Tistel · HackerTrans

قبل 6 أشهرdiscuss

  Location: Toronto (EST)
  Relocate: Maybe (depends on job/location)
  Technologies: python, ts/js, elixir, SQL, react, Django, nodejs, postgres, AWS, GCP, Terraform
  CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-anderson-53208053/
  email: james.anderson.nb.ca [at] gmail.com

I have worked in video games (FIFA!), AdTech, a couple of health startups, FinTech (ForEx) and lately helping companies adopt AI/LLMs.

Tistel

قبل 6 أشهرdiscuss

I have seen code bases that are amazing. I have seen ones that look bad, but work. About a year and half ago I saw my first fairly large scale fully AI generated project and it filled me with dread. It looked like the figma, which is very impressive. But under the hood it was bizarre. It was like those sci-fi movie tropes of teleportation where one of the people teleport and the destination coordinates are wrong and the merge with a tree or rock or whatever. There was so much unused junk that had nothing to do with anything. Ugh. My task to was to figure out why the initial render took so long. (unsurprisingly it was loading all the data then rendering, so with toy dev loads it was fine, in production nightmare and getting worse). So I just got to it and made some progress. But the new grad (who thought I was a dinosaur (might be right)) who made it was working in parallel and reintroducing more slop. So it became this Sisyphean task where I am speeding things up (true dinosaur so measuring things) and they were cutting and pasting and erasing the gains.

I have always found management to be just silly exercise in day full of meetings. I like to make things. I could retrain, but, the salary drop would be very hard. Hope to find one last gig and have enough to retire. I still get that spark of joy when all the tests pass.

Tistel

قبل 7 أشهرdiscuss

I heard on some podcast that there is such a thing as: "Microsoft Excel World Championship" and someone named Diarmuid Early won it last year. I would pay $2.56 to watch an Excel battle between a slop skipper and him. Money is on him. I am team John Henry.

Tistel

قبل 9 أشهرdiscuss

  Location: Canada (EST)
  Remote: yes
  relocate: probably not
  Technologies: python, JS, TS, Elixir, golang, Postgres, CouchDB, Terraform, k8s, React, django (a bunch more, want to be brief)
  Resume: available on request
  email: contact (aT) tisteltech.com

Tistel

السنة الماضيةdiscuss

I am not worried about personal atrophy. I am worried about young people who never learn the fundamentals and blindly believe everything the llm say.

Tistel

السنة الماضيةdiscuss

I am a Luddite holding on.

1) solving the problem myself is the fun part of the job 2) writing emails or whatever, I want it to be my voice, not some bland average of everything slop 3) I can't sppeell big word because auto-correct does that. I don't want to lose logic and thinking to "auto-think ai™" 4) is the output trustworthy?

For four, imagine some malevolent entity (North Korea or insert whomever you hate) procedurally generates thousands of tutorials (with slight cosmetic variations to trick the crc checks) with unique URLs. The tutorials teach some tricky thing like SSO. The tutorials reference some library (or tricky math heavy function) that has been altered by black hat hackers. The LLM reads all the urls and that affects its output. Then low knowledge "vibe coders" just blindly cut and paste their way to victory. voila, security nightmare.

It doesn't have to be code, it could be insults to political leaders (some emphasized, some excepted). Political policies. LLM lose money so start to sell out to advertisers (you pay, we push your product).

When I am procrastinating on other sites, you see it everywhere. Someone posts something the first comment is "grok explain the post." Its worse than orwellian, they had only the 5-minutes of hate monitoring. People are offloading their thinking to a handful of companies. Also, people apparently really open to the pseudo humans, will those personal private thoughts be resold to make up for cash burn?

I pretty sure I will lose, but, its worth a shot.

Tistel

السنة الماضيةdiscuss

I did CS and have been writing code for 20+ years. For the past two years, helping clients adopt LLMs into their business logic. It has lots of good use cases.

