Sparks in the Wind Ideas on AI, technology, and society. Mostly ephemeral, but carries a small chance of starting a fire.
The loop of progress 61 implied HN points • 06 Dec 22 Great ideas come from years of refining, not sudden bursts of inspiration. Iterating on ideas is a feedback loop with ideation, experiment, and analysis. To improve, run more iterations of the progress loop by designing better experiments, executing them faster, and collecting better feedback.
How I think about LLM prompt engineering 8 HN points • 09 Oct 23 🕹 Technology AI Programming Data science Machine Learning NLP LLMs are like databases of vector programs Prompting a LLM is like querying the database Prompt engineering is crucial to find the best program
The machine that makes the thing is more valuable than the thing 5 HN points • 21 Nov 22 Software companies are made of processes that produce and maintain code, not just code itself. The hierarchy in a company goes from people to culture to processes. Invest efforts proportionally to importance in each layer: people first, then culture, organizational architecture, and finally code.
AI is cognitive automation, not cognitive autonomy 2 HN points • 28 Nov 22 AI is about making computers do more, not replacing humans. There are three kinds of AI: Cognitive Automation, Cognitive Assistance, and Cognitive Autonomy. Modern AI is cognitive automation, focusing on encoding human abstractions to automate tasks.