Philip Lamb

24 years of AR/VR R&D engineering. Principal Engineer at neuRealities. Formerly @IncMoonbeam, @Mozilla, @DAQRI, @ARToolworks. Opinions expressed are my own.

[Stefan @Stefan__Powell]

Why is New Zealand a hotbed for Aerospace innovation, especially rockets and high-speed flight?

Airspace.

Even White Sands Missile Range is not wide enough to turn around a Mach 5 vehicle in a 3g turn.

We have thousands of miles of open air and sea space. Almost nothing between us, Antarctica and South America. And a test site only 45min drive south of our headquarters.

This is a structural advantage Dawn will carry forward almost indefinitely.

This is why we build the world’s highest-performance aircraft in New Zealand.

[Philip Lamb @TwoExponential]

The Wikipedia "Model Collapse" page has a good set of academic references on this topic: https://t.co/NgZlgL8u1U

[Philip Lamb @TwoExponential]

https://t.co/wcn4HMxi1u

[Philip Lamb @TwoExponential]

When I say that many people have the wrong mental model about what AI is doing, I mean it's very difficult for us to understand what a model trained on the entirety of human written texts is capable of regurgitating. Thankfully, this guy is an entertaining explainer. Worth a follow.

[Mo @atmoio]

Claude Mythos is Delusional

[Philip Lamb @TwoExponential]

@THELUOK This makes me want to re-watch Waking Life. That was one of only a few movies I’ve ever seen that capture the spirit of dreaming in a visual form.

[Philip Lamb @TwoExponential]

@bayagima Landing fees definitely add to the price on multi-stop, but I agree it should be a lot easier to fiddle with an itinerary and see the influence of stop overs on price and duration.

[Philip Lamb @TwoExponential]

@dhh One of the ironically true things said by Dan Lyons in his Secret Diary of Steve Jobs was that "at Apple, we start with the ads", which was actually 100% Jobs; acknowledge the human need and identify the technology that could meet it. That is what Apple lacks at present.

[Philip Lamb @TwoExponential]

This is consistent with my experience.

[Lakshya Jain @lxeagle17]

OK, so as someone who works on this stuff daily, here's my take on LLMs for coding: There are some things they're really good at and some things they're really bad at, and knowing where to draw the line on how to use them is the key.

I remain astounded by how incredible LLMs are for my productivity. I have to manage multiple engineers and write a ton of code on a daily basis. AI just makes my life a lot easier, because of three things:

1) It's really good at writing boilerplate code that you *need* (read and write to this AWS resource, create an SFTP client for me, etc). It's also extremely good at doing regimented tasks with minimal complexity (generate test cases, etc).

2) It's extremely good at finding (coding) packages that you didn't know existed. Python, Java etc are just oceans of libraries at this point, and the documentation for a lot of them is fairly sparse and shoddy, and exists as a Frankenstein's Monster across multiple websites and forums. No sane person has the time to read this.

3) It's amazing at helping you debug — whether through parsing large volumes of logs, or through processing errors for complex pipelines and suggesting solutions. You have to be pretty careful with prompts here, but if you know how to prompt it, the gains are immense. Things that used to take me 5-6 hours to debug now sometimes take minutes.

BUT: it's really bad at one major thing.

AI is horrible — and I mean *HORRIBLE* — at generating complex pieces of code and logic. A hallmark of AI-generated code is that it yields insanely long and unnecessarily convoluted blocks, with a ton of emojis.

If you ever ask it to do something open-ended and semi-complex, be ready for your work to swell by 5x. (In the process, it'll also generate a couple very nasty bugs.)

I'm pretty okay with senior, staff and principal software engineers using a lot of AI to speed them up. At this point, those folks have been coding at a high level for years, and it's second nature for them. Exceptions always exist, but they're generally very aware of where it can go wrong, and how.

I'm less patient with inexperienced engineers doing this, because they tend to blindly use AI to generate volumes of code and think "Lots of Code = Good". What this usually results in is bugs that eventually get exposed, which the rest of us then have to clean up. Moreover, they don't learn much from this, and so they're not building any muscle memory or making any real progress.

[Philip Lamb @TwoExponential]

So I'll make a prediction in my area of expertise: AI won't eliminate programming; it'll instead lead to an explosion of programming, and removal of creation of computation out of the hands of "guilds" and into the hands of the intellectual "middle class".

[Philip Lamb @TwoExponential]

Introduction of a revolutionary technology eliminates some occupations, of course. LLM-based AI is going to eliminate many occupations. But it's the secondary effects that are the payoff and where it gets interesting...

[Philip Lamb @TwoExponential]

The question about AI adoption then should be not only which occupations are threatened, but should be informed by the question: when a knowledge assistant becomes essentially free, what previously uneconomic careers could now become viable?

[Philip Lamb @TwoExponential]

@gfodor 👀

[Philip Lamb @TwoExponential]

Try and persuade me that an AI could produce artwork in the style of a named artist without being trained on the original works themselves.

[Philip Lamb @TwoExponential]

The daily waves of new AI image generation techniques are amazing, but I'm left with the feeling that no-one is really discussing the blatant monetisation of copyright violation baked into these AI models.

[Philip Lamb @TwoExponential]

Halfway there, but still not really touching the fact that that this is a highly obfuscated and sophisticated copying of copyrighted work. https://t.co/VMCy1zpmhO

[UnHerd @unherd]

'The Studio Ghibli meme trend constitutes the further “ensloppification” of internet culture.'

Human art has been swallowed by the algorithm, writes @MoustacheClubUS 👇 https://t.co/g1El0E7ku5

[Felix Z @felix_trz]

This has been a long time coming--excited to announce that Immersive Web Emulator 2.0 (the #WebXR browser extension, not the JS runtime) preview is available NOW!

Tap into the full power of IWER + DevUI, now in the extension format you know and love. Details & link below 👇

[Philip Lamb @TwoExponential]

The SDK for Amazon's leading platform, AWS, is just 1628 files thrown into a single folder. Installation notes tell you to "not forget to install dependencies!"

Amazon market cap is 2.38 trillion USD.

[Philip Lamb @TwoExponential]

I would go further. Every game that has 3D interaction should be a VR game. VR is an interaction medium.