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Jev-Leftpad

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227 points by fka 13 hours ago on hackernews | 85 comments

Topfi | 12 hours ago

Man-made horrors beyond my comprehension, neat.

jojobas | 11 hours ago

I have no mouth but I must pad.

adventured | 9 hours ago

What is my purpose?

You pad the text.

Oh, my god.

serious_angel | 12 hours ago

Now that's a rare GitHub Username!

Though, again, a yet another project for a yet another "AI" to make someone else more dependent on it...

Related:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jev_(AI_model)  
    https://typesafe.ai/

goosejuice | 5 hours ago

One might even say it's unique.

fumblebee | 12 hours ago

Can someone ELI5?

sklivvz1971 | 11 hours ago

Uses JEV to do something that's one line of code. Also, "leftpad" was a useless package from years ago that many important packages used instead of writing the code themselves. Its outage at some point broke a lot of packages.

grokkedit | 11 hours ago

why useless? it did one thing that js didn't natively do

jagged-chisel | 11 hours ago

It did one thing that you could write in one line of code. But it wasted space as a packaged dependency instead.

Sohcahtoa82 | 4 hours ago

It also ended up inadvertently highlighting a massive problem with the JavaScript ecosystem.

And yet we learned nothing from it and all the same problems keep popping up, only this time in the form of supply chain attacks.

intothemild | 11 hours ago

Jev is a new type of model that just makes decisions based on given options. It's small and really really fast.

Leftpad is a npm package that chooses if it should or shouldn't pad the left side of a string. It was famous for bringing down everyone's npm installs a few years ago.

This combination is a double joke. Put something stupid in something stupid.

andrekandre | 6 hours ago

  > Jev is a new type of model that just makes decisions based on given options.
something like “if x > y then x else y”?

r34ct0r14 | 12 hours ago

why

fnands | 10 hours ago

funny

r34ct0r14 | 7 hours ago

yeah but i have PTSD from the og leftpad stuff

applfanboysbgon | 12 hours ago

> Please don't use this in production. Or anything important.

5 to 10 years from now, after this has worked itself deep into the npm dependency chain, we'll be lamenting how Jev-Leftpad is causing outages in critical services.

sparrowidle | 12 hours ago

On the npm doomsday thing, the scarier version is someone vendoring it and the padding silently drifting between runs.

frangonf | 11 hours ago

Make sure to vendor this package if you want reliable operation.

    it('trusts Jev when it chooses the wrong amount', async () => {
    answer('space_2');
    await expect(leftPad('jev', 8)).resolves.toBe('  jev');
    });

raahelb | 11 hours ago

> This means the package can add between 0 and 10 spaces. If more than 10 spaces are needed, Jev has no correct option. Which feels appropriate for this project.

I'll raise a PR which uses Jev to check if the target length is beyond this range

Tepix | 11 hours ago

I thought you were doing a PR to add an 11th space.

Topfi | 10 hours ago

Nah, for ≥11 spaces we should fan out to a GPT-6 Astra agent. On light reasoning of course, lest we be wasteful.

anon48293 | 7 hours ago

Since the potential error increases with N, I suggest spawning N different models and let them fight it out instead.

w-ll | 11 hours ago

im so confused about what i should bring up at the 10am today

dormento | 8 hours ago

Aren't we all. Aren't we all.

sethaurus | 11 hours ago

I have to be honest. While this is obviously a smart and useful idea, it misses one of the core features of Jev: its confidence scores. Partial confidence could easily be mapped to fractional spaces, using unicode characters like U+2009: THIN SPACE. As it stands, this package is not harnessing the full power of Jev.

preommr | 10 hours ago

> its confidence scores

important to note that the "confidence" score is... maybe not what people think it is - kind of useless, and just a convenience step from the probabilities.

from the docs: "confidence is a statistic computed from the probability distribution the answer already gives you." [0] I actually encourage people to visit the docs because it has a specific page on this with a little applet to really make this clear.

