Jacob Eckel
@eckely
Followers
175
Following
665
Media
90
Statuses
2K
Building software since the last century. From first hire to unicorn - twice. Dropping wisdom one aphorism at a time.
Joined April 2009
People will more easily dismiss correct AI code review comments in a PR than those produced by humans, with corresponding quality implications. An expected outcome, now observed in the wild.
0
0
2
Those who provide the right answers will soon become irrelevant. Long live the people who can ask the right questions.
0
0
0
When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. No need to fight this natural drive. It's more productive to switch hammers periodically.
0
0
0
RT @eckely: @METR_Evals People miss the study's main point: we think we're productive when we're not. This isn't about the latest hyped mod….
0
3
0
* US Prohibition birthed NASCAR. Bootleggers modified their cars to outrun cops, fostering a culture of high-performance car modification and skilled driving.
0
0
0
* Economists argue that ZIRP forced people to save more to compensate for lost interest income (in addition to the intended goal of reducing borrowing costs). ⬇️.
1
0
0
* Gutenberg wanted to mass-produce Bibles and papal indulgences, but triggered the scientific revolution and Protestant Reformation. ⬇️.
1
0
0
* The Korean DMZ, Chernobyl "Zone", and Germany's "Death Strip" all became thriving wildlife sanctuaries. Yellowstone's wolf reintroduction led to cascading ecosystem changes. Nature is the ultimate complex system - full of PUCs. ⬇️.
1
0
0
Unlike serendipity, a PUC is entirely (systemically) unexpected, is not due to luck, and is a result of a deliberate decision. For example, Penicillin was a serendipitous discovery, not a PUC. Some examples of PUCs: ⬇️.
1
0
0
When the Law of Unintended Consequences is mentioned, we usually fixate on the negative. But positive unintended consequences (PUCs) are just as real. They are different from serendipity, though. 🧵.
1
0
0
How many evals do you have on that prompt? Zero? Congrats, you've just built an expensive random text generator.
0
0
4
Uploaded a large source file to Opus 4. Asked for a refactor and improvements. It cheerfully churned out a new file. Never occurred to it to ask which language version I'm using (defaulted to the outdated version dominating its training data). That's all you need to know about AI.
0
0
0
A planner's tradeoff: It takes one day to estimate with the precision of one month. It takes one month to estimate with the precision of one day.
0
0
0
Is there really a difference between AI hallucinations and what we accept as information?.
0
0
1
