Sailor, software engineer, musician, terminally online.

Englishman in Wales.

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • I’m surprised the US never found a love for rugby, it’s a brilliant sport to play and spectate but it tends to be a fair bit less dangerous to its players than American football. There’s various reasons but the lack of protective gear is a factor people talk about a lot ironically.

    Interestingly go far back enough in time and they evolved from a common ancestor, but nowadays there’s little to unite them other than fact they’re both full-contact ball sports.



  • It’s not just about how many examples of a language exist in the LLM’s distribution though, dynamic typing is a poor choice if you’re using LLMs for software in my view because it turns compile-time errors into runtime errors which will only be caught if the LLM writes a suitable test; an area that they still leave a fair bit to be desired in.

    The whole virtue of dynamic typing is that it reduces cognitive load on the programmer, if you’re using LLMs there’s no reason to do that in my opinion, you’re offloading a bunch of cognitive load to begin with so expressiveness and constraint is more important than human ergonomics. Yes there’s loads of JS in an LLM corpus but a lot of it is going to be poor examples, because it’s generally quite easy to write JS badly. If you use typescript you’re at least forcing a few common hallucinations to produce compile-time errors which the model has immediate feedback for, and you’re giving the model more context on what it’s seeing.






  • I have a neurological vision disorder which I suspect augmented reality glasses would help a lot, but sod letting Meta see my life from a first-person perspective 24/7, or the lives of anyone around me for that matter. Also I suspect a genuine medical device would have to be made very obvious, you don’t want accessibility tech being mistaken for pervert tech. I wouldn’t take the risk frankly! It’s like if I’m talking to someone and they have a hearing aid in that’s fine, but if they’ve got headphones in I’m going to feel a little cheesed off on the face of it.

    Also not American but I work for a trans-Atlantic company, those things sound like a PHI nightmare in a medical setting given Meta’s habit of indiscriminately hoovering up data like as many labradors in a pantry.