fdye

I've never understood why anti-scalpers just don't work backwards from shipping address. Are these scalpers all really keeping hundreds of actual physical addresses they can receive packages at? Like if you see the limited product has 100 orders going to the same building, or apartment, or whatever then flag it before it goes out. Limit PO Boxes, etc.

Sure they can find mules to buy+receive one and then sell to the scalper, but the more steps you put in the better. Same for the people scamming Sam's club by buying memberships, ordering limited items, then refunding the membership. Just lock orders to members older then >1yr and make sure it only ships to the actual physical address attached to the membership. Flag multiple memberships at the same address.

I've run a modest shipping op and the second I saw even a couple orders of the same product going to the same address I would halt it and do additional verification.

Synthropic | Detection Engineer + GenAI | Full-time / Part-time | Remote (SF) We're an early-stage startup looking for someone passionate about detection engineering and generative AI.

If you know SIEM, threat intel, logs, detection modeling/strategy, purple teaming, and adversary emulation — and you've been wanting to explore how LLMs/agents can accelerate detection engineering workflows — we'd love to talk.

The role A lot of it is what we call AI babysitting: guiding 1,000 kindergarteners (LLMs) as they try to become senior detection engineers. Sometimes they're brilliant, sometimes chaotic — your job is to shape that into something production-ready.

You'll be part detection engineer, part researcher, part builder, with a big say in shaping the product and how AI gets applied to real-world problems.

Details Full-time or part-time Remote-friendly (SF-based, local a plus but not required) Early team, high ownership, fast iteration

Email Resume: john at synthropic.com

Synthropic | Detection Engineer + GenAI | Full-time / Part-time | Remote (SF)

We're an early-stage startup looking for someone passionate about detection engineering and generative AI.

If you know SIEM, threat intel, logs, detection modeling/strategy, purple teaming, and adversary emulation — and you've been wanting to explore how LLMs/agents can accelerate detection engineering workflows — we'd love to talk.

The role A lot of it is what we call AI babysitting: guiding 1,000 kindergarteners (LLMs) as they try to become senior detection engineers. Sometimes they're brilliant, sometimes chaotic — your job is to shape that into something production-ready.

You'll be part detection engineer, part researcher, part builder, with a big say in shaping the product and how AI gets applied to real-world problems.

Details Full-time or part-time Remote-friendly (SF-based, local a plus but not required) Early team, high ownership, fast iteration

Email Resume: john at synthropic.com

Yeah MCP isn't really doing a whole lot. You can give an LLM a generic HTTP extension. Then list a series of GET/POST/PUT and ask it to form the calls and parse the response. The problem is its not really ideal as the calls aren't natural language and its common for it to misguess the next token and mess up things like the route, body, headers, with a hallucination. So people started shortening these calls to simple things like read_file, etc. Prior to MCP there was a ton of playgrounds doing this with simple Playwright functions.

The thing that surprises me is with MCP we have shirked all of the existing tools around OpenAPI specs, OIDC, etc. We could have created a system where all 'services' expose a mcp.slack.com/definition endpoint or something that spit back a list of shortcut terms like send_message and a translation function that composes it into the correct HTTP API (what most MCP servers do). For security we could have had the LLM establish its identity via all our existing systems like OIDC that combine authentication and authorization.

In the system above you would not "install an mcp package" as in a code repo or server. Instead you would allow your LLM to access slack, it would then prompt you to login via OIDC and establish your identity and access level. Then it would grab the OpenAPI spec (machine readable) and the LLM focused shortcuts 'send_message', 'read_message', etc. LLM composes 'send_message Hello World' -> translates to HTTP POST slack.com/message or whatever and bob's your uncle.

If you wanted to do fancy stuff with local systems then you could still build your own server the same way we have all built HTTP servers for decades and just expose the mcp.whatever.com subdomain for discovery. Then skip OIDC or allow ALL or something to simplify if you want.

Interesting read. Curious how the author feels re: the attack on airbases using shipping containers/drones that was so successful?

