Week #95
A continued week of heavy client call-patch work and some inspiration to learn again. I think I have stopped learning. I need to get into it as soon as possible, but one thing that holds me back is “why”, like people are just racing with tokens and not bothered to understand the structuring of software. I am not sure, if writing code by hand again is worthwhile, its not, but how to make decisions when LLM hallucinates or we want to go a bit deeper from what it understands.
This is a question, I want to grapple and write about. I might produce a blog post about it. Or maybe even start a live stream. I haven’t streamed in maybe six months, the last stream was advent of code, yes I think. Should I get back. Everything boils down to why right? Code is just a commodity that anybody can make, how thought-out it is, that is entirely on the assumptions of the whim of the LLM, they can only go as far as the model’s prediction intelligence. And to be honest, that is quite a powerful one now-a-days.
This rant gave a bit clarity, but not quite firm one. It really needs to seep into the deeper questions that I can only write in a open ended blog post.
Quote of the week
“To distance yourself from the machines, aim to be as improbable as you can be”
What a line. I just love this blog.
Be ambitious. We have been, we need to be more now. We have to be unpredictable. We have to be super curious. Its not hard I think, its just the lack of direction and right mindset people have.
Read
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Last 6 months in LLMs in 5 minutes
- This is wild. Just wild. How quickly things are moving. We saw the November inflection point, of “oh oh, AIs can write code reliable now” to “how much lines of code can we produce in a day?”.
- Where is this going? God knows. But one things is certain that its not going anywhere. And its annoying a bit.
- The Open Claw moment was a big one, it showed the point that its now possible for LLMs to do almost anything. But nothing has happened after that, maybe a sign of security issues.
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Andrej Karapathy joins Antrhopic as a Researcher
- No ways. Oh my god! Why Anthropic? Did he too had any arguments with Sam. Revenge or just curiosity, I think of later to be right as per his personality.
- But this looks a bit scary, Anthropic is not under a good leadership, or motive, ah! Maybe I am not really at position to speak that, but still it bothers me when they say “engineers won’t be needed anymore”, like what harm have they done to you, why are you so obsessed over to dethrone from their jobs.
- But anyways, a good guy in a bad company might change the direction of those.
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Elena’s Growth Scoop Substack: Your job is changing faster than you think: You’ll get fired in 2027 (it was a bit negative title I think)
- I didn’t like reading this, maybe its a bitter truth. Maybe the jobs are going away?
- For some reason that is very hard to digest, it cannot be right. Like the base on which humans operate, that is removed then why even create it. what’s the point if its taking away the joy from our lives.
Elena's Growth Scoop-
- Yes, its about the human connection. The “appreciate your work” goes a long way than a month’s paycheck. Not for all but for some.
- In this day and age, that kind of connection has become important then ever. I cannot stress this that people must write online no matter how cringe it sounds, or no matter what AI steals your work. Its not a asset for you, its an investment or a seed that you are planting that you won’t necessarily seep the fruits of.
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Kevin Kelly Substack: Your most improbable life
- What a piece of writing. What a way to inspire life.
- The more you go towards your own self, you become lesser and less replaceable. What a line. I don’t know but I needed this.
- Just read this, you will find what you need, really! Its beyond the measure of what we are capable of, we are not limited by 32k or 1M context window, we have unlimited memories and believes that LLMs can fathom reach there.
- We have the intrinsic motive to drive some things, that LLMs can’t produce a token without.
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- This is cool. Emails don’t have javascript, thank godness, otherwise LLMs would have become ….. the doom of humaity.
- AMP, ok interesting I thought it was the CLI agent. Never mind, need to read it a bit.
Watched
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Dwarkesh Podcast: What rebuilding Alpha Go teaches us about AI andR RL
- This is such a great video. It explains or I should say converses in such a understandable human language, rather than buzzwords and in the air topics.
- I haven’t completed watching the full video, but so far it has given me a great understanding of what Go actually is, what problems it has compared to chess, and also how AI is being used to self-play it.
- I like Go now as well, the reason I love chess is its deterministic yet infinite possibilities, there is no luck factor. The mathematics required to solve such complex games is very interesting, a bit confusing at first, but it can be understandable if put enough thinking and time in it.
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Theo: Spending 40k for just 40 on GitHub Copilot
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“It isn’t a rugpull, we are just stupid”, no no, we are stupid yes, that’s true, and that is also not a rugpull, but don’t forget, they don’t have the compute to provide the tools. And they say, it will eventually be free, and unlimited.
