@alexrice.bsky.social

📍Seattle

I asked Claude to confirm that two linux computers were "configured identically" thinking he'd compare a handful of settings files. I failed to consider how much he loves verifying things. Not sure how long I should let him have his fun before breaking in to make sure he's not doing it byte-for-byte

Consider the spider-tailed horned viper. It knows that wiggling its tail brings birds near. It does not know what a spider is. This is a koan about AI.

Bro that isn't real AI, that's just *massive search* over an *action space* using *learned heuristics.* If they hadn't given it any one of those three it wouldn't have done what it did.

This seems obvious in retrospect but I developed a habit of switching models mid-conversation before I knew that prompts are cached so I've been foolishly burning my compute ration while trying to be parsimonious.

Don't change Models Mid-Session
Prompt caches are unique to models and this can make the math of prompt caching quite unintuitive.
If you're 100k tokens into a conversation with Opus and want to ask a question that is fairly easy to answer, it would actually be more expensive to switch to Haiku than to have Opus answer, because we would need to rebuild the prompt cache for Haiku.

Had a funny conversation with Claude about why my Macbook wouldn't sleep. Found the real culprit quickly, but then he went in circles for a while: - "oh, now there's a new process doing it, should I investigate?" sure - "hmm, that process stopped, but there's a new one doing the same thing..."

BildBild

I'm seeing a lot of arguments like "You clearly don't understand how submarines work. They only *imitate* swimming. They use something called a propeller, which you'd know is different than legs if you were really as technically savvy as you claim. Idiot. Shill. Anyway, that's why they're useless"

"The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim"
- Edsger Dijkstra