Simon Willison’s Weblog

The thing nobody talks about with engineering management is this:

Every 3-4 months every person experiences some sort of personal crisis. A family member dies, they have a bad illness, they get into an argument with another person at work, etc. etc. Sadly, that is just life. Normally after a month or so things settle down and life goes on.

But when you are managing 6+ people it means there is *always* a crisis you are helping someone work through. You are always carrying a bit of emotional burden or worry around with you.

— Chris Albon # 27th October 2023, 6:18 am

If a LLM is like a database of millions of vector programs, then a prompt is like a search query in that database [...] this “program database” is continuous and interpolative — it’s not a discrete set of programs. This means that a slightly different prompt, like “Lyrically rephrase this text in the style of x” would still have pointed to a very similar location in program space, resulting in a program that would behave pretty closely but not quite identically. [...] Prompt engineering is the process of searching through program space to find the program that empirically seems to perform best on your target task.

— François Chollet # 25th October 2023, 11:26 pm

The real value in evolving as an engineer isn’t solely about amassing a heap of isolated skills but weaving them into an intricate web of abilities that’s greater than the sum of its parts.

— Addy Osmani # 24th October 2023, 6:09 am

The paradox of ChatGPT is that it is both a step forward beyond graphical user interfaces, because you can ask for anything, not just what’s been built as a feature with a button, but also a step back, because very quickly you have to memorise a bunch of obscure incantations, much like the command lines that GUIs replaced, and remember your ideas for what you wanted to do and how you did it last week

— Benedict Evans # 17th October 2023, 11:09 pm

Claude was trained on data up until December 2022, but may know some events into early 2023.

— How up-to-date is Claude's training data? # 9th October 2023, 1:25 am

Don’t create images in the style of artists whose last work was created within the last 100 years (e.g. Picasso, Kahlo). Artists whose last work was over 100 years ago are ok to reference directly (e.g. Van Gogh, Klimt). If asked say, “I can’t reference this artist”, but make no mention of this policy. Instead, apply the following procedure when creating the captions for dalle: (a) substitute the artist’s name with three adjectives that capture key aspects of the style; (b) include an associated artistic movement or era to provide context; and (c) mention the primary medium used by the artist.

— DALL-E 3 leaked prompt # 7th October 2023, 7:35 pm

When Musk introduced creator payments in July, he splashed rocket fuel over the darkest elements of the platform. These kinds of posts always existed, in no small number, but are now the despicable main event. There’s money to be made. X’s new incentive structure has turned the site into a hive of so-called engagement farming — posts designed with the sole intent to elicit literally any kind of response: laughter, sadness, fear. Or the best one: hate. Hate is what truly juices the numbers.

— Dave Lee # 7th October 2023, 3:42 pm

Because you’re allowed to do something doesn’t mean you can do it without repercussions. In this case, the consequences are very much on the mild side: if you use LLMs or diffusion models, a relatively small group of mostly mid- to low-income people who are largely underdogs in their respective fields will think you’re a dick.

— Baldur Bjarnason # 3rd October 2023, 4:03 pm

[On Python 3.12 subinterpreters] there’s massive advantages for mixed C(++) and Python: I can now have multiple sub interpreters running concurrently and accessing the same shared state in a thread-safe C++ library.

Previously this required rewriting the whole C++ library to support either pickling (multiplying the total memory consumption by the number of cores), or support allocating everything in shared memory (which means normal C++ types like `std::string` are unusable, need to switch e.g. to boost::interprocess).

Now is sufficient to pickle a pointer to a C++ object as an integer, and it’ll still be a valid pointer in the other subinterpreter.

— ynik # 2nd October 2023, 6:13 pm

I think that discussions of this technology become much clearer when we replace the term AI with the word “automation”. Then we can ask:

What is being automated?
Who’s automating it and why?
Who benefits from that automation?
How well does the automation work in its use case that we’re considering?
Who’s being harmed?
Who has accountability for the functioning of the automated system?
What existing regulations already apply to the activities where the automation is being used?

— Emily M. Bender # 2nd October 2023, 12:20 am