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Cake day: October 9th, 2024

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  • Against my better judgement I got into an argument with a promptfan on Bluesky. To his credit, aside from the usual boring arguments (ā€œmodels are getting better, and betterā€, ā€œhave you tried model xyzā€, ā€œeveryone not using chatbots will be left in the dustā€ he provided an actual example.

    https://github.com/dfed/SafeDI/issues/183 It’s a bug that’s supposedly easy to test, but hard to reason about. Took the chatbot half an hour while it would take him several (allegedly).

    Now, my first thought was: ā€œIf a clanker could do it (something that famously can’t reason) then it couldn’t be that hard to reason about.ā€

    But I was curious so I looked. Unfortunately it is an area I’m not familiar with and in a language (Swift) I don’t know at all.

    Probably should file the claim under ā€œnot true or falseā€ and touch grass or something, but it’s bugging me.

    Any one y’all who could say if there’s something interesting in there?













  • I have some thoughts about this goober (Simon Willison) that I need to get out of my head:

    First the positives:

    • I think he’s actually an experienced software engineer.
    • I think he care to check and test the LLM output.

    But, by his own admission:

    • He uses LLM for tasks he knows well (So easier to check and little negative impact on learning)
    • He works mostly on hobby projects (so no obligation to actually maintain the stuff)
    • He can choose to not use new libraries (which in a professional setting is not always a luxury you can afford)

    Tl;dr: an experienced dev who uses clankers to churn out tons of technically functional hobby software and thinks this gives him right to speak for all software engineers.