The Swyx Mixtape

Subscribe to Changelog++: https://changelog.com/podcast/519/discussFeaturingShawn Wang – Twitter, GitHub, WebsiteAdam Stacoviak – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, WebsiteJerod Santo – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedInNotes and LinksAI NotesWhy “Prompt Engineering” and “Generative AI” are overhypedMultiverse, not MetaverseThe Particle/Wave Duality Theory of KnowledgeOpenRAIL: Towards open and responsible AI licensing frameworksOpen-ish from Luis VillaChatGPT for GoogleThe Myth of The Infrastructure PhaseChatGPT examples in the wildDebugging codeTypeScript answer is wrongFix code and explain fixdynamic programmingTranslating/refactoring Wasplang DSLAWS IAM policiesCode that combines multiple cloud servicesSolving a code problemExplain computer networks homeworkRewriting code from elixir to PHPTurning ChatGPT into an interpreter for a custom language, and then generating code and executing it, and solving Advent of Code correctlyIncluding getting #1 place“I haven’t done a single google search or consulted any external documentation to do it and I was able to progress faster than I have ever did before when learning a new thing.”Build holy grail website and followup with framework, copy, repsonsivenessFor ++ subscribersGetting Senpai To Notice YouMoving to Obsidian as a Public Second BrainTranscript**Jerod Santo:** Alright, well we have Sean Wang here again. Swyx, welcome back to the show.**Shawn Wang:** Thanks for having me back on. I have lost count of how many times, but I need to track my annual appearance on the Changelog.**Adam Stacoviak:** Is that twice this year on this show, and then once on JS Party at least, right?**Shawn Wang:** Something like that, yeah. I don't know, it's a dream come true, because, I changed careers into tech listening to the Changelog, so every time I'm asked on, I'm always super-grateful. So yeah, here to chat about all the hottest, latest things, right?**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.**Jerod Santo:** That's right, there's so much going on right now. It seems like things just exploded this fall. So we had Stable Diffusion back in late August; it really blew up at the end of August. And then in September is when we had Simon Willison on the show to talk about Stable Diffusion breaking the internet. You've been tracking this stuff really closely. You even have a Substack, and you've got Obsidian notes out there in the wild, and then of course, you're learning in public, so whenever Swyx is learning something, we're all kind of learning along with you... Which is why we brought you back on. I actually included your Stable Diffusion 2.0 summary stuff in our Changelog News episode a couple of weeks back, and a really interesting part of that post that you have, that I didn't talk about much, but I touched on and I want you to expand upon here is this idea of prompt engineering, not as a cool thing, but really as a product smell. And when I first saw it, I was like, "No, man, it's cool." And then I read your explainer and I'm like, "No, he's right. This is kind of a smell."**Adam Stacoviak:** "Dang it, he's right again."**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. We just learned about prompt engineering back in September, with Simon, and talking about casting spells and all this, and now it's like, well, you think it's overhyped. I'll stop prompting you, and I'll just let you engineer an answer.**Jerod Santo:** Well, so I don't know if you know, but the Substack itself got its start because I listened to the Simon episode, and I was like, "No, no, no. Spellcasting is not the way to view this thing. It's not something we glorify." And that's why I wrote "Multiverse, not Metaverse", because the argument was that prompting is -- you can view prompting as a window into a different universe, with a different seed, and every seed is a different universe. And funny enough, there's a finite number of seeds, because basically, Stable Diffusion has a 512x512 space that determines the total number of seeds.So yeah, prompt engineering \[unintelligible 00:04:23.23\] is not my opinion. I'm just reporting on what the AI thought leaders are already saying, and I just happen to agree with it, which is that it's very, very brittle. The most interesting finding in the academic arena about prompt engineering is that default GPT-3, they ran it against some benchmarks and it came up with like a score of 17 out of 100. So that's a pretty low benchmark of like just some logical, deductive reasoning type intelligence tests. But then you add the prompt "Let's think step by step" to it, and that increases the score from 17 to 83... Which is extremely -- like, that sounds great. Like I said, it's a magic spell that I can just kind of throw onto any problems and make it think better... But if you think about it a little bit more, like, would you actually use this in a real work environment, if you said the wrong thing and it suddenly deteriorates in quality - that's not good, and that's not something that you want to have in any stable, robust product; you want robustness, you want natural language understanding, to understand what you want, not to react to random artifacts and keywords that you give.Since then, we actually now know why "Let's think step by step" is a magic keyword, by the way, because -- and this is part of transformer architecture, which is that the neural network has a very limited working memory, and if you ask a question that requires too many steps to calculate the end result, it do...

Listen to the Modern Mann: https://www.modernmann.co.uk/new/fog 20 mins in

Send My Love  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2qAsUxiogwShape of You https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07fQy1WS1WM

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My Fave New Podcasts of 2022: https://www.swyx.io/fave-podcasts-2022/Selected listener survey responsesif you missed the survey in July, you can still fill it in here: https://forms.gle/gmVYak98azGi28it8What other podcasts do Swyx Mixtape listeners enjoy?Conan O‘Brian needs a friend; alphalist cto podcast;remote rubyShopTalk Show, WTF with Marc Maron, Hardcore HistoryCorecursive, Working Code, Soft Skills EngineeringSoftware unscripted, your undivided attention, startups for the rest of usI like software sessions by Jeremy Jung and I have listened to quite a bit of Zero Knowledge podcast which is crypto related.Switched on Pop, Stratechery, Radio Derbcppcast, hanselmines, go timeSwyx Mixtape, Ezra Klein Show, AcquiredWhat are your favorite episode(s) of the Mixtape so far? Star Wars Lofi because I loved it. Career+Luck as it is a great tooicBehind the scenes of the business world. I’m not interested enough to listen to full podcasts about business, but I really appreciate the small nuggets of insight.All of them not about cryptocurrencyThe levels one (because I’m a diabetic dev)I started extensively listening starting in June. I really enjoye the episodes covering snowflake databricks. You introduced the idea of betting on technology to me and I trust your judgement. So the podcast gives me a list of interesting tech I should at least know about without too much effort on my end.This one! I like it! And I can’t remember some of the very good earlier ones. I don’t listen to that many podcasts. I dunno how you do it! Kudoslatest deep work series was great, I love to work or at least think about and how to improve. the learning in public thing was what made you follow for quite a while now/ the episode about the drowned singer/actor from glee touched me and I researched the topic and learned how to hopefully act correctly if I ever got in rip currentOne about Xbox losing all it's market share after the Xbox One launch (I love tech war stories--this field moves so fast. I find I know a lot about the preset but so little about the past)

Listen to BCS insider: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/better-call-saul/103-better-call-saul-insider-5X3QinSj9mV/ (55mins in)Opening song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ouIqZJ1elE

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fifVuhgvQQ8https://lexfridman.com/liv-boeree/ (1h19mins in)What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!