Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.

Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youā€™ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned so many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. Also, hope you had a wonderful Valentineā€™s Day!)

  • hrrrngh@awful.systemsEnglish
    7Ā·
    6 months ago

    context: I wanted to know if the open source projects currently being spammed with PRs would be safe from people running slop models on their computer if they werenā€™t able to use claude or whatever. Answer: yes, these things are still terrible

    but while I was searching I found this comment and the fact that people hated it is so funny to me. Itā€™s literally the person who posted the thread. less thinking and words, more hype links please.

    conversation

    https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1qvjonm/first_qwen3codernext_reap_is_out/o3jn5db/

    32k context? is that usable for coding?

    (OPā€™s response, sitting at a steady -7 points)

    LLMs are useless anyway so, okay-ish, depends on your task obviously

    If LLMs were actually capable of solving actual hard tasks, youā€™d want as much context as possible

    A good way to think about is that tokens compress text roughly 1:4. If you have a 4MB codebase, it would need 1M tokens theoretically.

    Thatā€™s one way to start, then we get into the more debatable stuffā€¦

    Obviously text repeats a lot and doesnā€™t always encode new information each token. In fact, itā€™s worse than that, as adding tokens can _reduce_ information contained in text, think inserting random stuff into a string representing dna. So to estimate how much ctx you need, think how much compressed information is in your codebase. That includes stuff like decisions (which LLMs are incapable of making), domain knowledge, or even stuff like why does double click have 33ms debounce and not 3ms or 100ms in your codebase which nobody ever wrote down. So take your codebase, compress it as a zip at normal compression level, and then think how large the output problem space is, shrink it down quadratically, and you have a good estimate of how much ctx you need for LLMs to solve the hardest problems in your codebase at any given point during token generation

    *emphasis added by me

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      6Ā·
      6 months ago

      So take your codebase, compress it as a zip at normal compression level, and then think how large the output problem space is, shrink it down quadratically, and you have a good estimate of how much ctx you need for LLMs to solve the hardest problems in your codebase at any given point during token generation

      wat

      I can see what theyā€™re going for but that seems ā€¦ wildly guess-y?

      • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
        7Ā·
        6 months ago

        Also code helper tools donā€™t even work like that, thereā€™s an absurd amount of MCP and RAG based hand holding for the chatbot to even get a grip on what itā€™s supposed to be doing at any given time.

        Prompting an LLM with your entire code base isnā€™t really a thing, even though the hype makes it feel like it would be.