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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • You should all see the story about the invention blue LEDs. No one believed that it could work except some japanese guy (Shuji Nakamura) who kept working on it despite his company telling him to stop. No one believed it could ever be solved despite being so close. He solved it and the rewards were astronomical.

    This could very well be another case of being so close to a breakthrough. Two years since GPT-3 came out is nothing. If you were paying any sort of attention you would see there are promising papers coming out almost every week. It’s clear there is a lot we don’t know about training neural nets effectively. Our own brains are the proof of that.



  • Universities often teach students to write a lot of comments, because you are required to learn and demonstrate your ability to translate between code and natural language. But this is one of the things that are different in professional environments.

    Every comment is a line to maintain in addition to the code it describes. And comments like this provide very little (if any) extra information that is not already available from reading the code. It is not uncommon for someone to alter the code that the comment is supposed to describe without changing the comment, resulting in comments that lie about what the code does, forcing you to read the code anyway.

    It’s like if you were bilingual, you don’t write every sentence in both languages, because that is twice as much text to maintain (and read).

    The exception of course, being if you are actually adding information that is not available in the code itself, such as why you did something a particular way.