his little drum set, so in some ways, it's just a new beginning. There's no better investment than time with our children.

https://huggyboy.bandcamp.com/album/into-the-wilds

I’ve been involved in one music project or another (bands, albums, solo projects, etc) for the past 25 years.

During the pandemic, a friend and I decided to make a record together. We labored over it for almost two years and finally “released it” on bandcamp to very little fanfare.

A few friends and family had nice things to say, and one random stranger reached out with positive feedback.

I get a monthly stream report from bandcamp, and it almost always says zero.

I am so pleased with this project and have such great memories of making the album that I had two lathe cut vinyl copies made (one for me, and one for my friend).

I put a big part of myself into the project and was able to convey ideas and feelings that I couldn’t express effectively via other methods.

I listen to the recording about once a year. It’s a part of me now, and I couldn’t be happier with my journey in making it.

To me, this is the purpose of the creative journey. Knowing yourself better, and enjoying all of the steps involved in arriving at what is always a surprising destination.

If someone else feels something as a result of your work, that’s a nice bonus, but not something I focus on at all.