Hacker News: throwuwu

New comment by throwuwu in "PaperBack: How to store arbitrary data on A4 sheets of paper (2007)"

throwuwu — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 13:48:37 +0000

Not sure but if you want to use a flat bed scanner then maybe if the engraving is deep enough you could just ink the plate and then press a sheet of paper onto it and scan the paper instead.

New comment by throwuwu in "PaperBack: How to store arbitrary data on A4 sheets of paper (2007)"

throwuwu — Tue, 02 Apr 2024 18:56:55 +0000

That’s what I was thinking of

New comment by throwuwu in "PaperBack: How to store arbitrary data on A4 sheets of paper (2007)"

throwuwu — Tue, 02 Apr 2024 14:56:19 +0000

Someone should reimplement this for use with cheap laser engraving machines so we can make physical backups on any material like stone, wood, stainless steel, or plastic.

New comment by throwuwu in "Deep Learning in JavaScript"

throwuwu — Sat, 30 Mar 2024 14:52:25 +0000

If you do want to add evaluation of mathematical expressions you should check out Math.js since they provide a parser among other utilities. Please make it optional though, it would be a nightmare to debug if everything was written in strings.

https://mathjs.org/docs/expressions/parsing.html

New comment by throwuwu in "Hot takes on Devin, the AI software engineer"

throwuwu — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 02:46:00 +0000

The evolutionary record is piled high with the bones of extinct species, extinctions caused by changes in the environment or by other species. We are not unique, we are just one of many millions of species to find a way to rapidly outcompete others but the difference is that we often choose not to. So far we can’t even hold a candle to the humble cyanobacteria in terms of wanton destruction of their environment and all life on the planet when they evolved the ability to photosynthesize. Similar though less dramatic events have likely occurred with each major evolutionary adaptation that allows a species to exploit something not available to others. For us it’s intelligence but for others it was eyes, fins, teeth, legs, claws, etc. all leaving a path of destruction and allowing the possessors of such traits to multiply and differentiate until their unique attributes are now the common necessities for survival.

New comment by throwuwu in "Hot takes on Devin, the AI software engineer"

throwuwu — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 14:28:06 +0000

Yes because the greedy capitalists will obviously keep this valuable technology all to themselves, hoarding it away so they alone can revel in its delights. Give me a break, this isn’t 1924, we know how things actually play out. The capitalists want to sell you a product and that is fundamentally at odds with hoarding beneficial technology. They will deliver those benefits straight to your door faster, cheaper and better than any socialized pipedream ever could. If you somehow seize these means I have no doubt they’ll only be available to top party members due to their great expense and the considered opinion that the average worker has no need for such tools in their assigned role.

New comment by throwuwu in "Hot takes on Devin, the AI software engineer"

throwuwu — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 14:09:20 +0000

UBI won’t happen but the price of most goods and services will fall to a tiny fraction of what they are now. There will still be people who are considered impoverished but they’ll likely have a higher standard of living than you do.

New comment by throwuwu in "Hot takes on Devin, the AI software engineer"

throwuwu — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 13:48:17 +0000

I hate this framing of humanity as a “fundamentally destructive species” it’s a meaningless sound that people make with zero serious thought given to it. Exactly which species are not destructive? All animal life must consume other life in order to survive and exactly zero of them have any inhibition that would prevent them from maximizing their consumption and reproduction at the expense of all other life if they could. Humans are the only species that cares at all what happens to other forms of life and makes efforts at our own expense to limit or temper our impact. The only reason the world around you seems even remotely safe and comfortable is due to thousands of years of sustained human effort to make it so.

New comment by throwuwu in "Hot takes on Devin, the AI software engineer"

throwuwu — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 13:26:35 +0000

If you really want to make more work, blow up budgets and create positions for masses of developers and assistants then you should demand we go back to punch cards and doing all the planning and algorithm design on paper before we translate it to instructions and hand it off to computer operators.

New comment by throwuwu in "AutoDev: Automated AI-driven development by Microsoft"

throwuwu — Sat, 16 Mar 2024 21:16:52 +0000

Rome wasn’t built in a day, all of those technologies will still be around 20 years from now and will likely be powering a lot of everyday stuff. Short timelines are hype, the technology itself is anything but.

