Isn’t this just something that any IDE has built-in these days? Maybe I’m missing something, but how is this fundamentally different from the built-in git timeline view from something like VSCode or Jetbrains?
> Isn’t this just something that any IDE has built-in these days?
In most IDEs I feel that Git integration is an awkward badly integrated afterthought. They are also very much tied to the whatever IDE offers them in terms of available shortcuts, layouts, controls etc. (this applies to Magit, too).
This might be an unkind reading, but to me this just sounds like an attempt to reinvent the very same kind of mysticism that it mentions in the first paragraph.
“No need to study the world around you and wonder about its rules, peasant - it’s far beyond your understanding! Only ~the gods~ computers can ever know the truth!”
I shudder to think about a future where people give up on working to understand complex systems because it’s hard and a machine can do it better, so why bother.
True, but I think the observation is spot on. There are people who want to know things, whether with some help from AI or by other means. Then there are people who prefer ignorance.
Personally I take great comfort from the fact that I no longer, to a large degree, face the dilemma of "Who should I ask about this?"
Not the intention at all. The part about mechanistic interpretability was meant to gesture at how building such systems can provide new tool kit for building further intuition and understanding.
Might we ever distinguish what is complex and complicated? Probably not, but I guess the author argues that this gives us a way forward because we can try to distill large models.
> How would a touchscreen MacBook improve on something?
It won’t, but there’s now an entire generation of users who get confused and angry if any kind of display doesn’t react when you poke it with your finger.
It’s not that much higher, actually. I just looked at some unskilled production line job offers, and looks like they start at 15-18€ per hour. Scale that to full time, and it’s less than 30k€/year - and of course without the free food and accommodation that you mentioned.
True, but muscle memory and a couple keyboard shortcuts (or heck, even using the mouse to select and drag the block) is always going to be faster then describing the changes you want and reviewing the output, at least for simple stuff.
Of course it’s important to remember that the ability of an LLM to answer an obscure riddle like that has nothing to do with its reasoning abilities, but rather depends on whether the answer was included in its training dataset.
The word is in most online dictionaries for what it is worth. It's also used in Biblical texts, albeit only a handful of times. I do agree it's not a true assessment of an LLM's overall reasoning. No person I have ever asked that riddle to has gotten it correct. Then again, that is probably partly the point of the riddle.
I would like to reiterate that both Claude and GPT answered correctly. It was just bizarre how Claude got a initial, minor detail incorrect, but reasoned enough to get the more difficult answer correct.
I think the point here is that an LLM might not get the correct answer because it hasn't found it yet by scraping Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc. Artificially limit the training set and it will never, ever get it right.
Whereas, a human of average intelligence, in possession of a dictionary or perhaps just a list of animals, could reason their way through getting the correct answer in finite time. They could probably get it without the list if they really wanted to.
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! As recently as yesterday I was forced to abandon a conversation with a normie because I couldn't convince her of this fundamental limitation. ChatGPT was "damn near magical" in her opinion. Sigh.
Same one for five years (Samsung Flip 3). It does have a crack down the middle. It's not enough to bother me, but you're right, early gens do have that problem (believe it is fixed by now).
That really hits home. I spent a couple weeks in primary school sketching my own blueprints for great inventions. Nothing that could've ever worked (I didn't know what a transistor actually was, but my machine certainly had a lot of them!), but in hindsight a good start for a curious tech-minded child - switches that opened/closed circuits, wires to connect the various imaginary lasers and electromagnets, and so on. On the back of the paper I scrawled documentation to remember what the darn thing was actually supposed to do (the biggest one? Save people who fall out of airplanes, which to my 9 year old mind was a big issue that needed to be solved)
One day my teacher noticed me doodling in the back, so she promptly grabbed all the "blueprints" I was so proud of, tore them up, and tossed them in the trash. I guess I get discouraged easier than you though, since I didn't design a thing for many years afterwards.
Thanks for sharing this. It is so sad! Sorry that there are people like that. The only thing we can do now, is be better people than those horrible teachers.
Oh god, what’s the deal with horrendous people becoming teachers? Lately, I’ve been, uh, “reminiscing” about how terrible adults were to kids when I was a kid (I’m gen X.)
It’s no wonder I turned my interest to the computer - it was only ever a jerk if I programmed it like that.
Same (GP). Schools were really unsafe places for children back then. It always strikes me of you see movies about schools in that period, that the story is often that children get horribly bullied and are called ugly, etc. I am glad my children grow up in better times.
Low barrier to entry and hard to get fired once you're in.
Rotten people put on a good face in the interview and then spread their misery around for decades to some of our most vulnerable. It happens in pretty much every unelected position in the public sector in my experience.
I think you’re confusing mastery with marketability. “Other people want to hear it” is at best adjacent to someone’s skill at composing or playing music.
There’s plenty of mediocre musicians who became world-famous, and plenty of great musicians who nobody’s heard about. Skill and success are pretty weakly correlated.
> I think you’re confusing mastery with marketability. “Other people want to hear it” is at best adjacent to someone’s skill at composing or playing music.
This is a fun and complicated topic. Yes, sometimes things outside of the music influence our perceptions of the music. If the Red Hot Chili Peppers were a bunch of bald fat dudes maybe they would have had less fans; if Kurt Cobain hadn't killed himself he would still be a legend but perhaps in the calbire of Eddie Vedder and not what he became. But the following underlying principal I believe to be true : it's impossible to survive the test of time in music without producing "good" music.
Example of music that survived the test of time : The Beatles, Queen, Pink Floyd and I'd argue Nirvana, Pearl Jam etc.
How do I define "survive the test of time" is another discussion I'd rather not get into lol.
