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padolsey
4,466karma·578submissions·June 29, 2011
about
padolsey.at.hn
I'm James. Living between Beijing and London. I like coding. Also plants. Stroke survivor & disability advocate. My dog's a whippet/iggy cross and is called Ducky. He's a beautiful lunatic.
* website: [j11y.io](https://j11y.io) * building: [nope](https://nope.net) * bsky: [@j11y.io](https://bsky.app/profile/j11y.io) * contact: https://tally.so/r/waYPvE * twitter: [@padolsey](https://x.com/padolsey) * book recommendations: [ablf.io](https://ablf.io) * me = founding eng @ [collective intelligence project](https://cip.org)
My work email is my first name at cip dot org.
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My meet.hn token: meet.hn-10d164d4-bf7f-4431-898f-e02b34b836dc
recent activity (578 total)
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> Rather than train the AI to recognize whole words, the researchers created a system that decodes words from smaller components called phonemes. These are the sub-units of speech that form spoken …
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Oh hm true - I guess I meant tobacco. Whoops!
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It’s true. But also perhaps more nuanced. Many people see disability as a purely negative experience, something to avoid at all costs, synonymous with illness. But it is a slightly different axis: Bot…
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Indeed. And we are all born disabled (in that we are unable to sustain our own independence and wellbeing without assistance), and will likely all be disabled at the door of death. For such a univers…
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This is quite darkly hilarious tbh. And consistent with my experience of Blackpool. I once went there on couple-week-long driving course when I was a teenager, hoping but eventually failing to get my …
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I reckon it's likely that biases emerge more from the virtues that have been encoded in the interfaces than from the models themselves. So any identified political slant isn't very interesti…
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Ostenibly yeh JSON should be able to encapsulate mose of that semantic stuff but having replaced an XML schema in the system prompt with gpt's function-calling API I've been very umimpressed…
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XML Elements themselves: their naming, their attributes, comments, indentation. There's more opportunity at every level of the hierarchy to demarkate and establish meaning. Having closing-tags as…
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IANA{LLM}, but if you're only sampling from a "correct" grammar, you are potentially (very potentially) forgoing what might otherwise have been a more desirable and more semantically us…
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I've had more luck with getting it to output XML as (1) You can imbue XML with actual language/meaning (which LLMs adore) and (2) parsers can be made to be more forgiving. I get why people w…
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Ah that's fair. But it is my impression that the bulk of privacy/confidentiality concerns (e.g. law/health/..) would require "end to end" data safety. Not sure if I'…
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I'm confused. If this is just a front-end for the OpenAI API then how does it remove the data privacy concern? Your data still ends up with Azure/OpenAI, right? It doesn't stay localize…
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It seems to reflect the general way we understand the brain right? Wiring together/firing together? Then ~ abra cadabra ~ meaningful blobs of brain buzzy stuff emerge from seemingly simple rules?…
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Love it!! The chunking stuff especially is really impressive. Hitting those token limits often is the annoying bit of working with LLMs. A weird question: How do you feel about possibly ~wasted effort…
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Very much agree with what you've said here, and I love the idea that it makes me a better programmer/mentor. Hadn't really thought of it that way!
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Hmm fair. It's strange that our experiences are so different. Can I ask what types of problems you ask it to solve? FWIW I've had to take quite a lot of time figuring out how to talk to it i…
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> Instead, you head over to Reddit where the programming community is much nicer Is this true? Wondering if there's a more objective way to know than endless anecdotes. I think programming co…
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Could this time be different? The tools are now in the hands of the "masses", not behind closed doors or in lofty ivory towers. People can run this stuff on their laptops etc
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Oh I know I'll get over it, as with all things. Still in that grieving place tho :)
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Would be nice if you could further qualify that statement.
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For myself at least, Twitter has been instrumental in my career, hobbies and friendships. But now, seeing it flounder, and having people shard off to mastadon, bsky, and siloed instances of [insert ne…
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Hmmm, I don’t think that's accurate. To label plant ecosystems as 'winner-takes-all' really misses the forest for the trees (sorry..!). It's not all about sun-hogging; different sp…
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> what libs / functions to use, how to call them Yeh same. It's got pretty good overview of what libraries are available. I tend to ask it for an npm module to do x and it always has a co…
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> the code can almost write itself My 2c: I've been an eng for around 15 yrs. I semi-recently had a brain injury so haven't been able to dedicate anywhere near as much mental cognition to…
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Dude I’m literally—right now— using an LLM to fuel and *build* new features in my production website (ablf.io). I’m just some random eng. I’m sure there are many like me. And I’m not talking about gpt…
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I don’t understand why this talking point keeps surfacing. LLMs are in significant usage already in many production environments and are already improving peoples’ lives and productivity. I can have a…
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Ambition is a pretty ambiguous term for what I think—here—means “A strong yearning for a type of success characterised by western capitalist-individualistic schema of wealth and status.” Cool if you w…