Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
Daft ai project of the week: āloreā, a version control system that should not be confused with another vcs of the same name open-sourced by epic games a few weeks ago.
ā¦which would be great, if the output of llms were deterministic, and generally it is not. This means rolling back a change to undo or fix something is just another spin of the roulette wheel, with the analogy being reinforced by the number of tokens youāll have to buy and burn to do a rebuild. It looks like it still needs a real vcs behind the scenes, given that it isnāt entirely self-hosting, but maybe I misunderstood something.
You might wonder if this is some kind of satirical work, or perhaps piece of performance art, but Iām fairly certain it isnātā¦ the creator and sole human author (naturally, claude is the only other ācontributorā) is a big fan of something called āopen audio protocolā and a project called āaudiusā which came about by someone asking what if spotify and soundcloud, but on the blockchain? With ai agentic integration?
https://github.com/lorevcs/lore
Iāve always thought that the ability for a VCS to show me exactly what my codebase looked like at any point in the past wasnāt as dementia-simulating as Iād like
Finally a VCS that simulates the horrific results of
cvs mergegone wrong, 20 years since the last time I used cvs.Wait, did I get that right and it reruns the prompts every time you want to look at the code? Holy token costs batman.
Perfect for when your workplace will fire you if you dont use enough tokens, Iām sure.
kayfabe vcs
Considering this is the logical endpoint of the āLLMās are just like compilers broā line of thought, Iām not surprised at all.
Nah, this isnāt the endpointā¦ you want something like prompt2exe, which is a performance art piece. Gets an llm to output machine code, and bundles it into an executable.
Hardcore mode. No handholding for puny human devs by their tool chains. š¦¾
Probably impractical for normal people to run, unless they have an employer who wants their minions to be burning all the tokens and pays up for the expensive kind of accounts.
Jesus, youāre right. This is so much worse.
I think thereās something to the compilers analogy, in the sense that if you used a C compiler through a chat interface with one liners to insert snippets into assembly without keeping the source code in source files as such, it would probably be slower than just writing in assembly yourself.
That LLMs have a number of extremely undesirable properties as ācompilersā (from nondeterminism to plagiarism) does not make the dumb ass chat interface any less fundamentally shit. It just makes them shit in other ways too.
There is one narrow case in which Iāve found the compiler analogy useful: explaining my frustrations with LLM-assisted design/architecture doc generation. Here, itās useful because handing someone a design document that was output by an LLM is a lot like handing someone a binary and asking them for a code review.
Iād much rather work with whatever disorganized soup of thoughts someone fed into the machine, because those at least contain intent, rather than a document that actively obscures what the designer wanted in a barrage of detail.
Yeahā¦ I think the core point is, LLMās shit is generated artifacts, which need to be kept separate from sources. That you canāt actually re-generate the same artifacts, is just a dingleberry on top of the shit pile.
I know weāre all familiar with the metaphor of LLMs as roulette wheel, but I think thereās some real craft to turning that into Russian roulette.