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Before: All filles export default and alot 1000 lines plus files
Now: Named files and exports and most files are under 200 lines
#makecomputersworkforus
James retweeted
Did you know? 🏎️💨
Both a Ferrari and a muscle car can have 8 cylinders, but they sound completely different just because of how their crankshafts are feeling!
🚘 Flat-plane V8 (Ferrari): Crankpins point 2 ways (180° apart) like a flat line. It gives every bank an even, smooth high scream.
🚘 Cross-plane V8 (American V8): Crankpins point 4 ways forming a cross (90° apart). It fires unevenly, giving it that classic, burbly muscle roar.
Same number of cylinders, completely different personalities!
Which exhaust note wins for you? 🔥
James retweeted
I turned an iPhone and an iPad into Tesla-style vision for any car.
📱 iPhone on the windshield sees cars, people, cyclists and traffic lights
🖥️ iPad shows it all around you in 3D
🚨 BRAKE alert when you're closing in too fast
🚦 Chime when the light turns green
🎥 Built-in dashcam
All on-device. No new car needed.
James retweeted
I was truly lucky to be in high school during this era.
There was a band from Buffalo called "Cute is What We Aim For" who got pretty big, internationally known even, around this time and the guitarist/pianist Jeff Czum was in my art class.
This is Enter Shikari (from England).
This was the last great era before everything went to shit. We had cell phones but we used them to call people not to stayed glued on social media all day.
James retweeted
For 60 years the blue tits of Britain broke into the milk on your doorstep, and all they ever took was the cream.
It was first seen in Swaythling, near Southampton, in 1921. A blue tit landed on a bottle, pecked through the cap and drank. By the 1950s every tit in the country seemed to know the trick. Housewives put out saucers, stones and upturned cups. The birds learned to follow the milk float down the street and be waiting at the next step.
You will remember the bottle. Silver foil on top, and beneath it 2 inches of thick yellow cream that had risen overnight, with the white milk underneath. The first one down in the morning got it on the porridge.
That cream was the whole point of the burglary. A bird cannot digest milk. It has no means of handling the sugar in it. Cream is nearly all fat, with very little sugar, so the tits drank down to the line and stopped.
A wild animal weighing 11 grams, with every bird table and berry bush in the street to choose from, worked out how to open a sealed container to get at butterfat.
Then the habit died, in about 10 years. Nobody trapped them or changed the caps. The milk changed. It was homogenised so the cream no longer rose, then skimmed so it was hardly there, then moved to a plastic jug in a supermarket.
The blue tits inspected the red top, found nothing in it worth stealing, and went back to the hedge.
They were the last creatures in Britain to judge a pint of milk on what was actually in it.
James retweeted
Aviation solved AI slop in 1986.
Karpathy is telling people to ask their LLM to write in ASD-STE100, a controlled language built for aircraft maintenance manuals. I went down the rabbit hole on where this spec comes from, and the backstory makes the hack even better.
Back in the late 1970s, European airlines were handing English manuals to mechanics around the world who mostly didn't speak English as a first language. One ambiguous sentence in a fuel line procedure can get people killed. So the industry built a version of English where ambiguity is banned at the dictionary level.
The spec allows roughly 900 approved words. Each word gets one meaning and one part of speech. "Close" can only be a verb, because "close the door" and "the close door" can't be allowed to coexist in a repair manual. "Follow" only means to come after. If you want obey, you write obey.
Procedural sentences max out at 20 words. One instruction per sentence. Active voice only. Around 1,200 common words are explicitly banned, each with a mandated replacement. You don't "commence pumping." You start the pump.
English has about 170,000 words in current use. Aviation decided mechanics get 900, and planes became safer to maintain because of it.
Now flip it to LLMs. Models hedge and synonym-cycle because the training data rewards sounding fluent. STE is 40 years of accumulated rules for stripping exactly that out, written by people whose readers would die if a sentence could be read two ways. It might be the strongest anti-slop prompt in existence, and it's a free PDF.
We'll be spending a lot more time trying to understand the outputs of language models. A few thoughts, tips & tricks:
Writing. Something I've had success with: Ask your LLM to explain something in ASD-STE100, it's a controlled language specification originally developed for aerospace maintenance documentation. LLMs well-versed in this language and it comes with heavy constraints on clean writing style that I often find a lot more readable. Sometimes I've tried to soften it a bit e.g. ask for "80% of the way to ASD-STE100" because the spec is quite stringent. But even better:
Diagrams / images. Instead of writing, ask your LLM to create a diagram. These can be a lot easier to process, parse, and understand. But even better:
Web pages. Ask for output "in HTML" to get a beautiful, interactive webpage. LLMs are getting really good at frontend and can create beautiful experiences, animations, etc. But even better:
Explainer videos. The output format I am most bullish on is fully custom / bespoke explainer videos generated on any arbitrary topic. Experiment with things like "Create a 3b1b style video explainer on X. Use my ElevenLabs API key for audio narration". (you'd need an API key for the latter or you can ask your LLM to find you decent free alternatives that use your local compute). This is actually starting to work!
In summary:
- As LLMs get better, they will do more and more of the legwork autonomously, and a lot more of our work will rise up the abstractions into oversight and understanding.
- Luckily, LLMs can help here too because as intelligence and code are increasingly abundant, you can ask for large, custom, discardable software artifacts (e.g. web apps, video explainers) that would have never made sense to create before. Push the boundaries here and you'll be surprised.
James retweeted
The RAF Fairford attack could have been one of the biggest mass terrorist attacks in British history
The fact that it was stopped by a Farmer who saw people looking out of place and not from the community shows that diversity is not our strength
The opposite is in fact true
James retweeted
The Aston Martin Valhalla, a car priced at about $1,000,000, goes viral as its open doors create penis-shaped reflections over the driver and passenger
Wow best tweet for a long time!
James retweeted
For years, I didn’t take much notice of the small boat crossings.
But once you start looking into even the smallest details, you realise just how organised the whole operation around them is.
The boats enter the Channel and vessels are waiting to support them.
They reach land and coaches are ready to take people away.
Then, if a protest appears, huge numbers of police suddenly seem to be available.
Just look at the number of police cars here.
The scale of resources being thrown at this is staggering.
James retweeted
GPT-6 Sol and Luna are out. Not only are they a very significant improvement across the board, but also in writing and general "you know when you try it" quality.
We are also permanently reducing the API price by 50% making both of them viable for a ton of new usecases and making your usage go further too, even on the subscriptions.
And one more thing. We are loading a banked reset into all accounts of our Plus, Pro and Business users. Let's go!
openai.com/index/introducing…
