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▲ aleph_minus_one 5 hours ago

See also https://bigospeedrun.com/integer-multiplication

▲fwlr 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I’d like to nominate the graph there for some sort of crime, for using a log scale from 1e-55 to 1, where there is one result at 1e-55, one result at 1e-18, a million results at 1e-3, the omgwtfbbq threshold drawn at 1… and each result is drawn as a bubble that covers 3 orders of magnitude above and below.

▲prezk 4 hours ago | parent [-]

To be fair it's a live graph, you can decrease the number of days and then the plot becomes more meaningful.

▲pinevale 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Except because it's some sort of a vibecoded atrocity, nothing happens if you try to toggle from "all" to "last 3 days", it only works if you change the value (e.g., to 2 or 4 days).

Stuff like that is really frustrating because it's not like we didn't have one zillion decent, human-tested graphing frameworks before.

▲mistercow 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I think it's basically an alignment problem. LLMs tend to think it's better to just do something small and bespoke than to just pull a mature library and use it correctly, which, to be clear, they are perfectly capable of doing.

And this is in part a reflection of our own bad preferences. This is what always annoyed me most about the left-pad Discourse a decade (oh god, a Decade™) ago; "why do you need a library for something so simple in the first place!?" people would scoff. And of course the answer is that even the reference class of left-pad-like problems includes a bunch of examples where the problem has bizarre and sticky edge cases you'd never consider, so in general, "just pop in a popular and well tested library" is actually a pretty good policy (assuming your package repository doesn't allow anything really silly like deleting entire packages and breaking everything downstream).

Of course charting is more obviously complicated, but again, it might seem fairly simple if all you're thinking about is one kind of chart in one style with limited settings. The difference is that for a human coder, "just whip up some chart code" is enough of a pain in the ass that they'll reach for a library by default, whereas a coding agent can just spit something out which mostly works in a few seconds.

▲hakfoo 20 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe the problem is libraries themselves.

All else equal, I'd rather have the richest possible functionality built into the language. At least I know that it will be updated and maintained in one place, and there's very little ambiguity about setup. You don't have to start picking apart the fact IN THIS PARTICULAR PROJECT, libfoo was imported by pasting it in the code base in 1977 before package management existed and globally namespaced, but libbar is a first-class citizen in the depency-injection system.

If you know you can just call bargraph($data), even if the stock bargraph library is boring, then people and LLMs will favour it.

▲fwlr 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

All those mature charting packages are solidly inside the LLM’s training set, I’m a little surprised it can’t do a better job of reproducing them.

▲fwlr 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Eh, then it just shows relative change between results; in isolation, yes, not contextualising these results at all is better than misrepresenting them, but doing both is arguably worse than either, it kind of admits you know exactly what to avoid saying.

▲ebiederm 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It is amazing to see how fast these bounds are moving.

▲shric 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I feel bound to say they’re bounding along boundlessly