shruubi

Joined 14 years ago

Karma
855
Submissions
156
Member since
Jul 23
I build programs which run on machines you don't own and talk to programs on some other machines you don't own, and call it "web-scale".
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Recent submissions

Comment · 1 month ago
In the last stretch of finishing off Malazan Book of the Fallen, currently about a third of the way through Dust of Dreams so hoping to have finished the series by the end of this year.
Comment · 3 months ago
This is why you should refuse to participate in these "trust and honesty sessions". You don't owe your employer or colleagues any insight into your personal life and the HR people who often run these sessions are there for the company, not for you and generally should not be trusted with personal info.
Comment · 3 months ago
> n+0 friends

Does this still hold if n=0?

Comment · 4 months ago
I have a theory, this is obviously based on speculation based on how Anthropic is treating Mythos and the whole media noise around it's dangers and who gets access to it.

My theory is that Anthropic are banking on being the top model when the race to IPO finally reaches the finish line, and to do that they need to have the top model but not let any competitors see it or derive from it to have a comparable model in the market.

Fable is their way of showing the public "the model does exist but in a mode that makes it harder/impossible for competitors to derive a comparable model from results.

Comment · 5 months ago
You are absolutely not a "random person on the internet", you are a very public figure with the wealth and influence available to you that could allow you to take revenge on someone who says something you don't like in real, life-altering ways. Now, I'm not saying that you would do that, but it is a shocking lack of self-awareness to think of yourself as a random person on the internet.
Comment · 6 months ago
Am I the only one who looks at guys like Addy Osmani and Steve Yegge who before LLM's had a good reputation and since then get the feeling they are cashing that reputation in to ride the LLM hype-cycle? Or is it just a matter of professional tech talking heads moving from writing books and giving conference talks about good engineering practices to talking about the new hot topic that sells books and conference tickets?
Comment · 6 months ago
Honestly, things like this just depress me. Someone makes a mistake and then they try to cover themselves by saying "Yeah I am somewhat to blame, but look at all these other things that are more to blame". They seem responsible by appearing to take accountability but in actuality are pushing accountability onto everyone else before themselves.

Then, to get clicks and attention we then ask the AI to write some kind of "confession". It's a probability engine, it has no thoughts or feelings you can hurt or shame into doing better, it has no long term memory to burn the embarrassment of this into and in fact given the same circumstances it is probable that the agent would do the same thing again and again no matter how many confessions you have it write or how mean you write to it.

Ultimately, you are the operator of the machine and the AI, and despite what OpenAI/Anthropic/Whomever say, you are required to exist because the machine cannot operate without you being there nor can it be accountable for what it does.

Comment · 6 months ago
Two questions

1) Do you not feel self-conscious or weird about calling this "EvanFlow"? Seems like a lot of people these days are naming their AI tools/skills/whatever after themselves which seems self-absorbed. Either that or they hope that if their thing takes off like OpenClaw did then they'll grab the fame that comes along with it.

2) Why does your TDD flow miss the refactor step of TDD?

Comment · 7 months ago
If Meta paid more than ten dollars for this then that is eleven dollars too much...
Comment · 7 months ago
Amazon - Where the beatings and layoffs will continue until AI usage improves.
Comment · 8 months ago
> Models are getting 99% more efficient every 3 years - to get the same amount of output, combined with hardware and (mostly) software upgrades - you can use 99% less power.

This is such a poor argument for a number of reasons.

1. Three years ago is basically when the "AI race" really kicked off amongst the frontier companies. You're effectively comparing a car from the 1920/30's to a modern car.

2. Past performance is not an indicator of future performance. You can't just say that LLM's will grow and improve at a fixed rate for all time, that isn't how they or anything else works in the real world.

3. Since it's an open secret that companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are running their models at a loss, a static 99% cheaper every three years arc still puts these companies at a net negative position unless compute, energy and water all somehow start getting 99% cheaper every three years.

Comment · 8 months ago
I realize that the example is contrived, but what is the point of writing a test of a fibonacci function if your test harness is designed to just take whatever it tells you and updates the assert to verify that what it told you is indeed what it just told you.

This assumes the code you wrote is already correct and giving the correct answer, so why bother writing tests? If, however you accept that you may have got it wrong, figure out the expected outcome through some reliable means (in this case, dig out your old TI-89), get the result and write your test to assert against a known correct value.

I wouldn't trust any tests that are written this way.

Comment · 9 months ago
I'm willing to admit I may be the odd one out here, but I find this entire article to paint the author as self-entitled and manipulative.

> One might even call the art of accepting generosity a type of compassion.

People may feel good about themselves after performing an act of kindness, but this sentence makes it sound like the author is gifting them the opportunity to go out of their way to do things for him.

And all of these stories of wandering around Asia for eight years sound more like he deliberately put himself in positions to guilt people who culturally feel obligated towards generosity. These don't read like stories of kindness to me, but someone bragging about all the people he manipulated, and then recycled all these stories of manipulation into some ridiculous idea that he is the truly compassionate and kind person because he is accepting their kindness.

Comment · 10 months ago
So not only are we measuring lines of code as a productivity metric as though that has any actual relation to productivity, but across the board they are boasting that lines of code is going up and PR density is getting bigger as well.

Those numbers should be seen as a giant red flag, not as any kind of positive.

Comment · 11 months ago
I understand the intention of what the author is trying to achieve, but I think the problem they will run into is how do you define "evil" in a legal document or license? There is a subset of acts and beliefs that wider society has deemed "evil", but I doubt large corporations are actively supporting sexual assault, torture, murder etc. What the author is referring to is things they find morally reprehensible but do not reach the level of the aforementioned acts enough to be expressly illegal and evil (and whether they are or not, IANAL).

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