OpenAI claims ChatGPT 04-mini-high is its best model for coding. Fuck 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 …

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.”)

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 …

“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 …

LLMs are bland. Two new papers, Art or Artifice? Large Language Models and the False Promise of Creativity and A Robot Walks into a Bar: Can Language Models Serve as Creativity Support Tools for Comedy? An Evaluation of LLMs’ Humour Alignment with Comedians ] reinforces the findings of a more rigorous …

• 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 …

• Interesting article about a classic pen-and-paper game: Ace of Aces: or, why you should Do Maths as a game designer

• Activism is not a Social Club

• “AI” Presets for Underwater Photography: Adaptive AI Preset Pack This is a good idea, especially if they really are doing the feasible thing, which …

BirdCLEF is a bird-call recognition contest that runs yearly on Kaggle. (CLEF stands for Cross Language Education and Function.)

Last year, I participated in BirdCLEF because the domain was native Hawaiian birds, so even though I didn't know much of anything about audio ML, I had a leg up in …

Larry O'Brien sold his first program at age 16 and has been an influential voice in the software engineering community since 1989. He edited Computer Language, AI Expert, Software Development, and Game Developer magazines, founded the Jolt Programming Awards, and wrote the "Codewatch" columnist for SD Times from 2001-2015. Three …