clintonb

Joined 15 years ago

Karma
1,555
Submissions
799
Member since
Aug 6
Engineer at Vori, formerly at Stripe

https://getfriendlyreminder.com https://clintonblackburn.com https://dev.clintonblackburn.com

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Recent submissions

Comment · 6 days ago
You can choose to not upgrade, or forego Apple TV altogether.

I say this as an Apple shareholder.

Comment · 16 days ago
So the CyberCab will drive on the ceiling of the Boring Company’s tunnel?
Comment · 25 days ago
> My guess is that truly skilled contractors in these trades are not hurting for work.

Why? Are you assuming these folks are also good at marketing, or customers are sharing via word of mouth?

I rent. I assume homeowners use AngiesList or Yelp, but those reviews don’t guarantee skill or that someone will be in high demand.

Comment · 25 days ago
Yes. Invoking an MCP tool is just an HTTP call. You can do it with curl.
Comment · 25 days ago
> Ultimately, we believe that incorporating Jev-driven diagnosis into an SRE agent’s workflow is a significant step toward effectively combining System One and System Two models.

Why? What’s the end goal? Lower cost? Faster analysis?

I configured an agent to respond to pages via Slack. It has access to ClickStack (for telemetry), Kubernetes, and GitHub. It runs one of the Sonnet models. The cost is so low, responding to less than a dozen pages a day (mostly from a very sensitive error count alarm) that swapping got Jev makes zero sense. This is especially true if the results are less trustworthy.

Comment · 29 days ago
Ink is cheaper.
Comment · 29 days ago
I wish! We put on a show for a while with tech spec reviews, but the specs were all AI slop. Now we don't even do that. Folks just work in their silos. I mostly learn of new functionality when I am assigned a code review. My feedback on those reviews is passed to an agent.

AI coding has taken away those conversations.

Comment · 29 days ago
I've struggled with these feelings over the past week as I take some time away from work and the LLM madness. I miss discussions and debates about architecture and solutions to problems. I miss the curiosity and learning!

It seems LLM usage has eroded whatever facades existed and made some of us believe we were part of teams or organizations that shared these values, or culture, I'm seeing expressed in the article and comments. Perhaps _we_ were the ones hallucinating the values existed in the first place?

I don't begrudge folks who want to solve problems by any means, and not worry about the alienation or deskilling. That's their right. However, it's now clear to me that I have to make a conscious effort to express what my own values are and to build/join and organization that shares them.

Comment · 29 days ago
I don't see the dependency amongst colleagues as a bad thing. The issues I saw when fielding those questions was folks not doing a simple search across the internal docs to answer the question themselves. Yes, LLMs make this initial search easier, and answer a majority of folks' questions.

The problem arises when it hallucinates answers. That results in colleagues operating based on invalid information, leading to bigger issues. I've seen this many times at my own company, and I simply do not know how to tell folks to be more discerning of the LLM responses while leadership is simultaneously saying do more, faster, with AI.

Comment · 1 month ago
> The idea is to give user's control of the messaging and marketers better options. SMS is good for individualized messages like you would get from loyalty programs. Our focus is on broadcasting messages to a group - we don't target an individual user by design.

Who is your ideal customer? This seems worse for marketers because it's yet another channel to integrate, and the messaging cannot be personalized. The market moved toward personalized marketing years ago, so a channel that lacks personalization seems destined to underperform.

Asking my shoppers/users to download someone else's app seems like a non-starter.

This all seems great for end-users, but terrible for the marketers/organizations that would actually be paying you.

I can see this working for conferences, but most of those have their own apps.

Comment · 1 month ago
Neat idea, but all it does is give you control over messaging my users instead of me. They need to use your app maintained by you. That’s a huge risk when SMS “just works”.

The messages are also limited to text and links, so no MMS.

Customers stopped trusting email because it became overloaded with spam. The incentive from loyalty programs (which is my primary use case) keeps trust high for SMS.

Comment · 1 month ago
I was briefly confused wondering what there is to buy on Spotify if one already has a subscription.

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