Humans have spent centuries in solving the fuel problem or energy problem, is it unlimited?
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Really lazy of GitHub and Microsoft of not seeing the severity of the pricing structure. Maybe it was a trick to getting people lured in, hooked and then asking for money, just like any other business model. Get them hooked and then present the bill. They will pay whatever it takes.
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Vasilios Syrakis was laid off by Atlassian
- This is a great video, and the video after it too. It explained his situation and the position and the things he has worked upon over the 8 years at Atlassian.
- Looking at this, it feels like I am doing nothing, maybe imposter syndrome. But the guy addressed this too, saying that you might be in a different subject. Which is partially true, but being a backend developer, most of the terms felt like foreign to me. Really need to broaden and deepen my skills.
- The guy has no college degree, he worked as a desk guy for the initial years and self taught himself CS, what a inspiration. He has given me some hopes to learn again. Maybe AI is just a FAD, and we’ll realize just soon enough to learn again.
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Teej devries: Software writing Software
- Just in time software. Ah! What a presentation. It made me think back again, maybe neovim might not be obsolete, even if it becomes, I can still use it, because no one is going to judge you or ask to use other things.
- I will admit, I haven’t opened a editor to really write a line of code from scratch in months now. Feeling the heat. I need to learn more.
- But the idea of this, hey get this thing, and its there, is just fantastic. I can see myself being able to build a like this, but this is only possible when I am in the weeds, making stuff.
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Primeagen: Coinbase layoff and restructuring
- This is interesting, I am seeing this a lot, seen myself. Not sure where it might end up in, but it feels like the mixture of over hiring and the hype of AI at peak.
- Yes, coinbase is something very transaction heavy, and the statement was wired “Non-engineers (non-technical) people to produce code to ship to production”. I am not against non-technical people being able to write code, but I am thinking why can’t they weigh what is at stake, like its a critical business. One transaction here and there, its gone bro!
- Writing code has become cheaper, and if engineers are being fired, then that means writing code at that company was a labour type of thing. Because writing good software hasn’t become cheaper yet. The agents are able to work effectively in codebases where engineers have spent years and years of experience and thinking into it. It hasn’t been built within a day of 37k lines of code sprints. Its coming boys, that realization that software engineers don’t just write code, they translate human requirements to software not code.
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Philip Choi: If you are ambitious but inconsistent in tech, watch this
- Wow! banger. Maybe this was a bit of AI, the cliche words and taglines were a bit predictable. But the intent was good that’s what matters.
- The call to actions, of picking up a stack was feeling like AI, yes, but is actually somewhat true, not perfectly true.
- But the bigger point was passion as a fuel, I can feel this. This is bhagvad geeta. Don’t rely on passion, use duty as the way forward. Correctly said.
- Emotions can play with your motive and they are not consistent, that is its nature, you cannot control that, but you can control what you do with that, that is your responsibility. The sense of duty is what will lift one up.
Learnt
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If everything is generated by AI, is it worth building by hand code anymore?
- I know its called trad coding (traditional coding I think), But does anyone value it, or is it worth it? Because code is not an art, it in some sense is. I mean architecting, thinking about structuring and the intent behind its use. But who cares right?
- Why it is that when I started my career, it had to happen, couldn’t I have given a few years of time to live.
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I am not learning lately, its just context switching and prompting to do things
- I don’t like it, but after the sessions, I am totally exhausted, I don’t have the time to review the code, nor the capacity to go through the 5k line it has spitted.
Tech News
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Google releases 3.5 Flash and Omini
- Google IO was mid week and we saw a lot of wired unexpected killing of projects from Google, a closed source agent in favor of open source, that is a big mistake maybe. Google, don’t become the next anthropic.
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- They now have the compute, the data, it is going to be a next level of deal.
- The model is fast hell yes, but its darn capable too. This is the model that I want for coding, zip-zap fast, but yes that can create slop too if not moderated.
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- They just are relentless, doesn’t matter how small the improvement is, they keep on with the closed source labs. A great sight to appreciate.
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Its a wired time to be writing these days, I must say, writing might be the next thing to get smothered by AI, its already there. I won’t ever sell my writing for AI. I will still hand chisel my words. It brings my thoughts to life, no matter how easy it can be to do with AI, the effort is worth it when done with bare hands.
Happy Coding :)