Simon Willison's Weblog: xkcd

XKCD 1425 (Tasks) turns ten years old today

2024-09-24T15:08:33+00:00

XKCD 1425 (Tasks) turns ten years old today

One of the all-time great XKCDs. It's amazing that "check whether the photo is of a bird" has gone from PhD-level to trivially easy to solve (with a vision LLM, or CLIP, or ResNet+ImageNet among others).

The key idea still very much stands though. Understanding the difference between easy and hard challenges in software development continues to require an enormous depth of experience.

I'd argue that LLMs have made this even worse.

Understanding what kind of tasks LLMs can and cannot reliably solve remains incredibly difficult and unintuitive. They're computer systems that are terrible at maths and that can't reliably lookup facts!

On top of that, the rise of AI-assisted programming tools means more people than ever are beginning to create their own custom software.

These brand new AI-assisted proto-programmers are having a crash course in this easy-v.s.-hard problem.

I saw someone recently complaining that they couldn't build a Claude Artifact that could analyze images, even though they knew Claude itself could do that. Understanding why that's not possible involves understanding how the CSP headers that are used to serve Artifacts prevent the generated code from making its own API calls out to an LLM!

Via @chrisalbon

Tags: xkcd, ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, clip, content-security-policy

Why doesn't xkcd site have social media share options?

2013-11-19T13:44:00+00:00

My answer to Why doesn't xkcd site have social media share options? on Quora

My guess: he probably thinks they are a bit tacky.

Plus his target audience are mostly capable of sharing via copy-and-paste URLs without needing the assistance of a share button.

Tags: facebook, social-media, social-networks, xkcd, quora

What is your review of xkcd?

2013-03-06T18:36:00+00:00

My answer to What is your review of xkcd? on Quora

★★★★★

It's consistently excellent, and frequently throws out absolute diamonds. Here's a great one from just a few days ago:

The occasional large-scale infographics are especially impressive.

And What If? Is the icing on the cake: http://what-if.xkcd.com/

Tags: xkcd, quora

Is xkcd overrated?

2012-08-16T16:31:00+00:00

My answer to Is xkcd overrated? on Quora

No.

Tags: xkcd, quora

Color Survey Results

2010-05-05T15:59:00+00:00

Color Survey Results

XKCD asked anonymous netizens to provide names for random colours. The results (collated from 222,500 user sessions that named over 5 million colours) are fascinating.

Tags: crowdsourcing, science, surveys, xkcd, recovered, colours

Quoting xkcd

2010-04-23T10:43:38+00:00

Telescopes and bathyscapes and sonar probes of Scottish lakes, Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse explained with abstract phase-space maps, some x-ray slides, a music score, Minard's Napoleonic war: the most exciting new frontier is charting what's already here.

— xkcd

Tags: xkcd

Quoting Randall Munroe

2008-08-22T08:28:35+00:00

A convention once saw, for example, that I had worked at NASA, and put me on a panel about the future of space exploration. I felt a little out-of-place, given that my main NASA achievement was that I once lassoed a robot with cat-6 cable and had it pull me around the hallways charioteer-style.

— Randall Munroe

Tags: nasa, randallmunroe, xkcd