May 03 2023

Quotes

While conducting research and expanding our personal knowledge base is instrumental to amassing knowledge and forming building blocks for our writing, it's not our primary objective. Don't let your mind trick you into believing that research alone moves the needle on creating written work. It's a trap. (View Highlight)

Interestingly enough, when you first start out at a company, everyone you encounter will tend to look like an idealist. After all, you’re a new and untrusted commodity and only the most intensely checked-out pragmatists will risk appearing lazy or insubordinate in front of an untrusted commodity. The pragmatists all put on idealist masks for this occasion, and opportunists are always wearing masks anyway. So as a newbie, you come into a world of apparent unbridled optimism about the company. (Location 773)

Assuming that you avoid the idealist lunch table in the cafeteria (and you should really try to do that), you’ll gain the trust of the pragmatists before too long. The barriers to entry aren’t particularly high here. And you’ll find yourself surrounded by people who define their lives almost entirely by valuations that are external and usually tangential to the company. They extract meaning from life elsewhere and signal that fact to others around them, sometimes with talismans as trite as mugs that say, “I’d rather be camping.” (Location 787)

Pure functions are functions that only depend on their arguments and have no side effects. Given the same arguments, they produce the same return value. These can be considered mathematical functions, to distinguish them from language functions. (View Highlight)

It's not true the functional programmers completely avoid side effects and only use pure functions. Otherwise, how would you ever get anything done? We run our software to get side effects. We want to send emails, update databases, make web requests, etc. (View Highlight)

Down the road, he is worried that future versions of the technology pose a threat to humanity because they often learn unexpected behavior from the vast amounts of data they analyze. This becomes an issue, he said, as individuals and companies allow A.I. systems not only to generate their own computer code but actually run that code on their own. And he fears a day when truly autonomous weapons — those killer robots — become reality. (View Highlight)

Many other experts, including many of his students and colleagues, say this threat is hypothetical. But Dr. Hinton believes that the race between Google and Microsoft and others will escalate into a global race that will not stop without some sort of global regulation. (View Highlight)

Images

These WoW HC "Last Words" messages are comedic gold:

Thoughts

i never noticed it but i was also fossilized alongside the music of my youth -- new artists i consume orbit around the planets of taste i developed at 15 years old

Dearest shareholders/readers and members of bramadams.dev:

This site needs more code, don't you agree? Ideally, runnable code hosted on something like Replit or CodePen. In addition, the Chats with GPT generally stop at the imagined code stage, the "almost but not really" program phase, I would love to formalize this process and make actual programs for people to use and play with that aren't on the mega scale of full GH repos.

In service to this goal, I've been hard at work on an ambitious project to merge: LLMs, CLI Apps, Project Management, and programming

It's called Moon, and its about to change how things are done around these parts!

Moon is a CLI tool for using LLMs to phase ideas to programs

Usage:
  moon [command]

Available Commands:
  help        Help about any command
  new         Create a new project
  orbit       Orbit options
  phase       Manage phases

Flags:
  -h, --help   help for moon

Use "moon [command] --help" for more information about a command.

It should hopefully be in a position to alpha test by EoW, I'm brimming with ideas on it atm, many of which I've already set into action.

A list of ideas: what is the optimal way for LLMs interface with the file system? How do projects evolve over phases? What if your file system was living and breathing?

Music

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