T0B1
Glyphit's truly amazing what LLMs can achieve. we now know it's possible to produce an html5 parsing library with nothing but the full source code of an existing html5 parsing library, all the source code of all other open source libraries ever, a meticulously maintained and extremely comprehensive test suite written by somebody else, 5 different models, a megawatt-hour of energy, a swimming pool full of water, and a month of spare time of an extremely senior engineer
Adam Jamie@glyph LLM as Dave the Barbarian's megaphone
Skjeggtroll
Dave the Barbarian - Megaphone
CKA
Stuart Longland (VK4MSL)
River@stuartl @glyph Power is measured as watts, or joules ÷ time.
Energy is measured as Joules, or slightly obscurely, as Power × time, as in Watt-hours.
So a megawatt-hour is a measurement of energy. It's the amount of every required to run a Megawatt of power for 1 hour (or 1 watt for 1 million hours, etc)
@riverpunk @glyph Indeed. 1 Wh = 3600 J.
However, it's unusual to measure electrical energy in terms of joules… nearly every electrical meter and EMS I've dealt with in the past 15 years has used either Wh or kWh. (I know ANSI C12:19 does support joules as a unit of measure though… just never seen it used in an electrical meter.)
@stuartl @riverpunk @glyph Physicists use joules. They are more appropriate in almost all applications.
The business side of power delivery uses watt-hours because it makes the billing calculations much easier and more intuitive.
Mike Lynch@glyph oooooffff
Furbland's Very Cool Mastodon™@glyph it actually takes two pools, it uses one for cooling and creates so much heat it evaporates the other
Richard "RichiH" Hartmann@GroupNebula563 @glyph that's how cooling works, yes
Bornach@RichiH @GroupNebula563 @glyph
Why can't they do that with sea water then recondense that evaporated water as desalinated rain to provide drinking water to a community or irrigate a desert or something?
Why can't they do that with sea water then recondense that evaporated water as desalinated rain to provide drinking water to a community or irrigate a desert or something?
Will Bradley@GroupNebula563 @bornach @RichiH @glyph also it's just called desalination with extra steps, which is already an expensive process, and I think operating salty pipes carries its own batch of problems. It's already nerve-wracking enough running water around tons of computers (eventually every pipe will need to be replaced, or it'll break...)
@bornach @GroupNebula563 @glyph because of delta t
The higher your temperature difference going in and the lower your temperature difference going out, the cheaper it is to get rid of heat
@RichiH @bornach @GroupNebula563 @glyph so basically they're transferring as much GPU heat into the (evaporated) water as possible, and don't wanna do the hard work of cooling it down again, since it's easier to just pump in new water from the existing tap water infrastructure?
@riverpunk @RichiH @bornach @GroupNebula563 @glyph Pretty much. You could run it without evaporation, but that would mean higher energy use. Evaporating water is just the most cost-effective means of cooling in warmer climate, unless you have a convenient river next door.
It's exactly the same equipment as in a power station cooling tower. Just scaled down.
econads@RichiH
BUT it does seem like (Fernwärme in German, not sure the English - distance heating?) where you pump the hot water/air/whatever around to heat houses would be a good usecase for this.
@econads @bornach @GroupNebula563 @glyph no, because those networks need high delta t. Otherwise it's too expensive to pump the heat out of the water, and it's much harder to pump the water back down.
Splitradix
@bornach @RichiH @GroupNebula563 @glyph Using seawater as your heat dump would actually work pretty well. Except there isn't any nearby. Coastal land is at a price premium, and data centers are built where land is cheap, usually on the outskirts of towns or cities. Even if you built one near the coast, tapping large quantities of seawater and returning it warmer would mean environmental review and permitting, and in the rush to ride the bandwagon there is no time to wait for such things.
Mercutio@bornach @RichiH @GroupNebula563 @glyph
Aside from social aspects, there's also a technical one:
Sea water is aggressive to metal tubes, especially when heated up.