[0] https://docs.typesafe.ai/confidence

wongarsu | 6 hours ago

What else do people think it is? If Typesafe had found a way to measure arbitrary AI results against objective reality (past, future and present) they'd either be making a killing on the stock market or working for the NRO, not publishing that as a confidence value on their API

preommr | 3 hours ago

Well I think there's an expectation that it's similar to the probability score, something that's outputted by the model itself, and so there's some level of "intelligence" (e.g. being able to recognize if the subject matter is relevant to the data it's been trained on, or as an accumulation of errors e.g. it couldn't figure out the question).

danieltanfh95 | 8 hours ago

Man we're going full 2015 ML, telling normies that confidence scores mean NOTHING to alleviate false negatives/positives.

bbor | 8 hours ago

Yeah I keep getting this weird sense that Jev is kinda poorly reinventing ML. I guess the graphs don't lie and theoretically I can replace luna with it, but I don't really use luna anyway.

What is the use case for a classifier that works 90% of the time...? I feel like if I'm classifying something, I probably care enough that 90% ain't gonna cut it...

I guess the answer is just agential stuff that effectively gets double checked by the LLM in the driver seat, anyway? That tracks, though it means that jev is mostly just for the people making harnesses. Which is all of us but still!

serbuvlad | 7 hours ago

I think the argument would be that the classifiers of classic ML can be very useful and that Jav is a geenral purpose classifier you can just use that doesn't need to be trained per-task.

torginus | 7 hours ago

I mean when you get your bloodwork done to check for an illness, the test you get will give the right result 90% of the time - and depending on the result, you doc might order more tests, which could be more expensive but no mrpe reliable than the first - but they are going to be statistically independent, and after 2 more, he can be 99.9% sure.

Which begs the question, can Jev retest until it gets the right result? Can it tell how corellated two of its results are? 90% correct makes for a wonderful iterator, but a poor oracle.

meowface | 11 hours ago

But is it Web Scale.

dofm | 8 hours ago

It's surely on the Pareto Frontier of something

yitchelle | 11 hours ago

wait.. is it just me or are we going overboard? I am waiting for jev assistance to exit vim, no wait.. a decision if we should exit vim or not.

rw_panic0_0 | 11 hours ago

what if 11 spaces are needed

brabel | 10 hours ago

You need to get the Pro version, please contact sales.

queenkjuul | 7 hours ago

Run it twice

freakynit | 11 hours ago

Would be fun to have a test runner that uses Jev for assertions.

Btw, this model also has very tiny inherent bias: https://jev-bias-analysis.stupidlabs.lol/

speedping | 11 hours ago

Flaky tests by design is a diabolical idea

freakynit | 11 hours ago

Done: https://github.com/freakynit/jev-test-runner

mawadev | 11 hours ago

This needs an SBOM and a SonarQube Qualitygate pass to be considered production grade code

fwlr | 11 hours ago

    The tests mock Jev.
10/10 no notes

slowmovintarget | 5 hours ago

I posted the same observation, then saw yours. Yours is better (at 0.92 certainty) so I deleted my post.

marcus_cemes | 3 hours ago

Reading this, I got excited that there may be be a hidden Easter egg, making fun of Jev. I was disappointed to find actual tests.

speedping | 11 hours ago

How did this guy get a single-letter GitHub username?

azatom | 11 hours ago

i maintained a system where for .. reasons (like other systems) from early days have users with id: null "null" "" and some i do not even know how to write here

so probably early bird

thrance | 11 hours ago

His oldest repository was updated in 2011. Looks like he's been there a long time.

unshavedyak | 7 hours ago

It's funny, i actually worked with this guy (same small startup, not closely), and recognized him from that unique username on this post. It's been so long i wouldn't have had any idea if not for the oddness of the single letter username.

anon48293 | 7 hours ago

GitHub clearly didn’t use his left pad

tesnorindian | 11 hours ago

Jev mania at its peak? HN is full of Jev like today.

andrekandre | 6 hours ago

nowadays i can’t even start a day without a fresh cup of jev in the morning…

larnon | 11 hours ago

I already have Jev fatigue.

christkv | 11 hours ago

Terrorist

ollipal | 11 hours ago

Instead of using Choice with criteria "space_0", "space_1"..., it could be even more elegant to use criteria names like "", " "... which could be directly inserted into response.

ckastner | 10 hours ago

Can't believe it's already been 10 years...

https://joelgrus.com/2016/05/23/fizz-buzz-in-tensorflow/

BenoitP | 8 hours ago

What an eerie feeling reading this, or was it prescient?:

"""

    def fizz_buzz_encode(i):
        if   i % 15 == 0: return np.array([0, 0, 0, 1])
        elif i % 5  == 0: return np.array([0, 0, 1, 0])
        elif i % 3  == 0: return np.array([0, 1, 0, 0])
        else:             return np.array([1, 0, 0, 0])
interviewer: OK, that's probably enough.

me: That's enough setup, you're exactly right. [<--- !!] [...]

