Posts

On Microsoft Employees dealing with Github Copilot PR - May 2025

     Related links: Reddit thread , HN thread     A few thoughts:     I fully understand the schadenfreude on the part of the SWE community. These things are possibly an existential threat to their livelihoods and the negativity is fully understandable if not misguided, but these victory laps seem to be repeating a common pattern of not waiting a couple months(!) before these systems improve, very publicly, from a mix of better models and now actively incremented training data from MSFT employees. This is the worst this system will ever be and looking in the improvement rate of the last few months should teach people to wait a little bit before condemning the effort fruitless     On a tangential note, I wonder if this public effort is somehow related to Github's new updated rate limits ( hn discussion ). All this juicy data PLUS expert human feedback out in the open ready to be used for distillation is an obvious target to upstarts trying to...
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Commentary on CWT w/ Jack Clark - Bullish case for AI impact on economic growth

     Link to MR post: MR     Jack and Tyler are both of the opinion that AI will cause lower economic growth than the 20%-30% estimates of those who are "feeling the agi" because  real world bottlenecks in the world of atoms, which still makes up the majority of the Economy by far, will put some brakes on that breakneck acceleration.     Now, I'm certain that both of them have already thought about the argument I'll make here, but I just want to spell it out loud. Many bottlenecks in the real world are consequences of political disputes (broadly speaking) in which parties have to rely on claims to support their side. In a world where more people rely on AI - and here I'm imagining the voting public using using AI to help them think about these disputes - it's possible that we'll see more rational, or at least better supported by evidence, policy getting an edge.     For example, a supporter of a proposal to reduce the maximum speed in a ...
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Quoting Simon Willison on LLM-assisted search

I can feel my usage of Google search taking a nosedive already. I expect a bumpy ride as a new economic model for the Web lurches into view. —  Simon Willison, “AI assisted search-based research actually works now” I second the feeling
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Signal boost: Voronoi diagrams with SciPy

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[Link] Voronoi diagrams with SciPy  I was a bit confused by SciPy's documentation for its Voronoi class and wondering how I could easily draw the "infinite" regions from the output. After getting a somewhat verbose answer from ChatGPT, I decided to Google the question and found Voronoi diagrams with SciPy , by Martin McBride , which solved my problem. The solution is not different in spirit to ChatGPT's but it's simpler in my mind, so I went with it. The idea is to add the points of a very far off bounding box, then simply ignore regions with -1 vertices.
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A neat approach for sortable versioned filenames

A neat approach for sortable versioned filenames tl;dr Add a letter to indicate number of digits: a0, a1 to a9, b10 to b99, c100 to c999, etc. Important disclaimer: I didn't come up with this scheme. I read it in a twitter X thread some time ago and have been using it ever since. I'm sure I bookmarked it, but I lost access to my account 1 So, basically, I know you hate when you're dealing with files and start with important_work.xlsx and then realize that you better version this thing, so you F12 it and add a suffix indicating the version: important_work.xlsx important_work_v2.xlsx That works, so back again to doing your job. Then, after a few back and forth with peers/boss/clients you find yourself with over 10 versions: important_work.xlsx ...
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Computer Science Nominative Determinism - Edsger Dijkstra

Computer Science Nominative Determinism - Edsger Dijkstra \(\text{Edsger } D^*_{ijk} \) Ok, that was awful, I know, I know. P.S.:If you're not getting this joke, maybe you have a terrible sense of humor your browser doesn't play nice with MathJax
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Semantic Similarity in Pompeii

 Reposting an anecdote I originally posted on Hacker News  regarding my trip to Pompeii:     We were walking around the city (the archeological park, that is) and I wanted to see one of those roman public bathrooms. So I googled "pompeii latrine" and got search results links for how to find the bathrooms (as in, the guest facilities). I was initially confused as to why such a clear query got me the completely wrong answer, until it hit me that bathroom and latrine are semantically similar, but not in my context.     At least that's my headcanon, who knows. And it seems like the cool preserved latrinae were in herculanum anyway. Still, fun to think about  Again, I have no way of knowing if this is why it happened, but I like to believe it is.
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