New comment by throwuwu in "AutoDev: Automated AI-driven development by Microsoft"

throwuwu — Sat, 16 Mar 2024 21:10:15 +0000

If it makes you feel better, the AI will write all the code for the tests and come up with all the variations and do all the fuzzing to try to break things. You’ll just have to do a good job of explaining the requirements to it and adjusting them as it becomes clear you didn’t fully describe the outcome you wanted the first time around.

New comment by throwuwu in "AutoDev: Automated AI-driven development by Microsoft"

throwuwu — Sat, 16 Mar 2024 21:03:12 +0000

If you employ an AI to do software development for you then you are now a boss, congratulations. Getting rich is still up to you though.

New comment by throwuwu in "AutoDev: Automated AI-driven development by Microsoft"

throwuwu — Sat, 16 Mar 2024 20:47:05 +0000

Because we’d rather be living in a world where textiles are so cheap to produce that everyone can afford to clothe themselves however they want and even the working poor can furnish their homes with upholstered furniture and own more than one towel, blanket, sheets, pillows, and have rugs, mats, carpets, etc. not to even mention all the other woven stuff that isn’t even possible to do by hand along with all the other technologies birthed from the very smart idea of automating a tool that was previously only operated by hand. I don’t know about you but I certainly don’t want to go to my grave bent over this loom.

New comment by throwuwu in "AutoDev: Automated AI-driven development by Microsoft"

throwuwu — Sat, 16 Mar 2024 20:28:56 +0000

Steps 2 and 4 through 8 are what this implementation along with others like Devin are doing. 1, 3, and 9 may have surprise answers when a reliable system can produce a working app/website/tool in a matter of minutes. If that’s possible then clients can just keep prompting and checking the results and iterating on changes until they get what they want just like people using Midjourney do to get the idea they have in their head transformed into an image. Things change a lot when apps become so quick, easy and cheap to create that you can try out a hundred variations and modifications in a day.

New comment by throwuwu in "AutoDev: Automated AI-driven development by Microsoft"

throwuwu — Sat, 16 Mar 2024 20:00:06 +0000

Jobs aren’t distributed out of some cookie jar. They are needs and wants and obligations that other people will pay to have fulfilled or taken off their hands. Figure out how to solve those problems and you’ll have all the work you could ever ask for.

New comment by throwuwu in "AutoDev: Automated AI-driven development by Microsoft"

throwuwu — Sat, 16 Mar 2024 19:54:35 +0000

Move to a higher level of abstraction and architecture. We’re leaving the era of hand wiring data structures and program logic the same way we left behind the era of hand wiring ICs and discrete components. Different skills will be needed.

New comment by throwuwu in "AutoDev: Automated AI-driven development by Microsoft"

throwuwu — Sat, 16 Mar 2024 19:19:54 +0000

I’d rather be in the textile industry post industrial revolution than before it. The fortunes made during the age of mechanization make all of history’s kings and merchants paupers by comparison.

New comment by throwuwu in "AutoDev: Automated AI-driven development by Microsoft"

throwuwu — Sat, 16 Mar 2024 19:13:36 +0000

What makes you so sure that problem solving and invention aren’t just engineering challenges that we can solve by combining LLMs with well designed algorithms? The way I see it, we’ve just discovered something fundamental like steam power or electricity and we’re currently in the very inefficient stage of brute force solutions like mine pumps driven by condensing engines that needed tonnes of cheap readily available coal and arc lamps running off an entire room full of galvanic piles. In other words, we’re just throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks; but stick it will and then we’ll quickly be on to locomotives and lightbulbs.

New comment by throwuwu in "Quiet-STaR: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Think Before Speaking"

throwuwu — Fri, 15 Mar 2024 15:08:28 +0000

You’ve never made a mistake in your reasoning?

Tongue in cheek but this has been considered and has resulted in experiments like tree of thought and various check your work and testing approaches. Thinking step by step is really just another way of saying make a plan or use an algorithm and when humans do either they need to periodically re-evaluate what they’ve done so far and ensure it’s correct.

The trick is training the model to do this as a matter of course and to learn which tool to apply at the right time which is what the paper is about wrt interspersed thoughts.

New comment by throwuwu in "Following the Lean Startup Method"

throwuwu — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 20:34:25 +0000

Your definition is incomplete:

an MVP is the smallest subset of useful features to take the product to market in order to prove or disprove its viability

and the reason you want to keep it to the minimum is to minimize the time and money invested in it so that you can throw it away if it doesn’t work and then try a different product. You’ll probably have to do this several times before succeeding so your budget for each should be about 1/10th of your available time and money.