Recent submissions

Comment · 12 days ago
Almost everything can be improved by making it cost more.
Comment · 18 days ago
To be fair, try getting cancer and then consider how you feel about “wait and see” even when you understand enough to know it’s the advice with the best evidence.
Comment · 28 days ago
Making incredibly complex and opaque pricing structures is not necessary for the providers to charge for and make a profit on their service. And being technically difficult is a lazy excuse. Cloud platforms have to solve many, much more difficult challenges to offer their services at all, they just don’t want to invest the time in more customer friendly billing because they expect it will result in reduced revenues.

I know your post isn’t explicitly defending the platforms, but the arguments they use feel transparently flimsy.

Comment · 1 month ago
What does it mean to not be good at being a car?

It’s a terrific car if you want a great handling convertible at a low price point. As you said, it’s fun.

It’s not good at moving a lot of people or things, or going really fast, or lasting for 500k miles, or being as cheap as possible. Other cars are good at some of those things, but what is the Miata missing that is otherwise required to be a ‘good’ car?

Comment · 2 months ago
> it just misses a base load component right now.

I’m sympathetic to the intent of your argument, but man, that’s a hallava gotcha there. Other than nuclear there isn’t a compelling story for a base load source of green energy. And all the new-gen nuclear tech is a long shot for safe, cost efficient, rapid scaling right now.

Comment · 2 months ago
It’s more that unwanted disclosure of sensitive business numbers is a product-class limitation at this time. While undoubtedly some models are better than others, expecting them not to leak information in high stakes output is unseasonable. Seems like you agree, since you are reading everything.

Jumping to another company’s offering because of one instance doesn’t seem like that’s going to meaningfully change your experience. I’m guessing there was more to it, but that’s how it came across in your first post.

Comment · 2 months ago
I hope you don’t plan to cut back on reading legal documents crafted by any LLM before executing them.
Comment · 3 months ago
I don’t see any screaming and waving arms in the parent. It’s a passionate but well reasoned and carefully presented case. If that is to be dismissed as zealotry we’ll all need to stick to writing journal papers to avoid the label.

If anything your “copyright forever” drumbeat and incorrect read of “only being trained on copyrighted works” are more hyperbolic than anything you’re responding to.

Also, the models from China are only being released open weights as competitive positioning against the globally more used competition. If the Chinese companies had a dominant market position they’d be falling prey to the same forces that have caused OpenAI and Anthropic to behave the way they do.

Comment · 3 months ago
The weights are in the meat
Comment · 4 months ago
Thanks, that was interesting to learn, I’d never thought about how odd the phrase sounds as-is.

There’s a fascinating complexity to what constitutes constructive feedback, criticism, or dismissal. And to when it’s okay to provide one, the other, or none at all.

Comment · 4 months ago
Here here. This was a joy to wake up to and wish I hadn’t stumbled into the comments.
Comment · 6 months ago
A new bug appears, it’s in an encryption layer. You solve this by deciding to disable the encryption layer because user experience is better without the errors. You write it up as a recruitment piece for your engineering team.

There may be some good answers and lessons, but they didn’t make it into the article. Saying it’s on a cloud provider’s private network so encryption between your nodes isn’t necessary is a bold choice. Also, what happened to the root cause? Why did it start failing a week ago? Was a downgrade of the offending code not possible?

Not all bug investigations are worth really digging into. Sometimes the right call is to find any fix and move on. But all the nuance, judgement, implications, and lessons learned failed to make it into this post. And they are what make reading incident reports interesting for most engineers.

Comment · 6 months ago
As pointed out in the article, naproxen is an NSAID like Ibuprofen, though slightly more COX1 selective. It likely has a somewhat lower risk of serious renal and cardiovascular events, but higher risk of GI bleeds. There are some studies that show little to no increase cardiovascular risk, but most do show some or even comparable to ibuprofen.

Convenience vs ibuprofen is a thing given the longer half life, but it still generally comes with similar risks. If you are taking anything for more than just an occasional headache, definitely discuss with a doctor, COX2 selectives like celecoxib may be a better risk profile and even more convenient.

(COX1 and COX2 selectivity loosely separate which systems get the brunt of the side effects)

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