"""

Damn, Claude was there all along

ckastner | 7 hours ago

oh, I missed that. Brilliant!

kevinrineer | 4 hours ago

> me: That's enough setup, you're exactly right.

So that's where in the training set current models get that phrase! /j

fnands | 10 hours ago

> MIT Licensed

Would have been funnier if it used the GLWTPL: https://spdx.org/licenses/GLWTPL.html

selimonder | 10 hours ago

github.com/f is more impressive to me than jev-leftpad lol

MasterScrat | 10 hours ago

I’d be curious to see how reliable it is in practice, it sounds like a cheap and (hopefully) easy benchmark

jdw64 | 10 hours ago

JEV seems similar to BERT. Where would it be useful?

I use it mainly to check whether this code fits the rules I defined, just a yes or no. But I'm not sure if that's the right way to use it.

monxer | 10 hours ago

Is this package vibe coded with Jev or just old school with an LLM?

thisisauserid | 9 hours ago

Jev-in-the-Loop. Makes sense.

hanspagel | 9 hours ago

This is funny, because I just implemented the same feature, but mine is calling OpenAI’s Astra on High (very capable for this kind of feature).

It works great, but maybe your implementation could save me some money. I’ll test it and report back.

gandreani | 8 hours ago

I can't tell if this comment is satire or not lol

silviot | 7 hours ago

I can. It is indeed satire.

random_cat_8745 | 9 hours ago

Next: jev-is-even

deaton | 8 hours ago

This makes about as much sense to me as AI-powered air traffic control

shawabawa3 | 8 hours ago

poor implementation

jev should only have the choice of space_0 or space_1, then recurse on n-1

this extends the implementation to infinite padding and is cleaner code

weego | 7 hours ago

Maybe for Enterprise scale, for ramen scale hackers if you need 15 spaces you just add 5 to start with then use space_10. Clean and, importantly, dry.

hermannj314 | 8 hours ago

Is there a local model that can run this?

throwa356262 | 8 hours ago

I think some people are missing the joke here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Npm_left-pad_incident

weego | 7 hours ago

Subtlety in a joke is a beautiful art. BUT AT WHAT COST.

mrguyorama | 6 hours ago

People who were in high school in 2016 and therefore not being aware of leftpad are currently in their 6th year of their career if they went directly to college and then a job.

Tech doesn't teach it's own history in a useful way, so we keep repeating it too.

rzzzt | 5 hours ago

Another multi-volume textbook to carry for the students of the future!

TZubiri | 7 hours ago

It's fun so far seeing the new trend from the sidelines, never bothered and never will bother learning what JEV is, but I'll see the occasional meme.

I feel for the people whose 'AI strategy' is keeping up with every vibecoded vibecoding junk that releases

muragekibicho | 7 hours ago

I must admit, I stopped keeping up with the new AI terms after J-space. Absolute peace of mind.

tantalor | 7 hours ago

I'm very curious about the performance. Where's the quantitative analysis? Got any graphs or charts? How's the recall/precision? Show me the data!

davidkunz | 7 hours ago

I'm afraid the performance won't be great. Definitely needs a caching layer.

kmoser | 6 hours ago

This comes just in time. My app has been using Amazon Mechanical Turk for left-pad queries, and that service is shutting down in less than two weeks.

mawadev | 6 hours ago

I should have know that beforehand, I have terraform ready for quickly moving off of mechanical turk into agentic AI left padding, this load-bearing workload has to be clowd powered

brunoborges | 5 hours ago

Quick, we need a jev-isBoolean(value) so we can code YAML with confidence.

artursapek | 5 hours ago

Cracker news upvotes the stupidest shit to the front page