
Software developer. @robertknight2.bsky.social, @robertknight@sigmoid.social OCR and ML in Rust - https://xitter.cf/t.co/ifiV9SvMau
London
Joined October 2011
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Robert Knight retweeted
We instituted an official AI Writing Policy at @Clay.
Massive thanks to @sophiebits on our engineering team who wrote this.
Originally this was just for eng, but other teams found it so helpful we expanded it company-wide.
Here are the four guiding principles:
1. You must stand behind every idea and sentence
It is your responsibility to make sure that the entire document is representative of your own thoughts before you share it.
2. Writing is thinking
Spending time on the writing process teaches you more about your topic. If you circumvent this process, you will walk away with a poorer understanding of the subject matter.
3. More time should be spent writing a document than consuming it
If you generate a document from a short prompt then ask your readers to go through the longer output, you are disrespecting their time. They can talk to ChatGPT themselves if they want to.
4. Longer is not better
AI makes it easy to generate long docs, and it loves padding them with sentences that say nothing. If you're producing docs from a short prompt, consider just sharing the prompt.
You can read (and borrow) the full policy below. Hopefully we all communicate a bit more clearly now :)
My latest cartoon for @newscientist
My latest books cartoon for @GuardianBooks
Many more here: theguardian.com/profile/tom-…

ALT Panel 1 A small girl and boy are reading on the floor. A father appears at the door and says: "This is so nice to see! I heard that kids these days weren't reading." One of the children says "Ugh, reading? So lame!" Panel 2 She continues "It's called Booksmaxxing now, Dad!" He replies as he is leaving "'m just happy you're enjoying it." Panel 3 The boy says "Booksmaxxing?" The girl says "I like to mess with him."
Robert Knight retweeted
Bad news -- I'm not going to be with my employer for much longer due to team relocation demands. If anyone has any leads for roles that would allow me to continue my Rust compiler work (in New York City), they'd be greatly appreciated.
I wrote a progress report / retrospective on the RTen machine learning runtime in 2024, looking at the added features and progress towards performance parity with more mature runtimes: robertknight.me.uk/posts/rte…
RTen v0.14 has been released. It adds examples for Whisper speech recognition and RMBG background removal, plus compatibility with tokenizers exported by the latest version of Hugging Face Transformers - github.com/robertknight/rten…
When starring a repo, it would be cool for maintainers if users could provide context on why it is interesting ("I really need a FooBar implementation for my XYZ project")
The onslaught of unhinged political content in my Twitter feed got a bit much over the weekend. This prompted me to take another look at Bluesky (robertknight2.bsky.social). My first impressions are quite positive.
I've been working on safer and more ergonomic slicing APIs for the next rten release using type-level arithmetic.
chw_tensor.slice((0, .., 0)) // Statically infers result is 1D
nchw_tensor.slice(0) // Statically infers result is 3D
I appreciate the Street Fighter analogy at the end.
This is why having AI write code for you sucks. Literally just have the training wheels on forever. Great point by @dhh
Robert Knight retweeted
Very easy way to improve the quality of your work: whenever you put up a PR, take a few seconds to skim through it yourself just as a reviewer would (i.e., in the GitHub UI). I find a surprising number of small issues this way that never stand out in the editor.
Robert Knight retweeted
There’s a very high quality conversation happening about uv and its risk/benefits for Python overall happening on Mastodon - I gathered some notes and illustrative quotes here simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/8…
RTen v0.13.1 is out. It fixes a few bugs that enables the Silero speech detection model to work (github.com/robertknight/rten…).
youtube.com/watch?v=wGSSUSea… is a good watch on the basic principles of writing efficient code for modern CPUs. It matches my experience that predictability is the main quality that matters.
RTen v0.13 has been released. It adds support for ONNX models with branches (the `If` operator), including encoder-decoder models exported from Hugging Face such as TrOCR - github.com/robertknight/rten…
AI in your text editor is so passé. How about AI in your fonts - github.com/hsfzxjy/handwrite….












