Software engineering experience was useful, since I did plan out a lot of the high-level design and data model and sometimes push for simpler designs. Overall though, I mostly felt like a product manager trying to specify features as quickly as possible. While software engineering is more than coding, I'm starting to think Claude is already superhuman at this part.
One of my favorite AI papers is “Lets Think Dot By Dot7”, which finds that LLMs can use meaningless filler tokens (like “.”) to improve their performance, but I was overestimating the implications until recently1 and I think other people might be too.
The paper finds that LLMs can be trained to use filler tokens to increase their ability to do parallel reasoning tasks2. This has been compared to chain of thought, but CoT allows models to increase sequential reasoning, which is more powerful3. I now think this paper should be taken as evidence against LLMs ability to perform long-term reasoning4 in secret5.
CloudFlare recently had an incident5 where some code expected that a list would never contain more than 20 items, and then it was presented with a list of more than 20 items. Internet commenters rushed to point out that the problem was that the code was written in Rust, or that the source code had the word unwrap61 in it. A surprising number of people argued that they should have just "handled" this error.
I think this is wrong, and it completely misses how software is made robust.
I was thinking about an approval-style voting system that could end with a large number of ties, and ran into the problem of how to break ties in a provably-fair way that doesn't depend on candidates trusting each other and won't make voters' eyes glaze over.
I think I found a solution which is provably-fair, but it might still cross over into eye-glazing territory. I don't know if this is practical (or novel), but I'm writing it up in case anyone else finds it interesting.
I recently moved near Seattle1, where traffic is terrible but there are surprisingly many bike lanes. Unfortunately, there are also a lot of hills. For a while, I would occasionally bike to work, but the hills were intimidating and I had to re-motivate myself every morning. Around a year ago, I finally gave up and just got an e-bike.
