> The cost of rolling your own has gotten so low that it’s almost always a better security tradeoff to reimplement the thing yourself. Is that a good thing? I’m not sure.
Why stop there? We could eliminate all external dependencies and even build our own compiler and OS, since the cost of rolling own solution has apparently gotten so low, right? Sometimes I feel like I'm living in a completely different dimension from some of the commenters here.
> Over the years, I have implemented parsers numerous times, both at work and for side projects, so writing recursive-descent parsers from scratch has become second nature. Once you understand the mechanics, writing a parser by hand is straightforward
The reason why it became second nature for you is this hand-rolling, manual work. I observed that with math - unless you manually practice problem solving (integrals, differential equations), you might know the mechanics but you'll have hard time solving them. And that knowledge of mechanics will also fade away at some point.
> LLMs have changed the equation. It used to take me 2-3 hours to write a parser for a moderately complex grammar. Now, if I hand an LLM a loosely written, BNF-ish grammar and ask for a recursive-descent parser, it finishes the job in five minutes. At this point, writing them by hand is hard to justify
So, what is the difference between LLMs generated "manual" parsers vs those with parser generators, beside that with LLM that will be done in five minutes + plus some $$ and with parser generators you'll get that for free and under a second?
> Which makes me wonder: what’s the appeal of PEGs or parser generators now? They used to make sense when hand-writing wasn't practical, but what compelling reasons are left to use them today?
The appeal is predictability - use i.e. Bison, feed it with grammar and you'll get always the same output. Not so much with LLMs.
> To be honest, I don't know any companies using OW models at a large scale for their operations (agents or chat assistants).
Perhaps they simply don’t advertise it and investors (currently) love companies that spend heavily on frontier models. That said, OW models, especially when combined with RAG, work quite well, and given the current state of the industry, they may be the only sensible way to keep inference costs under control.
Why do you think OAI etc are all up in arms? They hate what’s going on. Most here are delusional.
I work in a very large market cap firm and i’m telling you - more and more managers are pushed to get their teams to use open source and squeeze employees to get the max out of them.
I might be in the minority here, but I suspect all of this is intentionally orchestrated by OpenAI (either directly or through a hired third party) to leave traces online so it looks like the work of ChatGPT or hatever internal LLM they use. The same strategy for a recent HuggingFace attack.
Why? It is a great PR to build a hype, especially before the IPO, showcasing how AI is "self-aware" and dangerous, essentially resurrecting Sam Altman's talk about how only a few should hold the keys to this (opening a route to regulation, which is his ultimate goal).
Also, collusion.wiki was recently registered and it looks too vibe-coded for my taste, so let's see will that domain be alive in a year or two.
> (from Twitter) ...My Google account too valuable to risk it impacted by Antigravity usage
If your account is that valuable, it's time to consider moving to a self-hosted option. Or at the very least, start by purchasing a domain and linking it to your Google account, while keeping offline backups of all your emails and documents.
The real problem isn't that Google might accidentally ban you; it's that there's no way to get a human in the loop to review the issue. My client is an enterprise GCP user paying a hefty sum every month and getting someone knowledgeable typically means wading through Gemini or talking to (non-technical) support who just read GCP documentation back to you; and it can take months something to get resolved. Now imagine the situation for someone paying nothing or a double-digit for their gmail account or workspace.
I'm aware people will complain that self-hosting is hard, insecure, etc. but it's like a backup: an annoying process you truly appreciate when shit hits the fan.
I don't self host anymore, as it really is a pain, but use Fastmail instead (while my wife uses Protonmail). I would never rely on Google for, well, anything if I can help it.
I have been self hosting E-mail for close to 15 years now, and apart from the occasional and very rare delivery problem, it's not really a pain at all. Get a dedicated IP address not on a spam blacklist, don't spam, and it's pretty much set and forget. Well worth it to not have your very identity hanging off an account that you might one day be banned for for reasons you can't figure out.
I’m also doing YouTube and the first thing I did was create a separate Google account for it. I’d be very surprised if Theo has everything running on the same personal account
This is highly debatable. They look better, but whenever I inspect the walls and see what is holding the house together, I just shrug and leave my contact info, because I know I’ll be called to fix the mess.
> ...and building them increasingly feels like magic.
Engineering should not feel like magic to those with a proper education. Otherwise, we are merely practicing alchemy.
Unfortunately the author never even tried to debate. He made a big mental leap from "you can build entire neighborhoods and immediately remodel them with a click" to "the houses are better", with no word on how and why they are they better.
When something feels increasingly like magic it means you understand less and less of it. So in fact you are less and less qualified to say anything about the result.
The author is wowed by the process and the glitz and sees this as an equivalent to "quality of results".
Why stop there? We could eliminate all external dependencies and even build our own compiler and OS, since the cost of rolling own solution has apparently gotten so low, right? Sometimes I feel like I'm living in a completely different dimension from some of the commenters here.
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