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Alex Gude

@alexgude.com

2.6K followers 160 following 3.6K posts

Machine learning engineer in Silicon Valley! Formerly a particle physicist at CERN and alumni of Insight. He/Him https://alexgude.com @[email protected]

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Alex Gude @alexgude.com · Jul 20

Alright, I did it.

Here's my book reviews of Disco Elysium.

Tough to keep it short and focused, there was so much I wanted to cover, but we'll call this good enough.

It is fantastic, give it a read! Or... Play.

alexgude.com/books/disco_...

#BookReview

Disco Elysium

Disco Elysium, written by Robert Kurvitz et al., is a role-playing game produced by ZA/UM. It’s the story of Harrier “Harry” Du Bois, a man who wakes up with no memories and has to solve a murder whil...

alexgude.com

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Alex Gude @alexgude.com · 1d

Lol indeed

Screenshot of the op:

Not even American buddy.

Just look at the French if you want to know how to do it.

Reposted by Alex Gude

conputer dipshit @davidcrespo.bsky.social · 1d

cool stuff. notable effect of model size. the biggest in the list by far, Gemini 2.5 Pro, dramatically outperforms the rest. other SOTA and SOTA-adjacent models (GPT-5, Claude Sonnet and Opus, Qwen Max, Deepseek, Kimi K2) were not tested

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Alex Gude @alexgude.com · 2d

Really changed my view of disasters in history from "they must have had a reason to do that stupid ass thing" to " okay maybe they were just really fucking dumb". 😔

Alex Gude @alexgude.com · 2d

"Forty kay", and actually often just that. You can mostly leave out the "warhammer" because it's almost always clear from context (for example, being in a game store and looking like a huge nerd...).

Alex Gude @alexgude.com · 2d

This thread is a *FANTASTIC* look at LLMs!

rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 2d

i am going to try to give a framework of my own understanding which laypeople can understand.

Buttadeus @thewanderingjew.bsky.social · 2d

yeah - I was impressed by the token-prediction as being as powerful as it is, but there's more going on than that and I don't really follow it any more.

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Reposted by Alex Gude

rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 2d

this is like shaking a bag of watch parts and dumping out a fully assembled watch. many people say that this is impossible.

the people who say that result from an even more disorganized bag shaken by an even stupider process.

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Reposted by Alex Gude

rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 2d

so, okay. based on this framework, my answers to a bunch of questions about LLMs:

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Alex Gude @alexgude.com · 2d

Grok?

Ah yes Grok.

Screenshot of the Wikipedia app showing a search for mechahitler and a redirect to Grok the chat bot.

Alex Gude @alexgude.com · 2d

It was @dystopiabreaker.xyz, and I agree I love the description!

bsky.app/profile/dyst...

⚡️🌙 @dystopiabreaker.xyz · 12d

this is a common misconception about modern ai systems. they are grown, and not crafted; we understand the process that builds them but lack a paradigmatic understanding that answers the question “how do these 1 trillion floating point numbers do <x>”. this has been the case since the DL revolution

Alex Gude @alexgude.com · 3d

October 2004 it turns out. Way ahead of the trend! 😉

Reposted by Alex Gude

Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 4d

I'm beginning to suspect that a key skill in working effectively with coding agents is developing an intuition for when you don't need to closely review every line of code they produce. This feels deeply uncomfortable!

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Alex Gude @alexgude.com · 5d

I *LOVE* this!

Reposted by Alex Gude

♨ naïve dumbass @atticusgf.bsky.social · 5d

I think a LOT of AI pushback from developers comes from taking the job too seriously in the ways that don't matter, and not seriously enough in the ways that do.

Claude doesn't write perfect code? Well uh, neither do I? And if you are maybe that's not the best use of your time?

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Alex Gude @alexgude.com · 5d

I think one thing I've come to grips with is that I like writing clever little bits of code... But that's not what my company pays me for.

My company pays me to solve business problems and bring in more money.

Sometimes that means writing code.

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Reposted by Alex Gude

♨ naïve dumbass @atticusgf.bsky.social · 5d

Not really wanting to start a fight but if I can use it to 1) set up basic CRUD around some new tables 2) hook up basic apis around that, 3) read some random library's docs that I'll never use again for the logic.. that lets me focus on the parts I really do like, architecting it all at a high level

Eva @evaogbe.bsky.social · 6d

Using AI to code feels like the "AI fucks my wife" poem. I am genuinely surprised at the sheer breadth of programmers who turned out to not actually like programming

Faine Greenwood @faineg.bsky.social · 6d

there’s this weird idea a lot of people seem to have about how all of us writers and artists must secretly want to use AI and are merely resisting temptation for ethical reasons, and like, no, it’s not hard for me to resist drinking the bowl of Piss With Glass In It actually

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Alex Gude @alexgude.com · 5d

A great step towards fixing our housing crisis!

It feels especially good because I was really invested in it: I talked to my representatives in person, calling them up when they wavered later.

Still a lot to do, but we'll get it done! 🥳

M. Nolan Gray 🥑 @mnolangray.bsky.social · 5d

Ladies and gentlemen, we did it. SB 79 has been signed.

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Reposted by Alex Gude

M. Nolan Gray 🥑 @mnolangray.bsky.social · 5d

Ladies and gentlemen, we did it. SB 79 has been signed.

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Alex Gude @alexgude.com · 6d

🦀🦀🦀

Alex Gude @alexgude.com · 6d

This is an orthogonal point:

God those subreddits are horrendous!

Maybe it's not so orthogonal, it's horrendous because of those guys, amongst other reasons.

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Alex Gude @alexgude.com · 6d

Well that's because tops is the best!

I'm so weird I'm like "Maybe I want a mountain bike... With drops?" But that seems extremely crazy.

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Reposted by Alex Gude

Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 7d

Yep. Definitely. Or “forcing vision-impaired users to become complicit in your plagiarism,” to use the official controversy name.

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Alex Gude @alexgude.com · 7d

Love the $0.60 per top end rate. 🙃

Alex Gude @alexgude.com · 7d

XKCD "Average Familiarity" Comic. Two stick figures are talking.

Figure 1: Machine learning is second nature to us MLEs, so it's easy to forget that the average person probably only knows the difference between training and inference, and one or two optimizers.

Figure 2: And RELU, of course.

Figure 1: Of course.

Alex Gude @alexgude.com · 8d

I only read them to update my block list...

Alex Gude @alexgude.com · 8d

Hmm I'm learning there is one 30 minutes away, but it's an annoying drive... Maybe have to go do it though. 🤔