I am curious, what kind of work do you use Claude for that sometimes requires hours of working. In my case, I have never seen it go off for more than 10 mins and even that is very rare.

debugging code. I had some issue so I create a plan to root cause that would run the code, change some functions or variables and run again until we get a confirmed answer.

I just work up to that very workflow this morning. I ran last night and finished at around 3am with ~200k tokens spent. Fixed the issue and created a follow up doc for things that it could not verify.

I had the same thought. TBH there is nothing in those individual sentences that read like AI but when you read them all together I could see it too. I dunno what it is, only way I can describe it is that it does not sound like a normal human but rather a monologue from a character trying to sound impressive with each successive sentence.

The author works at OpenAI, so it's no surprise that they've stopped noticing how grating this kind of structure is to read.

I think it’s likely there will be methods to fix this soon, some de-slop algorithms, or is there a deep reason it will always be detectable? Perhaps there are some PhD linguists who have figured out how to quantify the “slop” effect and are writing their thesis on it. Once that is done it will be possible to smooth it away.

The book is definitely LLM assisted authoring yet it also has great content, so not sure we can immediately jump to shaming it entirely for being slop.

Thanks for the kind words, and checking out the book here.

I'd written this piecemeal over the last year or so (originally a series of blog posts), and was happy to release it all for free in a single edition, and under CC.

I'll release an Edition 1.1 soon with some errata, adjustments. There's already a free PDF for the on-the-go -> https://gitperf.com/pdf.html

Regarding the cherry-picking of fragments of an LLM: of course an LLM (in fact several!) were used to stitch together those disparate blog posts into a more coherent whole. And they certainly left an imprint in places. Otherwise, as a solo writer with a full-time job putting together a 200-page book, I'd have to pay an editor, or work with O'Reilly (did this in 2010 on a Redis book; never again!); and perhaps the book wouldn't be free!

LLMs will continue to leave imprints in our work. Some words will, over time, be edited and whittled away. Other words, when the LLM writes well enough to convey a useful point, will be kept.

> Regarding the cherry-picking of fragments of an LLM: of course an LLM (in fact several!) were used to stitch together those disparate blog posts into a more coherent whole. And they certainly left an imprint in places. Otherwise, as a solo writer with a full-time job putting together a 200-page book, I'd have to pay an editor, or work with O'Reilly (did this in 2010 on a Redis book; never again!); and perhaps the book wouldn't be free!

There’s no of course here. You made a choice.

I think it’s great and you should be doing it, I have no problem at all if there is LLM assistance in authoring, I think it’s a good thing because like you said it enables solo writers with good ideas to produce valuable work that they otherwise wouldn’t!

What I’m interested in is how to address the “grating” or whatever characteristics the readers detect to have them focus on the LLM aspect. I feel it’s probably soon or already removable with some methods.

Ignore the haters they are just wrong to blanket criticize, however their observations are helpful to try and improve the process. We want LLMs to assist in creating useful and effective content for humans.

this sort of grammatical error in the defense of ai copyediting does not exactly instill confidence in your supervision of said ai copyediting: "of course an LLM ... were used". perhaps you could still pay an editor to look things over.

> The book is definitely LLM assisted authoring yet it also has great content, so not sure we can immediately jump to shaming it entirely for being slop.

Personally I have an extremely hard time reading text like this and it makes me lose trust in the author. Publishing potentially useful Git knowledge this way is a shame.

"Shame" is a strong word to describe a free ebook written for the general good. Happy to have a live conversation with you anytime to discuss Git and its internals to ensure your trust; I have some experience with it.

I'm sorry if I have offended you.

You probably have a great deal of understanding and knowledge about Git, and this book might be a good resource.

I'm not asking you to do anything differently, and yet I think it's important to realize that people have a deep aversion to text that appears to be LLM generated.

By "shame", I meant that just from a skim of the contents of this book, it can be hard to distinguish it from any other LLM generated text by any other author who has no idea what they're talking about.

That makes people (like me) inclined to discount what it has to say, potentially losing out on good technical content.

Yep, signals are signals, but I think it's quite complicated now. (In any case, this is still the embryonic era of LLMs).

An interesting point to consider: an author that goes out of their way to hide any LLM influence may actually be degrading the signal. Because in that case, you'll not see the LLM's etchings, and misattribute skill to the author under the belief an LLM was not involved. Complicated times.

