kelseydh

StackOverflow jobs was great when it existed, found great opportunities through there. So dumb they killed it especially with LLM's eating their core business.

I suspect when you load a big fridge with lots of room temperature product (does that happen?) the fridge struggles to maintain adequate cold. Though that still seems like something the fridge itself could handle locally.

Surely, these fridges weren't doing inventory tracking? (Or were they?)

Methanol poisoning is another risk.

Methanol is a natural fermentation byproduct of pectin breakdown of fruits like plums, cherries, apricots as well as grapes.

Methanol collects in a still easier than ethanol. Methanol boils at approximately 64.7°C (148.5°F), while ethanol boils at 78.4°C (173.1°F). Professional distillers carefully measure and discard the initial fraction (the heads/foreshots) of a distillation run to remove the methanol. Easy for a novice to miss this key safety step.

It feels like the real value here will be from monitoring services like DataDog adding this functionality to their own internal products, rather than companies rolling their own agentic monitoring. Datadog's Bits AI is already quite helpful in scanning monitoring data for insights.

Looks it's resolved it, working for us again.

This has completely locked out our company staff from using our admin tools.

Every time a new image format comes out, I think about the compatibility crisis between apps.

E.g. Telegram still doesn't have sane support for .webp, it treats them as stickers. MacOS can take a long time to update with support for new formats. Image viewer apps even longer, many never updating to support new formats.

I have used DuckDuckGo for many years, and sadly over 75% of the time I find myself adding !g to the search to get the much better Google result. I'm not sure why I still bother with DuckDuckGo.

How do you afford to do this if you want something resembling the best that's out there right now? The hardware needed to run beefy open source models is like $15,000 to $50,000+ for a robust local multi-GPU rig, and even its performance might lag behind.

A change in the direction of protobufs to reduce serialization and transfer costs of data exchange seems most likely the next trend.

Mostly the former, but occasionally it goes back and forth for awhile as alignment need ironing out. That's the other thing about engineering arguments: both people are aligned in seeing an end result. People in online arguments don't have mutual alignment for a good outcome so they go nowhere.

I used to work in politics, where sadly, the goal is to change people's opinions. At this level I did succeed in changing many opinions.

The most effective way to change an individual's opinion is to calmly provide facts to them without commentary or judgement. No insults, no judgement, no snark. Just calmly engage with their points and empathise with them. Most opinions are formed without knowing all the facts. Presenting facts without attacking their ego is the best path for changing an opinion.

This works best on unfamiliar topics people don't yet have strong feelings about. With opinion formation, the side to set the first emotional frame has the advantage. This is why in a referendum campaign it's so critical your message reaches voters before the other side can define the ballot question.

Other things I learned

- Good marketers in politics understand psychology. Repeat exposure better encodes a message into memory. For political ads this means repeating the same key phrases/words over and over again, to a degree you and I would find weird, to ensure you encode them into the viewer's memory. With enough repeat exposure, people feel like the ideas are their own.

- Never repeat your opponent's framing of a lie. To debunk a lie: use a "truth" sandwich. State your truth first -- first frame gets the advantage. Next describe the lie in less incendiary words, debunk it, then repeat your frame on the issue repeatedly.

- Politicians start every day with coordinated key talking points for media interviews because message repetition = encoding.

- Referendum ads are particularly crazy because they have no candidate reputation to protect. They do not need to be reasonable or respectable. A referendum ad's sole purpose is to persuade with the most emotionally resonant messages it can to encode key messages/frames of thinking. Being controversial just helps to create more exposure and people seeing your message. If everybody in the media is "debating" the merits of your message frame you are winning. People vote on the issue, not on the campaign team. E.g. If an ad says X will lead to extremist neo-nazi soldiers goose-stepping the streets, people will scoff at the hyperbole while it still subconsciously encodes into them that maybe I don't want something that risks instability.

- Politics is tribal and people follow the support signals sent by elites on their favoured side. Powerful elites speaking out in favour or against something/someone greatly changes its support among coalitions.

I "argue" constantly with my coworkers: they are savage in PR reviews identifying mistakes/improvements, and I give it back the same.

It's collegial, not hostile or insulting. Yet it's arguing nonetheless. We are exchanging ideas to create better software. Using steelmans and devil's advocate to evaluate new ideas / approaches.

Ego-less arguing is easier with engineering work because people are not emotionally invested in code the way they are on a political issue.

But still, assuming California Pacific time, is that midnight, 9am, noon or ?