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Entropic Thoughts

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Following is a selection of the best articles based on various criteria. If you’re new here, they may be a good place to start!

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6

Are LLM merge rates not getting better?

I was reading the metr article on how llm code passes test much more often than it is of mergeable quality . They look at the performance of llm s doing programming when the success criterion is “passes all tests” and compare it to when the success criterion is “would get approved by the maintainer”. Unsurprisingly…

8

Parser Combinators Beat Regexes

Someone online was solving Advent of Code problems, and had a question about last years’ day 3 . They had a working solution using regular expressions (regexes) on String values, but they wanted to use ByteString values instead for performance reasons. They were surprised, however, that there seems to be a lack of…

9

Evaluating LLMs playing text adventures

When we first set up the llm such that it could play text adventures , we noted that none of the models we tried to use with it were any good at it. We dreamed of a way to compare them, but all I could think of was setting a goal far into the game and seeing how long it takes them to get there. I just realised there’s…

10

Advent of Code on the Z-Machine

Fantasy consoles like the Pico-8 are a great idea. A fantasy console provides a standardised and portable environment in which developers can explore ideas within creative constraints. The Z-machine , developed by Infocom in 1979, is the earliest fantasy console I know, although this is probably the first time it’s…

11

A curmudgeon tries a language server

I write code roughly the same way I did ten years ago 1 1 Well, this was true when I started drafting this article. I have since adopted robots to do much more of the actual typing of code, unless it’s a project where (a) I care about code quality, or (b) I try to learn something. : I make edits in my text editor, I…