A Programming Sabbatical


I'm setting programming aside for the next year. I'll continue to mentor HS students in programming and I'll continue writing short programs and scripts to help me deal with large amounts of data (particularly, in my case, my 80,000+ photographs), but I won't be embarking on a third version …

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You say "ChatGPT says," I say "Sprently"

A while back I wrote about how we needed a word for citing statements that had been sourced from an LLM but which are low-stakes enough not to have been fact-checked.

I like the word "sprently," for this. It's already an English word that seems more or less interchangeable with …

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There needs to be a word

I found myself writing "s/apparently/according to Claude 3.7 Sonnet/".

There needs to be a word.

(That string is programmer code for "whenever I write 'apparently' switch it to 'according to a possibly-hallucinating LLM.')

The essay in which I found myself writing that substitution doesn't use "apparently," except …

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ChatGPT 04-mini-high for coding? Screw that!

OpenAI claims ChatGPT 04-mini-high is its best model for coding. Screw that. The thing lies about its ability to correct its hallucinating behavior after I gave it every chance to clarify its shortcoming. If I were a junior, much less "vibe" coder, I would likely believe its assurances about doing …

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Kinder than “worse is better”

If there are two equivalently capable paradigms, the one with the shallower learning curve will enjoy a positive feedback loop of learning resources and tooling. The result will be more people learning the arguably less elegant paradigm.

(This is my kinder version of “worse is better.”)

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Recent readings

ML Architecture and papers

Scaling Monosemanticity: Extracting Interpretable Features from Claude 3 Sonnet Really important article, seemingly a breakthough in peering inside LLMs. A nice adjunct to this article is the less dense An Intuitive Explanation of Sparse Autoencoders for Mechanistic Interpretability of LLMs. My big worry about this is …

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“Hundreds of Beavers” is 5-stars for the right audience

Hundreds of Beavers” restored my faith in the comedic art of cinema.

It's a silent b&w movie that combines a few live-action actors with Terry Gilliam-style animation to tell the story of Our Hero learning to survive and become a competent-enough trapper to win the hand of The Fur-Trader's …

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New YOLO, Tensor Math Diagramming Language

  • There’s a new version of YOLO: https://github.com/THU-MIG/yolov10

  • I’ve studied this proposal for hours and I still can’t figure out if it would be a help or a hindrance. It’s a diagramming language for tensor math, which is a good idea, but I …

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