Author: brice
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GPT4 Helps me Code
Spent some time yesterday giving some of my crappy code to GPT4 and asking it to make it better. I gave it this: and asked “Can you simplify this code” The response was pretty good. Then I asked “Can you add type annotations?” And got back: It also added this note: Note: The trace is…
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LLMs and Pocket Calculators
I am old enough to remember when calculators became a thing. There was a weird feeling for a while that this little machine could do math so much better than people could. There was a lot of talk at the time about how smart will computers get. Will they be able to win at chess…
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What can LLMs do?
I wrote this up a while ago for a friend but I decided to update it and post it here. LLMs are capable of doing a lot of interesting and surprising things. They also sometimes fail in surprising ways. Most things I read online about LLMs are either people trying to say either: “Well they…
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Image Rotation and Image Understanding
I did a bike tour across the Olympic Peninsula this year. Here’s a photo I took of a snack stop (no judgement about the food selection) Lets ask ChatGPT about it: What are all the objects in this photo? The photo includes: [Pretty good except for the chips Flavor and it misread longhouse] Are you…
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More Meme-ing with GPT4
This ad campaign is kind of cringy: But GPT4 does a pretty good job reading straight from the image and interpreting the terms. The image appears to be a public health campaign attempting to utilize Gen Z slang to communicate the dangers associated with street pills, presumably containing substances like fentanyl, which are known for…
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Talking Like a Manager
Whatever your challenges are as a manager you are going to need some solid skills in communication to be able to deal with them. As an IC you can sometimes code your way out of problems but when you are a manager you are almost always having to talk or write your way to a…
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My Rule of Meetings
Every meeting which consists only of managers is a bad meeting. Managers might actually be good people but putting them in a room with other managers usually brings out the worst in all of them.
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Do the hard thing more often
When we were developing Uru the game build process was pretty complicated. We had built all of our own tools etc from scratch including 3DSMax plugins to generate game data and we also had a custom asset management system. A lot of complexity had accreted over time to make just creating a stable build of…
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Varifocal Mirror
When I was in Gradual school at UNC Chapel Hill, there were so many cool graphics projects going on its tough to even remember them all. We had huge mechanical force feedback arms, head mounted displays, all kinds of special purpose hardware including the project I worked on (PixelPlanes). But we had a really interesting…
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Ephemera
I was watching For All Mankind last night and was reminded about those things called slide rules. Even though I am pretty old, I never had to use one. I missed this by one year in high school. My class was the first one where we were allowed to use a calculator. The teacher still…