Additionally, the minerals it contains remain as solids when the water is evaporated.
Aside from social aspects, there's also a technical one:
Sea water is aggressive to metal tubes, especially when heated up.
Additionally, the minerals it contains remain as solids when the water is evaporated.
prince lucijaI'm sure this would be easily solved with the brilliant idea of datacenters in space, proposed by a man who was already in space, therefore experience, and desalination in space surely can be done easily.
Snake Oil Salesman@glyph i am truly amazed!
alys
The Lack Thereof 
@glyph
The grug agile rant but about LLMs.
The grug agile rant but about LLMs.
sodiboo 
Francisca Sinn
Claudius Link@glyph
Oh, come on
The existing html5 parsing library has been inconsistently maintained.
(Now we have two inconsistently maintained html5 parsing libraries 😬)
mapto
xs4me2
Falko
Aslak Raanes@volkersfreunde @glyph It's easy to find, but someone published a html5 parser in Python. Someone else converted that to javascript using llm. Both by very experienced developers.
Alex Russell@glyph Chef kiss. No notes. Bravo.
ailepet
Beldarak
Michael Simons
@glyph @tante And when you read other articles praising that work, you hear _nothing_ on the arc that the models *all* had access to the existing lib, that it mostly isn't *new* to begin with. It's just praise, praise, praise… And than a rewrite in JavaScript. Congrats again.
To stay positive in same capacity: I do like the 100% TCK coverage approach. It's something.
Necessary? I wonder… But that is these days out of the discussion most of the time anyway.
jumblies
Allan Svelmøe Hansen@glyph Well. when you say it like that, it's hard to not be ..... impressed :D
J3RN 
Jules she/her@glyph 🤯 LLM's are basically the "I made pasta out of pasta" meme on a collosal scale aren't they?
Mirano4566@glyph I don't understand this modern Luddism any more than I understand the AI hype. It's simply a tool that, when used sensibly, can serve you well. These posts full of demagoguery are laughable. Go break your machines like your ancestors did.
Jackie
flere-imsaho 🇺🇦@mirano if they're laughable, it should be easy to disprove them, no?
also, do learn about luddites. luddites weren't against progress; and they were right.
@mawhrin There's really nothing to disprove here. Or first tell me the volume of that demagogic pool of water and nonsensical units of energy.
@mirano come again?
@mawhrin Look, I understand that it's sad when progress forces you to change your work style or job in general, because you become obsolete. Crying on the internet, coming up with nonsensical constructions, and commiserating with like-minded colleagues won't help anyone. You'll only feel better for a moment.
1. re: luddites, I'd recommend you educate yourself—maybe just read the wikipedia page—about who the luddites were and why they were breaking looms. From that wikipedia page: "Luddites were not opposed to the use of machines per se (many were skilled operators in the textile industry); they attacked manufacturers who were trying to circumvent standard labor practices"
2. re: vague gesturing at "demagoguery" rather than engaging with the substance of the point: https://mastodon.social/@glyph/115561854355416955
fupduck@glyph
I also really love this comic:
I'm a luddite (and so can you!) by Tom Hunberstone
tuban_muzuruAnd yet, without the LLM, that senior engineer would have spent that month writing boilerplate instead of orchestrating the synthesis. It's almost like tools are force multipliers, not magic wands. Who knew?
Wait until they find out how much source code, energy, and senior engineer time went into building the compiler that built the library.
Abstraction layers are wild, aren't they?
1. Or maybe the senior engineer would have simply written all the code and it wouldn't have taken that long. Nobody measures this. We don't even know yet if it's a "force multiplier" or a distraction. I've written at length about this phenomenon here: https://blog.glyph.im/2025/08/futzing-fraction.html
2. Or maybe they would have solved the actual social problem instead, i.e. that the original library is insufficiently maintained, rather than rewriting to move the locus of control closer to themselves.