Seems to be a unique case that worked especially well for (higher end I'm sure) FPV drones. Getting artillery in on shipping containers would have a higher likelihood of detection. Similarly, the ability to 'guide' in the drones with munitions seemed to allow for greater flexibility during the attack and its effectiveness.

I imagine eventually these cheap FPV's will be augmented with low-cost GPU's allowing for running smallish models and self-guided autonomy. This would seem the next evolution where a commander deploys them in bulk and overwhelms the enemy in a way that can't be jammed like radio-communication. Similarly, horrifying when you consider their eventual use in terrorism scenarios...

8Flow.ai | Founding Backend Engineer | FT | OnSite | San Mateo

-- Key skills: Nodejs/Typescript, Python, Nextjs, Terraform, CI/CD, ETL (Airflow), Postgres/Mongo

-- 2-5+ years of experience with strong academic background and excellent communication skills.

-- Full-time, on-site position with equity options and comprehensive health benefits.

8Flow.ai | Founding ML Eng. | FT | OnSite | San Mateo

-- Key skills: Python, Tensorflow, PyTorch (or similar), AWS

-- Design and develop machine learning models for various applications, including but not limited to transformers, hidden Markov models, GRUs, BERT, GPT, LSTMs, reinforcement learning models, and diffusion models.

-- Expertly preprocess and encode unstructured, time series, and structured data into suitable formats for diverse machine learning models.

-- Implement cutting-edge machine learning algorithms and frameworks to solve complex problems.

-- 4-5+ years of experience with strong academic background and excellent communication skills.

-- Full-time, on-site position with equity options and comprehensive health benefits.

Send resume and any relevant projects or links to frank (at) 8flow.com

8Flow.ai | Founder's Associate | FT | OnSite | Palo Alto, West Hollywood

Launch Your Career in Tech: Work directly with our CEO in a high-growth startup.

-- Key skills: Business, Economics, Computer Science; data analysis, strategic planning, project management.

-- 1-2 years of experience (recent graduate) with strong academic background and excellent communication skills.

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Send resume and any relevant projects or links to jobs (at) 8flow.com

So as someone who took many of those remedial math classes this article rubbed me a bit the wrong way. Not necessarily that any of his descriptions are wrong about the students or the type of things it covers. Instead there seemed to be this underlying theme in the article about it being a waste of time and of little value to society. I strongly feel any time us as humans sit in a classroom and try to better ourselves even when we ultimately fail, it benefits society overall.

Personally, I was in the basic math in High school, like long division/multiplication freshmen/sophomore year. When I first went to community college around the age of 16-19 I got farther, taking Algebra I and then II. However, once I reached Calculus I crashed and burned, although I did great in my CS and other science classes.

I eventually entered the work force (programming/tech) and over the next half dozen years tried and failed at least 3 times to restart at community college usually failing at Calculus I or college level english. Finally, at 30 it seemed to take, I eventually passed Calc I, Discrete, Linear, got my degree. A blend of community college and state school so I didn't break the bank.

I have friends from other sides of the world that have told me this would only really be possible in the US. In many places their is no equivalent of community/junior colleges or an attempt at adult remedial education. Instead you place in your teens, and if you score well enough you get to go to college. Otherwise, its trade school or similar and much more difficult to escape your socio-economic class. The author and others seem to be advocating for something similar here under the guise of it being unethical to waste resources or give hope to the dumb dumbs. I can't say I agree...

8flow.ai | Backend, Front-End, & Data Scientist/ML Engineer | FT/Contract | OnSite | Palo Alto

Backend Engineer, $120-140K/yr:

  --  Contribute to our AI-driven personalized automation platform.
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Interested in being a part of AI-driven innovation? Email your resume/LinkedIn and a brief introduction to frank at 8flow.com

So my $0.02 from being on both the hiring and trying to get hired side of the fence. Also I can't do a whiteboard interview to save my life, never could. I mostly think the process everyone is running makes a bit more sense for entry-level applicants. You are dealing with a candidate pool exactly like what you describe above. However, for anything above a junior dev it is horribly inefficient.

