There is a persistent belief in the ‘AI’ community that large language models (LLMs) have the ability to learn and self-improve by tweaking the weights in their vector space. Although there’s scant evidence that tweaking a probability vector space is anything like the learning process in biological brains, we nevertheless get sold the idea that […]
When it comes to software developers, there are a few distinct types. For example, the extroverted, chatty type, who is always going out there to share the latest and newest libraries and projects with everyone, and is very much into bouncing ideas off others, regardless of whether they know what you’re talking about. Then there […]
Cognitive processes are not something that we generally pay much attention to until something goes wrong, but they cover the entire scope of us ingesting sensory information, the processing and recalling thereof, as well as any resulting decisions made based on such internal deliberation. Within that context there has also long been a struggle between […]
Does vibe coding risk destroying the Open Source ecosystem? According to a pre-print paper by a number of high-profile researchers, this might indeed be the case based on observed patterns and some modelling. Their warnings mostly center around the way that user interaction is pulled away from OSS projects, while also making starting a new […]
If you’re a hacker you may well have a passing interest in math, and if you have an interest in math you might like to hear about the direction of mathematical research. In a talk on this topic [Kevin Buzzard], professor of pure mathematics at Imperial College London, asks the question: Where is Mathematics Going? […]
Recently AI risk and benefit evaluation company METR ran a randomized control test (RCT) on a gaggle of experienced open source developers to gain objective data on how the use of LLMs affects their productivity. Their findings were that using LLM-based tools like Cursor Pro with Claude 3.5/3.7 Sonnet reduced productivity by about 19%, with […]
In the past few years, what marketers and venture capital firms term “artificial intelligence” but is more often an advanced predictive text model of some sort has started taking people’s jobs and threatening others. But not tedious jobs that society might like to have automated away in the first place. These AI tools have generally […]