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

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 …

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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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Some recent readings

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Conformer: An interesting ML architecture that I'm abandoning

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 …

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About Larry

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 …

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