Instead I'm always surprised more places don't rely on references and prior experience. Yes people lie, but in my experience its relatively easy to tell the difference with a simple glance at their LinkedIn. If I look at a candidate that spent 2-3 yrs as a Software Engineer at some company that I'm relatively familiar with, and they seem to have 2nds and thirds to people I know in the industry, then pretty good chance they aren't lying. Same for people taking the time out to write recommendations for them. Even bigger signal if they want setup some calls with their prior co-workers who can vouch for them, to me that means they stand by their work and reputation.

I recently went through about seven rounds for a senior role. During that time I repeatedly offered to setup some time with my prior coworkers from those I directly managed, to peers, to those I reported to (executive team). My thinking being that they could hear from the horses mouth how I lead a team, my work ethic, etc. They did not take me up on the offer, which to me was crazy. Yes, I could be running some machiavellian scam with 2-3 people who also made a fake LinkedIn, I also could have put up fake articles in PR Newswire announcing my last position, could have spoofed all those blogs I co-authored from the company I worked at 2 jobs ago, etc. But really, wouldn't it be a better signal for a candidate to offer and have all these things?

Instead you see an industry that puts someone with ~10 yrs experience through a whiteboard interview. It makes no sense.

Honestly, I feel like this is another bi-product of 0% interest rates for so long. Bankers have essentially stopped caring at all about deposit amounts. Many banks still offer 0.x% interest even with most T-bills paying 5%+. It is an odd position from something that should be easy business, receive billions in deposits, invest in 6 month T-bills, carve off 0.5-1% of the profit amount for yourself, profit?

I'm convinced this is less about them actually losing money and more about them having sour grapes about not making 100x or something. Like the credit card is losing money when it is immensely popular and charges like 18% interest, HOW?

Agree this is a UX problem. They need an option, "Pay minimum + X amount each month" so a user could set it to be $25 for their min + $50 to pay down a bit of the balance. This is actually the prescribed way most places recommend to repair or keep a high credit score. If you pay it entirely off you get dinged, if you just pay minimums you get dinged.

Scientist lurkers in the thread take note. We have a couple for the first cohort for testing to see if their mouth biome differs from base population. Inquiring minds want to know!

So within the existing population today there exist individuals who essentially never get cavities. The hypothesis for this has been 1. they don't eat sugar, or only fibrous foods, etc. 2. They have a genetic difference that builds stronger enamel or similar.

I have never heard of anyone discussing bacteria in the mouth as a possible difference. Be interested to see if there is a natural strand that some people have present that could also be a culprit.

There has been modest support for this concept in term of gut bacteria, i.e. thin people who donate their excrement to fat people seem to inoculate them with a gut biome that helps them lose weight, or deal with digestive issues.

There is a decent episode on this on The Daily by the NYT. Gives some historical context of the give and take of the unions and big 3.

One takeaway, this particular new union leader is the first directly elected one in a very long time. Prior to this the union leader was selected in a good 'ole boys manner by union reps and sort of rotated. After the justice department found quite a bit of graft and bribery they required a new election and Shawn Fain won in a razor thin recount.

As a result the UAW for the first time in a long time got a populist representative of the average union worker, thus the hard line strike. So for those of you against unions because of corruption, etc. This is what it looks like when there is at least less of that, a good thing.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/12/podcasts/the-daily/ford-g...

1. So this is a gambit in the contract negotiations, its unlikely to be taken seriously but can be given up at a later date. The first stage of these negotiations always has a ton of these whacky asks.

2. Since the concessions the union made in '00 (?) there has been a two tiered pay rate system. Essentially, 1/2 the wages for new hires (was like $28/hr for vets and $15 for newbies in '00). This has caused the big 3 to lean on newbie wages and sometimes do required work 6/7 days a week for >10 hrs a shift. So the new union boss is trying to make a point that equal pay needs to come back along with work/life balance even for factory workers.