> An interesting point to consider: an author that goes out of their way to hide any LLM influence may actually be degrading the signal. Because in that case, you'll not see the LLM's etchings, and misattribute skill to the author under the belief an LLM was not involved. Complicated times.

To someone who thinks that LLM use is an of-course-I-did-that, other people complaining about LLM-tells might seem like complaining about not post-processing the input enough. But they are more likely to be complaining about using it in the first place.

I don't particularly care about LLM use per se, but when I see LLM text it makes me think I'm about to read something devoid of content - just word vomit. The equivalent of yesteryear's listicle. This instinct usually serves me well. A good text is a good text. If an LLM wrote all of it that'd be fine with me, but that's usually not how things go.

I don't think it should be socially acceptable to perform a denial of service attack on people's attention.

“It’s a shame” is a very neutral way to criticize an editorial/authoring choice.[1] It conveys that they might have enjoyed it under different circumstances. Really no different than someone saying that it’s a shame that someone published some useful information in video form without any transcript. [But now with AI we can have the transcript anyway etc. etc.]

[1] A neutral way to express a subjective judgement: not blaming any person.

It's fairly easy to quite thoroughly "de-slop" writing: Just feed chunk by chunk to a an agent that you make compare the writing to a good piece of human writing, and adjust the writing to match. It won't address structural/content issues, but all the major models are perfectly capable of copying the tone and style of a particular style of writing, and in doing so it tends to remove most of the rough edges.

(The corollary is that the LLM writing you notice is mostly going to be from people who aren't actively trying to hide it from you)

Slop is content not written by a human. By definition, there can be no de-slop algorithms. There can only be algorithms that remove certain telltale signs, fraudulently attempting to present non-human-generated content as human-generated.

Here we are in place and time where if you put — character anywhere in your text you will be burned like OP on stake for witchcraft.

For those hunting witches doesn't matter if you put in effort and just did fixing grammar or did some research using LLM but in general thoughts and experience were yours. Maybe you are not that good at writing — yet still they will just take pitchforks and torches and drag you out, call you names.

Absolutely. What I had hoped was a proper 75% layout with proper full sized up and down arrow keys.

My introduction to Feynman was more from other science communicators either quoting him or retelling some story about him and initially it formed a mental picture in my mind that he might be one of those personalities more famous culturally than for his actual scientific achievements. Like how in sports often the more popular players may not be the actual “best” one purely from the sporting skills pov.

But then I read more about him and yeah, he is indeed the real deal.

us-west-2 is indeed very large, but will still not be able to take a full failover from us-east-1

Hi there, I was looking to get a NAS that I can just install and not have to worry about maintenance too much and senility was at the top of the list. If not synology what would you suggest?

In my case, Synology has worked fine. Reliability is a big deal for non-backup RAID (not the same as "backup," but does the trick, 90% of the time).

It's entirely possible that their newer units are crappier than the old workhorses I have.

I don't use any of the fancier features that might require a beefier CPU. One of the units runs a surveillance station, and your choices for generic surveillance DVRs is fairly limited. Synology isn't perfect, but it works quite well, and isn't expensive. I have half a dozen types of cameras (I used to write ONVIF stuff). The Surveillance Station runs them all.

Synology's fine - even ideal - for that use case. If you want to run Docker containers, run apps for video conversion like Plex, etc, then you'd likely want to consider something with a beefier CPU. For an appliance NAS, Synology's really pretty great.

May be a “fast follow”? Right after launch of the “MVP”?

Do you use or have used MySQL in the past?

One benefit is that it makes these operations lazy. There are no intermediate lists created when you call a map on a stream. If map were a method in a list, it would need to return a new list. And if you have multiple such maps etc, it would create more such lists for each map invocation.

From what I recall, Reddit uses AWS extensively. Could they not have replaced RabbitMQ with SQS? You get the near unlimited horizontal scalability, extremely good uptime, guaranteed at least once message delivery and for the case of a worker crash, the messages will become visible again after the visibility timeout (since they wouldn’t have been deleted by the worker).

SQS could not handle the volume or latency requirements we had, and it was too expensive compared to running it ourselves at the time.

I think there is a hard limit on the number of in-flight requests (that is items that have been dequeued by a worker, but whose job has not been completed). I wouldn't be surprised if Reddit hit those sorts of volumes.