I’ve been using Copilot for over a year now, and this is more or less how I use it: To help me quickly blast through boilerplate code so I can more quickly get to the tricky bits.
There’s a more subtle problem with ChatGPT’s code generation, which is that it suffers from ChatGPT’s general “bullshit” problem.
It doesn’t bother me much that bleeding-edge ML technology sometimes gets things wrong. It bothers me a lot when it gives no warnings, cites no sources, and provides no confidence interval.
Yes! Like I said:
Expose the wires. Show the workings-out.
A very astute framing by Ted Chiang—large language models as a form of lossy compression for text.
When we’re dealing with sequences of words, lossy compression looks smarter than lossless compression.
A lot of uses have been proposed for large language models. Thinking about them as blurry JPEGs offers a way to evaluate what they might or might not be well suited for.
Twitter is a chatroom, and the problem that Twitter really solved was the discoverability problem. The internet is a big place, and it is shockingly hard to otherwise find people whose thoughts you want to read more of, whether those thoughts are tweets, articles, or research papers. The thing is, I’m not really sure that Twitter ever realized that this is the problem they solved, that this is where their core value lies. Twitter kept experimenting with algorithms and site layouts and Moments and other features to try to foist more discoverability onto the users without realizing that their users were discovering with the platform quite adeptly already. Twitter kept trying to amplify the signal without understanding that what users needed was better tools to cut down the noise.
Twitter, like many technology companies, fell into the classical trap by thinking that they, the technologists, were the innovators. Technologists today are almost never innovators, but rather plumbers who build pipelines to move ideas in the form of data back and forth with varying efficacy. Users are innovators, and its users that made Twitter unique.
I enjoyed this conversation with Sophia (our chat starts around the 11 minute mark) prompted by Resilient Web Design.
Adversarial chatbots engaged in an endless back-and-forth:
This piece simulates scheduling hell by generating infinite & unique combinations of meeting conflicts between two friends.
The upside to being a terrible procrastinator is that certain items on my to-do list, like, say, “build a chatbot”, will—given enough time—literally take care of themselves.
I ultimately feel like it has slowly turned into a fad. I got fooled by the trend, and as a by-product became part of the trend itself.
Myself and Stuart had a chat with Brian about browser engine diversity.
Here’s the audio file if you’d like to huffduff it.
I enjoyed talking with Chris about design systems (and more). The episode is now available for your huffduffing pleasure.
Join your favorite authors on Zoom where you can have spirited discussions from the privacy of our own quarantined space!
A great initiative from the folks at Mule Design. As well as chatting to talented authors, you can also chat to me: this Thursday at 4pm UTC I’ll be discussing Resilient Web Design.
yap is an ephemeral, real-time chat room with up to six participants. your messages appear and disappear as quickly as you type them, which means unless you pay attention to what everyone says (for once), you’ll miss it.
A delightful dialogue …on the moon!
A truly monstrous async web chat using no JS whatsoever on the frontend.
This is …I mean …yes, but …it …I …
A handy browser extension for Chrome and Firefox:
“Hello, Goodbye” blocks every chat or helpdesk pop up in your browser.
I enjoyed chatting to Larry Botha on the Fixate On Code podcast—I hope you’ll enjoy hearing it.
In which I have a conversation with a polar bear.
Very well-mannered species …I’ll miss them when they’re gone.
A podcast chat in which I ramble on about web stuff.
Myself and Lizzie were on a local radio show, having a wide-ranging chat about technology, commenting on recent news stories. It was fun.
In a very mundane take on the cliché of a climactic showdown, I’ll be having a chat with Paul Boag at the top of Spinnaker Tower in February. Come on by if you’re in the neighbourhood.
IM conversations between a cat and its so-called owner.