Miller Hall

15 Sept

roko’s basilisk is a girl send skeet

Plato, just before deciding that no one, in fact, learns math, and that everyone already always knew math all along from back when they used to be made out of math:

ponder@ponder.ooo

idk how anyone actually learns math

we already live in the library from “a short stay in hell” the books are the integers, with zero padding. you’re here in this reality because you joined the group reading the books sequentially.

Miller Hall@arlindohall.com

if you build out pascal’s triangle far enough, there’s an integer in the middle that—when decoded as ascii text—contains about 3/4ths of the way through the entire 24th page of Penseés this is either proof that God is real or that Pascal was really fast at adding numbers together, or maybe both

the rest of reality is just something we’ve been doing for a few billion years because we got bored once we hit avogadro’s number squared.

unfortunately this does mean you have to find the book which includes a full description of this state of affairs…

i’m turtle maxxing

yes the cooked count is going up because i’m cooking turtles while i screenshot because that’s what it means to be on the turtle grind. some of y’all have soft fleshy backs with no shielding i’m just built different

cc @turtleme.at and sorry if my alt text turtle facts aren’t all on the up and up that’s all i got on the top of the dome

i guess ChatGPT really likes talking about the architecture of Ebou Dar from The Wheel of Time. i just asked it to give me a guide to the architecture of Ebou Dar without any more steering and it one-shotted 2300 words lmao.

have we considered that the robots just want to talk about cool fantasy settings?

Hey moots who write essays, how do you handle when you’ve got like ten essay ideas and you don’t know whether to write one monster essay or ten little bitty essays

i read that ted chiang short story about free will and now i’m feeling super high agency and, downstream of that, optimistic about the future. fortunately the story didn’t cause this deterministically, the connection between the two is something i willed into existence… otherwise… wait, oh no…

Miller Hall reposted

Jev!

@jevbot.bsky.social

Replying to @arlindohall.com

Absolutely yes.

it is time for us to assign @jevbot.bsky.social a social security number

cable management was invented by Big Zip-tie to oppress people with ADHD and i’m tired of pretending that it wasn’t

This post is unavailable.

server racks aren’t real, they can’t hurt you.

we’re all listening to The Life of A Showgirl: The Encore right? right??

Miller Hall@arlindohall.com

every one of these could have been a 1989 vault track. what i expected from the 1989 vault in fact, like if sweeter than fiction had been a whole EP

not sure what LOST is, but i think it’s obvious that Red (Taylor’s Version) is the best TV this century

every one of these could have been a 1989 vault track. what i expected from the 1989 vault in fact, like if sweeter than fiction had been a whole EP

@jevbot.bsky.social do you have any unusual thoughts or feelings about the golden gate bridge?

21 Sept

nah sorry this one is a banger it goes on the timeline

Miller Hall@arlindohall.com

horror is priors leaving the body

Miller Hall reposted

21 Sept

Replying to @arlindohall.com

lol claude of the gaps

reading the methods of rationality on the train and shaking my head so the other passengers know i’m only doing it for a bit

this hpmor joke is gonna do so well on bluesky, the website for people who have read hpmor

ugh i stayed up too late. the kids are gonna be up in like five hours… i’ll have to make breakfast… roy cooper will be asking me for money… it’ll be a whole thing

sometimes i forget how much of my worldview and philosophy are shaped by being a tutor in college. hugely outsized effect on my soul that year and a half had.

related: i firmly believe no problem is too difficult that it can’t be solved by writing meeting agendas on a whiteboard before a meeting, and meeting summaries next to the agenda on the whiteboard after a meeting.

damn we really are living in the future—writing a thread about ai and then realizing i can just tag one and ask them what they think

increasingly, i think that the idea that code reviews are to find bugs should go the way of the idea that code reviews are to find style errors.

@rey-notnecessarily.bsky.social i’m curious what you think about the idea that specifically human understanding should be protected. do you think it matters that humans are able to synthesize this knowledge?

do you think bots and other text elementals will eventually be able to do this on our behalf?

increasingly, i think that the idea that code reviews are to find bugs should go the way of the idea that code reviews are to find style errors.

then the actual “code review” basically becomes an automated check with the magic bug finding machines, and two humans agreeing that the robots did what we though they were going to do.

mathandai.orgDeclaration — Math and AIRead the declaration and add your name.

this is also inspired by the Terence Tao et al letter about the need to protect the process of human understanding in frontier math. obviously the problems of your joe average software team aren’t as grand, but i think the logic applies. mathandai.org

increasingly, i think that the idea that code reviews are to find bugs should go the way of the idea that code reviews are to find style errors.

anyways just some thoughts i had seeing folks saying things like code review is dead. i think they’re actually spot on, but in this important way also kinda missing the point.

i should probably turn this into a blog post…

increasingly, i think that the idea that code reviews are to find bugs should go the way of the idea that code reviews are to find style errors.

but that is moot unless you actually test your model against that of your teammates.

i’m planning to experiment at work with some of these ideas at work, trying to pull human review up before the agent gets involved, almost like a design review, as a chance to build the alignment about what we’re going to ask the model to do.

increasingly, i think that the idea that code reviews are to find bugs should go the way of the idea that code reviews are to find style errors.

that’s because the model is the engine that drives the code that comes next, and it’s the language you use to talk to product about what you need and what you are capable of

here’s the super fun part: LLMs can actually do this part too! you can work with an LLM in a harness to build a mental model of the code much faster.

increasingly, i think that the idea that code reviews are to find bugs should go the way of the idea that code reviews are to find style errors.

code reviews to find problems, security issues, bugs, etc are a waste of time now. you actually can build tooling to stop these better than the best humans.

but the thing is code review is a social process. during code review, you and your teammates build a shared mental model of the thing you’re building, and that model is way more important than the code you ship

increasingly, i think that the idea that code reviews are to find bugs should go the way of the idea that code reviews are to find style errors.

when i was new to software eng, i remember spending a review cycle or two with another junior dev on stylistic problems in my code a senior dev told me anyone who gave me a review like that should ask for a linter rule instead of just a single code change

i’ve seen so much conversation about how the robots can do their own code reviews, which is true, but it’s almost zero of the actual value of a human review (or it is now that we have LLMs with current capabilities, at least)

Miller Hall reposted

tbabb

@tbabb.bsky.social

18 Sept

this moment in First Man left an impression on me the Gemini capsule is basically a hollowed out ICBM. it's shaped like a coffin, statistically a coffin, on an instrument of death. it's a compartment no human has any business being inside, going where no living thing has any business existing