But, I can recognize when it makes mistakes due to my years of manual learning and development. If someone uses LLMs through their entire education and life experience, will they be able to spot the errors? Or will they just keep trying different prompts until it works? (and not know why it works)

Its like the auto-correct spell checker. I can't spell lots of words, I can just get close enough to the right spelling until it fixes it for me. I am a bit nervous about having the same handicap with LLMs taking that away from me in: thinking, logic and code.

Fully aware I can be dismissed as a dinosaur.

Tistel

السنة الماضيةdiscuss

Is it still Paul Graham/Robert Morris working on it? Skimmed the article but did not see a ref.

need to check out what it adds to CL: http://arclanguage.org/

Tistel

السنة الماضيةdiscuss

its a one liner with:

https://imagemagick.org/script/command-line-tools.php

The "solution" stated is hilarious.

Tistel

قبل سنتينdiscuss

Might spawn a new occupation: sniff sommelier!

Tistel

قبل سنتينdiscuss

This might be fun:

Train on java compiled to class files. Then go from class back to java.

Or even:

Train java compiled to class files, and have separate models that train from Clojure to class and Scala to class files. Then see if you can find some crufty (but important) old java project and go: crufty java -> class -> Clojure (or Scala).

If you could do the same with source -> machine instructions, maybe COBAL to C++! or whatever.

Tistel

قبل سنتينdiscuss

I am in Toronto, Canada. I don't have the open to work flag on in LinkedIn. Two years an ago, even with the flag off, would get recruiters reaching out daily (> 20 years experience). Now it's 1 per week. I do get lots of job openings alerts in the area though. Not looking, hoping current company does not blow up (betting heavy on LLMs. Fun demos, no real products yet. Concerned it's an expensive fad) this year. But, feels like something bad is brewing (might just be crazy state of the world).

Tistel

قبل سنتينdiscuss

There is a nice book that goes into detail of his life called: "The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution"

Tistel

قبل سنتينdiscuss

Peter Schweizer's great book Blood Money goes into the current state of the art with TikTok (and a bunch of other stuff).

Tistel

قبل سنتينdiscuss

People should check out Google's JAX. Work in a high level language and run anywhere. Nvidia should just be commodity hardware if people avoid vendor lock in.

Tistel

قبل سنتينdiscuss

It will happen someday. Still decades away. No true learning in the current LLMs just plagiarism so far to get better. I work at a place that is trying to use LLM to do a thing. just hired two humans to double check the work. They now do almost all of the work ...

Tistel

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

I have tried to use VSCode more, but, the original emacs keyboard movement is burned into muscle memory. VSCode has a keyboard mapping for emacs, but, its does not feel right. At the end of the day, who cares? Its just a tool, whatever works.

Tistel

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

I worked at a place that had a half built distributed system that we still needed to use (many bidders buying Ad space from a API based market). one great thing with tramp is that you can tramp into multiple systems simultaneously. So you are editing say files from 5 different systems (tweaking the yaml or whatever) at the same time. You could then start eshells on each of those systems at the same time. It made it really easy to adjust the settings and restart multiple apps really quickly (big screen, 5 files on top, 5 shells on bottom). I always get a kick out of people saying "you use that! you need to switch to editor X it has feature Y!" And me thinking yeah, that feature has been in emacs since before you were born. it is getting a bit crufty in its age though. Its main attraction is for people who like LISP. There a project called lem (IIRC) that is rewriting it in much higher performance Common Lisp.

Tistel

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

search for "shane macgowan teeth" for a laugh.

Tistel

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

Famous Irish band's singer that was big in the 80-90s. If you have ever been in an Irish themed pub that plays music, you have probably heard one of their songs:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvfcW8XVa2Kj802P4l302Yw

Shane was the lead singer for their heyday and was eventually kicked out of the band due to his drinking while touring. He went solo (pretty good) and the band tried to go on without him (so so). He was a famous wild man whose health has been in decline for many years. Many people were surprised he was still alive! RIP.

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