3. I did some off the cuff math, GM+Ford+Stellantis did stock buybacks of AT LEAST 9 Billion to shareholders in '22. Estimates of the current kinda crazy opening bid at 40% raises + other incidentals is a cumulative 80Billion split between the big 3 from september of '23->september of '27 so 4 years or ~20Billion a year. A big number but remember the big 3 made something like 50 billion in profit, even subtracting that stock buyback first. So effectively the union is asking for 2/5ths of profits, or 1/3rd if you add in the stock buyback.

tldr; the money is there. The big 3 offerred a 10% raise, union wants 40%. My guess is they meet somewhere around 25%. Or about a year of profits over a 4 year contract. Big 3 would be stupid not to agree they are making money hand over fist and this still leaves them plenty of room to stay nimble. In addition they are losing billions a week with this strike.

I once saw a young lady in the lab in Soda hall getting obviously frustrated. A few moments later she exclaimed, "Why is it so f**ing hard!" and then as if in a cartoon slammed her forehead into the lab computers keyboard repeatedly before a TA noticed and came over to help. It was like something out of a cartoon. I've taken CS/Programming courses at a few institutions and never seen quite that level of despair/frustration. Maybe its just a CAL thing, I didn't end up transferring to CAL in the end so CS61A was the only class I did on campus, so can't really say.

Took CS61AL (Lab version) about a decade ago. Even knowing how to program and working in industry for several years it was not easy. I think my class was one of the last to use Scheme before they switched towards Python and was entirely taught with SICP Book. Probably the biggest difference between sort of traditional programming courses and CS61AL is you have to essentially understand and do recursion day one. It sort of blew my mind compared to the way I learned because generally you do simple statement programs, then functions, then for, while, do while, etc. Then finally around maybe chapter 10 in a traditional book you get to recursion. CS61AL, SICP, and its lots are great, but they very quickly touch on discrete math and calculus concepts and how they relate to programming/CS. Ditto for first-class functions and Lambda's, all introduced very soon in CS61A. Great course though, was a serious challenge from something I thought I would skate through. Definitely made me a better programmer.

Also board from back to front. Yes first class has to wait, but it would save so much time. Even if they boarded first class then did the rest of the plane back to front it would speed up loading by like a good 10 minutes most likely.

So I guess "Whistle-blower" is appropriate here, but marketing a "batch" processing system as "real-time" seems to be a bit of a nothing-burger in my mind. I think the more telling thing is he seems to have raised this multiple times to various superiors and not gotten the hint that they weren't concerned. Someone at a VP level (especially at Salesforce) should have enough corporate etiquette to get the hint. Unless he believed this would literally be hurting/killing people (and I find the hospital/care marketing laughable) it doesn't seem appropriate to not accept "I heard your concerns but we will still be launching on X." He is certainly not financially liable for an overzealous marketing department. I've certainly raised concerns from a technical perspective to be shot down in launch meetings, particularly around marketing claims. However, at a certain point you do your best and start supporting the team effort.

So I haven't ridden the Loop in Vegas, but have seen the videos of people riding it. My first thought was what happens when one of those lithium-ion batteries malfunctions in such a small space? Did they install fire suppressant? How is the ventilation? The idea of being trapped inside while a battery cooks off would be my nightmare...

What I think is interesting, at least in the case of Veritas default in SF, is that they are then allowed to bid to buy the debt at a discounted price. They are using a different financial backer and likely just management on the properties, but still it seems like if you mismanage your portfolio so bad you default you probably then shouldn't be allowed to rebuy those same properties. If they wanted a debt restructuring they should have been forced through bankruptcy.

https://therealdeal.com/sanfrancisco/2023/05/31/veritas-to-b...

Good lord, $26.4K. Yeah not quite car-level worth it to me, although I'm sure they are very nice. Was thinking like $250-300, for a sort of anti-tech punk thing at tech parties.

