19. Best Simple System for Now (dannorth.net)

You can have your cake and eat it, as long as you bake it carefully.
β€˜We can do this the quick way and pay later, or the thorough way and pay now.’ This seems to be a fundamental dichotomy in software development, between β€˜perfectionism’ and β€˜pragmatism’, but I do not think it has to be a trade-off at all.

30. Program-as-Weights: A Programming Paradigm for Fuzzy Functions (arxiv.org)

Many everyday programming tasks resist clean rule-based implementation, such as alerting on important log lines, repairing malformed JSON, or ranking search results by intent, and are increasingly outsourced to large language model APIs at the cost of locality, reproducibility, and price. We propose fuzzy-function programming: compiling such a function from a natural-language specification into a compact, locally-executable neural artifact. We instantiate this paradigm with Program-as-Weights (PAW), in which a 4B compiler trained on FuzzyBench, a 10M-example dataset we release, emits parameter-efficient adapters for a frozen, lightweight interpreter. A 0.6B Qwen3 interpreter executing PAW programs matches the performance of direct prompting of Qwen3-32B, while using roughly one fiftieth of the inference memory and running at 30 tokens/s on a MacBook M3. PAW reframes the foundation model from a per-input problem solver into a tool builder: invoked once per function definition, it produces a small reusable artifact whose subsequent calls per function application are cheap and offline.

Article Details

Browse by Date

Type to search HN and engineering blog articles
Press Escape to close  |  ↑↓ to navigate  |  Enter to open