Linkblog feed from Rob on staticnotes.org
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One of the consequences of LLM proliferation is that significantly more academic papers are uploaded to arXiv and submitted to conferences. As the quality of papers drops and their number increases it becomes harder to find good ideas and problems among the noise. Ben Recht has been critizing this for a while and suggests that the academic community should find other ways to evaluate, discuss and…
Really interesting Dwarkesh podcast episode with Ada Palmer, a history Professor at the University of Chicago. They talk about Renaissance Florence, Gutenberg’s printing press business, and the Inquisition. A couple of highlights from the conversation that stuck with me: One reason why Florentine merchants rediscovered and promoted Ancient Roman and Greek culture was to show off to European…
A post shared by antirez that resonated with me (as of January 2026). LLMs, even with no future performance improvements, are here to stay and will fundamentally change the jobs of people that write or interact with code. Not using them for a majority of tasks will be like using C for data science analyses, rather than higher-level abstractions. To add to his post, I think that LLM+human will…
This week the Lunch with the FT is with Yann LeCun. It’s an interesting conversation in a (very expensive) Parisian restaurant. I didn’t know that LeCun worked at AT&T Bell Labs in the 1980s and 1990s where he had access to the resources to play with convolutional neural networks. In 2013 he became Meta’s Chief AI scientist, apparently under the conditions that he could retain…
This is such a well-produced video by one of my favorite youtube channels, Veritasium . The video explains ASML’s 17-year long quest to build a EUV (Extreme Ultraviolet) lithography machine. The R&D cost for this project were €6 billion and the project was close to be shut down on multiple occasions. They are the most complex (commercial) machines built to date. They use 13.5nm EUV light to…
Sean Goedecke verbalized something I had on my mind for quite some time, but couldn’t put into words. Every tech team has certain tech issues or high-impact projects that will not be worked on because the feasibility of the project is unclear the costs of not working on the project are unknown to all but one or a few people the project involves using a technology that few or nobody has…
Interesting post from the great blog Construction Physics   on the evolution of solar energy cost in the last 20 years, and what that means for solar’s role as an alternative way of powering your home. An interesting point is that the cost of powering your home doesn’t increase linearly with the % of solar used in your electricity mix. If you target to use solar for 90% of your…
One of the best ways to become a more effective user of LLMs is to watch other people use them. An eye-opener for me was this post   by Nicholas Carlini. Some useful snippets from Simon Willison’s LLM usage guide: The best way to start any project is with a prototype that proves that the key requirements of that project can be met. I often find that an LLM can get me to that working…
Interesting discussion of git config options that the git core developers favor and that are not (yet) defaults. There are some nice suggestions. For example, I didn’t know that git config --global push.autoSetupRemote true existed. If you haven’t defined an upstream for a branch yet, git will automatically set it for you. So you don’t have to run git push --set-upstream origin…
This is an interesting podcast conversation with Brandon Sanderson   that I came across accidentally (I enjoyed particularly the parts from [00:37:57] onwards). He is the author of The Stormlight Archive   and Mistborn   fantasy novels. I have read The Way of Kings some years ago but didn’t yet continue the series. A couple of interesting things he discussed: He…
“Getting from a rough idea to a working proof of concept of something like this with less than 15 minutes of prompting is extraordinarily valuable. This is exactly the kind of project I’ve avoided in the past because of my almost irrational intolerance of the frustration involved in figuring out the individual details of each call to S3, IAM, AWS Lambda and DynamoDB.” This…
Casey Handmer’s perspective on how to think about your job and career, especially relevant for people transitioning into tech after a PhD/Postdoc: “It’s not enough to have mastered your job to get moved up. You also have to build trust with your management. It doesn’t matter how good you are at the mechanics of your job, if your management and colleagues don’t trust you, they’ll see…
A couple of senior developer best practices that I can relate to, especially: “Avoid, at all costs, arriving at a scenario where the ground-up rewrite starts to look attractive.” and “Nobody cares about the golden path. Edge cases are our entire job. Think about ways in which things can fail. Think about ways to try to make things break.” link: https://qntm.org/devphilo…
I am at least sceptical that the current LLM approach will allow the necessary step change in capability, autonomy, and robustness. However, it is fun to read about hypotheses how future companies will look like: “Everyone is sleeping on the collective advantages AIs will have, which have nothing to do with raw IQ but rather with the fact that they are digital—they can be copied, distilled,…
I think most people (that get to choose) know deep down about the major things they need to do to be more productive, have a more fulfilling career and family life. Nevertheless, it’s always interesting to see other people’s focuses and learnings. I agree with most of them. link: https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/life-lessons-from-the-first-half-century-of-my-career/ via:…
I agree with this blog post on good (impact, leverage, vision) and bad (money, status, growth) reasons for becoming a manager. Nicely put together and I like the style of the blog. link: https://terriblesoftware.org/2024/12/05/the-one-good-reason-to-become-a-manager-and-all-the-bad-ones/
I am a big fan of the decentralized and simple nature of RSS. I am using the Feeder RSS app which means I can curate a feed of interesting content without an algorithm having to push content on me. link: https://reedybear.bearblog.dev/ive-been-advocating-for-rss-support-and-you-should-too/ via: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42746222
“[…] much of the point of a model like o1 is not to deploy it, but to generate training data for the next model. Every problem that an o1 solves is now a training data point for an o3 (eg. any o1 session which finally stumbles into the right answer can be refined to drop the dead ends and produce a clean transcript to train a more refined intuition).” - gwern link:…
I wanted to add a link blog section to this blog since some time. This article gave me the motivation to do it. It took me roughly 2 hours with the support of claude to add this functionality and design to this page. I roughly follow the design/ideas in My approach to running a link blog   . link: https://rednafi.com/misc/link_blog/ via: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42642625