Alan J. Ponte (ポンテ)

Software Engineer, math nerd, aspiring polymath. Drinks out of mason jars sometimes. Views are my own, not my employer’s.

[Alan J. Ponte (ポンテ) @alanjponte]

@0xIlyy AI did not “solve” mathematics. It brute-forced a solution to a lemma of a very hard problem. It’s solution was completely mechanical.

[Alan J. Ponte (ポンテ) @alanjponte]

American politicians would rather ban algorithms than factory farming.

[Perry E. Metzger @perrymetzger]

Any time someone tells you that AI has an X% chance of wiping out humanity, ask them for their math that got them the number. If they didn’t do a calculation, if they just pulled the number from their butt, you can safely treat it like anything else that came from their butt.

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

The "whiteboard defense:" I should be able to pull you aside at any moment and ask you to explain any customer-facing system you've shipped. You should be able to clearly explain how it works and defend the decisions you made. This is my benchmark for responsible AI usage.

I don't expect line-level familiarity with the code. I don't care if you remember the exact function name or implementation detail. You may not even know it. I don't care.

But if I ask "why did you do X instead of Y?", "what happens if this actor behaves maliciously?", "what data structure did you use here and why?", or "where does this fail?" you should be able to answer confidently.

For PoCs, demos, experiments, whatever: I don't care. Generate 100% of it and understand none of it. Speed over quality every time in those specific scenarios.

But if you're shipping customer-facing work, you can't be shipping things you don't understand at a high level.

[Alan J. Ponte (ポンテ) @alanjponte]

@krystalball Let’s assume that autoregressive LLMs are the threat to society as they say. Why wouldn’t they just stop building them?

[Cassandra Unchained @michaeljburry]

Let's all take a moment to understand how self-serving it is for OpenAI, Anthropic and other execs of big hyperscalers to talk of slowing things down.
1. LLMs are not AI and won't be AGI. There is nothing AI to slow down.
2. Competition is coming up fast, slowing benefits incumbents.
3. IPOs need hype & puffery; "we are so awesome it could become dangerous" is hype & puffery
4. Cover for real uncontrollable slowing growth as IPOs look to be pushed out

[Alan J. Ponte (ポンテ) @alanjponte]

@DoctorFishbones I’m not aware of any prominent mathematicians advocating for OpenAI breaching artists’ copyright protections. Do you have any examples?

[Alan J. Ponte (ポンテ) @alanjponte]

@TheSalonDon 49ers held their training camp practices around 10am. They’re definitely trained for the early start.

[LaurieWired @lauriewired]

Insulin Pumps
Pacemakers
Airbag Deployment
Smoke Alarms
Elevators
Anti Lock Brakes
Lithium Battery Controller
Safety Critical Aircraft Code
Pressure Cookers
Power Steering
Treadmill Saftey
CPAP Machines
Defibrillators
3D Printers
Railroad Crossings
Nuclear Reactor SCRAM Logic
Literally anything PLC

gotta disagree on this take. tiny code often the most important

[Plant Based News @PlantBasedNews]

if you care about water use from data centers, you should really look into animal farming

[developing valhalla @valhalla_dev]

A pre-commit hook for Git that reads in the diff'ed code on a PR and quizzes you on it before you're allowed to open the PR.

You have to score an 85% or above on the quiz to open the PR.

This would fix 99% of complaints about slop PRs overnight.

[Alan J. Ponte (ポンテ) @alanjponte]

@Polymarket I find that to be a stretch with the given technology. LLMs operate by looking at familiar text in a corpus, and assigning sets of scalar values. When you replace the text with binary, the distance equations will fail at telling you much about similarities.

[Branko @brankopetric00]

The Terraform module was "reusable," which is why it has 40 input variables and works in exactly one place.

[staysaasy @staysaasy]

Pull requests used to be like love letters and now they’re like toilet paper.

[Alan J. Ponte (ポンテ) @alanjponte]

I just received news that my @squarespace account subscription is increasing in price. You would think that with AI reducing the cost of building software, subscriptions would follow. Safe to say I’m migrating my website to be self-hosted.

[Bret Taylor @btaylor]

I deeply resent that AI has forced me to eliminate em dashes from my writing for fear of signaling slop

[No context Hazz ⛩ @HazzimIO]

No comments.

[Wes Winder @weswinder]

fable 5 just refactored my entire codebase in one call

67 tool invocations. 1M+ new lines. 24 brand new files

it modularized everything. broke up monoliths. cleaned up spaghetti

none of it worked

but boy was it beautiful

[Alan J. Ponte (ポンテ) @alanjponte]

@r230614_shin その女性は、ただ戸惑っている時にそういう表情になるだけなのかもしれません。見た目だけで悪意があると決めつけるのもまた、偏見です。