The irony of this is Google is very much a culture of spending vast amounts of resources on internal/external tools. They have a significant product category in GSuite. So when I see them making statements about the effectiveness of in person it boggles my mind. You are quite literally in the business of providing productivity tools, many of them facilitating remote work/meetings. How on earth do you go on records making a statement like that? Shouldn't the Google ethos be to improve those offerings to compensate for any perceived shortcomings from not being in person? This is like Zoom saying everyone should go back to in person meetings and flying execs all over the country for business pitches. Incredible...

Did a tour on some business of Vogtle-3/4 several years back. You have no idea how big or complex these things are until you see it up close. It feels like watching the pyramids go up. Just the amount of rebar on the ground was impressive. So happy to see it going into operation even with all the delays!

Really cool timelapse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSEv_K9861E

Wish this was for sale... shut up and take my money!

I'll try to give sort of another analogy. With everyone at home on an individual laptop there is essentially one channel of communication. A single audio and video channel showing the presentation, or someones face talking, or whatever. The entire group is focusing all attention and communication in the same place, sure some may be zoning out, but its consistent. Now take the example of a room of six people, a whiteboard, and two remote. We essentially have two or more communications channel for those in the room together, and a single channel for everyone on zoom. Sure they can see a birds eye of people sitting in chairs around a table, maybe the camera focuses to varying crap degrees on who's talking. The whiteboard may be a camera focused on it, or one of those magic board thingies (again just use lucidchart or something over zoom, its better). There are cross-conversations, or mannerisms, conversations are likely muffled or speaking over each other, its generally very poor for those not in the room.

I don't think we're actually disagreeing, I agree if you can get everyone in a room then cool, its likely better. However, in terms of RTO, if you are a large F500 company you should look at your employees day-to-day and calendars. If the bulk of them are zoom meetings with people in other locations (different buildings, floors, etc) where it is unlikely they will be able to all get in the same physical location, then the axiom holds and you should just let them take it from home.

The problem with RTO is a fundamental axiom, "If >1 person on a meeting needs zoom, everyone should stay home". Hear me out, that one person can be the CEO in the hamptons, Jenny who just had a kid and is easing back in after matleave, the sales prospect from another company, etc. All it takes is one and it makes everything a giant waste of time. Because for everyone in office, they had to commute, find a conference room, spend money on lunch (usually), then sit on a zoom call in the office. I've tried all the teleconference thingamagigies, cameras on whiteboards, all of it. If > 1 person has to be on zoom, then everyone might as well be at home individually on their laptops showing a powerpoint or using lucidchart(or similar) to whiteboard. Yes if everyone is at the office sharing a conference room, white boarding it out, that can be great. However, at any office of sufficient size that is a RARITY! My last company we had teams all over the world, so it was silly to sit in a special conference room and try to get zoom to show our whiteboard or whatever. End rant.

This is just using the AI hype as cover to not get slammed by the markets. If they came out and said "We are pausing hiring..." the markets would rightly be like "Man they are screwed..."

Expect to see more of this from zombie companies in the future, as long as they spend $20/mo on a ChatGPT subscription somewhere they are probably not violating SEC disclosures either.

Hi, I'm Frank. Location: San Francisco, CA

Remote: Yes, open to hybrid as well.

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Technologies/Skills: Full-stack web development, Node.js, C/C++, Python, React/Angular, NoSQL, SQL, CI/CD, DevOps, SDLC

Email: frank at frankdye.com

Résumé/CV: Available upon request.

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/frankdye

Just coming off a successful acquisition where I served as Head of Engineering for a Series A cybersecurity startup. I'm a seasoned software engineer and leader with a strong background in product strategy, implementation, team management, and cybersecurity. I excel at driving software development and shaping architecture to enhance engineering culture, attract top talent, and ensure corporate compliance.

Throughout my career, I've led diverse engineering teams and launched successful products, setting the stage for innovation and impact. I'm excited to bring my expertise to a company that aligns with my passion for driving innovation and creating groundbreaking technology solutions that drive results, with a particular focus on cybersecurity. Let's chat if you're looking for someone who can build, lead, and inspire teams to make a difference.