To combine with the "but did he build a cpu" thread, back-in-the-day the term project for MIT 6.004 was "build a CPU with TTL", with a very open-ended "performance race" extra credit project at the end. (At least one of the highest scorers went on build a network performance hardware company and sold it to Broadcom :-)
(If the "build a CPU" part doesn't impress, it was common to build an entire compiler toolchain to go with it; also it was long enough ago that a web browser really was a weekend project :-)
Trying not to turn this into "falsehoods developers believe about geographic names", but having done natural-language geocoding at scale (MetaCarta 2002-2010, acquired by Nokia) the most valuable thing was a growing set of tagged training data - because we were actually building the models out of that, but also because it would detect regressions; I suspect you needed something similar to "keep the LLMs in line", but you also need it for any more artisinal development approach too. (I'm a little surprised you even have a single-value-return search() function, issue#44 is just the tip of the iceberg - https://londonist.com/london/features/places-named-london-th... is a pretty good hint that a range of answers with probabilities attached is a minimum starting point...)
In a previous tech bubble I figured out that the Aeron chairs were great - if you were using good posture. Slouch at all and they'd hurt you. The humanscale chair was the one that was actually good for feet-on-desk, keyboard-in-lap, staring out the window while rotating data structures in my head...
Yeah, but even that isn't going to make me care about why Gwern is obsessing over Venice. Part of that is that I follow Overly Sarcastic Productions on youtube and "Blue" did a vastly better job of expressing/performing "I'm excited about Venice, and in a couple of minutes you will be too!" - an advantage of the medium and of their chosen style, for reaching someone like me who isn't all that compelled by European history.
(Yes, I get that it was an example to make a point about a writing style; one of the risks of really concrete examples is bouncing off of the example itself :-)
Stackoverflow code has a license (not per post, but a blanket one depending on which year - https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing it's mostly CC BY-SA.) I've written corporate policies that emphasize that you can learn from SO answers, but (as you point out) they basically never fit exactly - and you should include a link to the original so when the next Ubuntu LTS breaks your clever hack, we can see if someone has already posted a fix :-)
The engineers using svn were the ones who were pushing for git - I was the one saying "we can't, because none of the conversion tools competently preserve branch history, and it's even worse on repos that started in CVS". Noone responsible for repos was pushing for git, it was end-users pulling for it (and shutting up when they learned how much work it would cause :-) That looked nothing like the drug-dealer-esque LLM push I've been seeing for the last 3 years.
(Likewise with CVS to svn: "you can rename files now? and branches aren't horrible? Great, how fast can we switch?" - no "pushing" because literally everyone could see how much better it was in very concrete cases, it was mostly just a matter of resource allocation.)
In the context of this discussion, it feels more like ipv6 :-)
"responsible for made up sources" leads to the hilarious idea that if you cite a paper that doesn't exist, you're now obliged to write that paper (getting it retroactively published might be a challenge though)
Looks like GPTZero Source Finder was only released a year ago - if anything, I'm surprised slop-writers aren't using it preemptively, since they're "ahead of the curve" relative to reviewers on this sort of thing...
reply