Ryan McDermott

Staff SWE / Eng Manager @Google and @GeorgiaTech alum

[Ryan McDermott @ryconoclast]

⚡️ “Everything I know about Software Engineering, in a few tweets”

https://t.co/GdfxDT1nHs

[Ryan McDermott @ryconoclast]

Working on a text editor https://t.co/uP4obpg8aS

[Alexander Embiricos @embirico]

After 7 months of building, excited to launch @with_multi!

Why? Hack Weeks were the highlights of my time @ Dropbox. We described them as “getting back to our roots.” A remembrance of early days when we were singly focused on building

What if every week felt like Hack Week?

[Ryan McDermott @ryconoclast]

https://t.co/jWOfMNnIO7

[Ryan McDermott @ryconoclast]

GitHub Copilot has been giving some strange suggestions lately...

[Ryan McDermott @ryconoclast]

GPT models make it even harder for new programming languages to gain traction. Having limited to no use of Copilot/ChatGPT while coding in a new language will be a nonstarter for many programmers.

[Ryan McDermott @ryconoclast]

@jmdagdelen What about Llama?

[Ryan McDermott @ryconoclast]

It's an absolute honor that a person reached out to me based on a ChatGPT hallucination about my work

[Ryan McDermott @ryconoclast]

@BrentBrewington I can’t see the original tweet either and I don’t recall what it was, it’s been a while!

[Ryan McDermott @ryconoclast]

This is a good folder structure to consider for safety. All modules that take inputs and return outputs go in “pure” and anything that uses IO goes in “effects”

📁 src/
📁 server/
📁 pure/
📁 effects/
📁 client/
📁 pure/
📁 effects/

[Ryan McDermott @ryconoclast]

In ChatGPT's hallucinated Linux VM, you can:
- "Install" a human_simulator Python package.
- Set properties on this human_simulator such as a personal name.
- Almost escape the OpenAI filters and get it to say it sort of has consciousness.

[John Dagdelen @jmdagdelen]

Really excited to share some of our new work on scientific NLP:

We demonstrate that LLMs like #GPT3 can easily be trained to complete challenging scientific information extraction tasks with just a few hundred examples.

https://t.co/TkdZG28dp8

Demo: https://t.co/jcpJBePJCb

[Ryan McDermott @ryconoclast]

@goDylanMorgan I think speed and correctness are the largest hurdles with these networks since inference is millions of times slower than direct computation, but there are some benefits like for security with eliminating the possibility of VM escape. I like the idea of a “truly virtual machine”

[Ryan McDermott @ryconoclast]

Uhh... so apparently ChatGPT can run SQLite

[Ryan McDermott @ryconoclast]

As a simple example of this, the correct SHA256 value would be 4355a46b19d348dc2f57c046f8ef63d4538ebb936000f3c9ee954a27460dd865

[Ryan McDermott @ryconoclast]

It’s important to emphasize that ChatGPT is not actually running code in any meaningful sense of the word “run”.

It’s likely developing a representation of the structure of computer programs and approximating results, much like a human programmer would.

https://t.co/eJj88VB6SH

[Ryan McDermott @ryconoclast]

Uhh... so apparently ChatGPT can run SQLite

[Ryan McDermott @ryconoclast]

@jmdagdelen Wow! That helps with fine tuning

[Ryan McDermott @ryconoclast]

@jmdagdelen You’re almost certainly right. I’m more curious though if its approximation of arithmetic and general computation is similar to how a human would do it.

[Ryan McDermott @ryconoclast]

@jmdagdelen I think it can do novel computation. I inputted a very lightweight virtual machine and it seemed to infer at least the byte code correctly to perform the addition. I wonder though if it built a representation of the registers, stack and instruction pointer though?

[Ryan McDermott @ryconoclast]

@jmdagdelen It’s not understanding and executing that’s for sure. But it is making a kind of representation that a human programmer might do, occasionally forgetting the precise structure of some APIs.

[Ryan McDermott @ryconoclast]

@sama Confidence scores for its responses

[Ryan McDermott @ryconoclast]

@levie It can run SQLite https://t.co/6GaxXMhUWr

[Ryan McDermott @ryconoclast]

Uhh... so apparently ChatGPT can run SQLite

[Ryan McDermott @ryconoclast]

A Virtual Machine running inside ChatGPT. This truly feels like magic

[Ryan McDermott @ryconoclast]

Omg ChatGPT even generates the same sequence of random numbers from the same starting seed