ranman

Joined 15 years ago

Karma
1,440
Submissions
423
Member since
May 9
Caylent CTO. Formerly of Facebook, AWS, SpaceX, MongoDB, and NASA. Opinions expressed here are my own and don't represent my employer.

[email protected]

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/ranman; my proof: https://keybase.io/ranman/sigs/GS3wz0ln3f5bJCGpSPMkU24SwdykGnldpDoA1i8Optw ]

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Recent submissions

Comment · 10 days ago
Why not put these in the HTML instead of as videos?
Comment · 6 months ago
They'll cut you a private offer for bedrock tokens but bedrock has a 32k output limit
Comment · 7 months ago
Which countries? Density matters but raw volume matters too.
Comment · 7 months ago
Route53 being off on the side but unconnected is still valuable info...
Comment · 8 months ago
It's a little ironic that the text wrap doesn't work on some of these examples on WebKit.
Comment · 1 year ago
Eventually he'll be about tree fitty
Comment · 1 year ago
> we built the LLMs unethically, and that they waste far more energy than they return in value

If these are the priors why would I keep reading?

Comment · 1 year ago
Caylent has been testing this for quite some time and I have to say it's an interesting take. With claude code you can shift between planning and coding modes and this offers a similar approach. The speed is quite good and the results are solid. The spec approach is solid but it takes a learning curve. Some of the tooling and autojumps take a bit to get used to because they differ from the other IDE approaches.

Overall I do believe this has accelerated our development and I'm interested to see where it goes. I don't think it's a direct comparison to claude code or cursor - its a different approach with some overlap.

Comment · 1 year ago
Humanity fails that question an embarrassingly large number of times.
Comment · 2 years ago
You get a scale at AWS that is hard to find elsewhere. There are still a huge number of very smart people there. You can learn a lot. I loved my time at AWS.

That said there are a ton of cons. There's an entrenched management class that is disconnected from reality. There are a number of ~L8-L10 folks who don't believe or understand how they're falling behind the cloudflares and other providers. There is a bizarre arrogance in Seattle that masquerades as "willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time". People aren't afraid enough.

What AWS will struggle with over the next few years is verifying the results of the narratives they tell themselves. At some point along their evolution a disconnect between narrative and reality happened and someone needs to bring everything back to a baseline of reality. Leaders tell a story of their success (that I'm sure they themselves believe) and no one follows through to actually verify the results.

This issue of lack of narrative/reality baseline, to me, is a cancer at the heart of AWS and if it can be addressed then I think they can recover and shine. Otherwise they'll fall into the same trap as MSFT back in the 90s/2000s where they think everything is going just fine while the floor falls out from under them.

Comment · 2 years ago
Someone mentioned that this took almost as much compute to train as the original model.
Comment · 2 years ago
I don't get this take... what is the scam part? It's a real device that people can buy, and it does what it was purported to do... maybe it's not as amazing as people hoped, but does that make it a scam?
Comment · 2 years ago
Do 3/4 say it does more good than harm?
Comment · 2 years ago
I'd love to see one of these for migrating from Claude's prompt API to their messaging API
Comment · 2 years ago
Be lucky?

I don't have any particular advice. I've been very lucky to join a few companies that were on the run up at the time but I never really knew at the time that they were going to be successful.

I just think blindly pursuing passion to the exclusion of profit will leave most people happy (or not) but impoverished and some people happy, lucky, and wealthy.

It was really just a tongue in cheek comment. I think Paul's advice is inspirational but it should be checked with a healthy dose of reality.

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