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jfaat

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Joe at joefatora dot dev

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medium.com 7mo ago

Why Software Still Sucks (and Why That's About to Change)

jfaat
1pts0
railway.instatus.com 10mo ago

Railway partial outage (unless you pay more)

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3pts1
www.npr.org 6y ago

Boeing employees mocked FAA in internal messages before 737 Max disasters

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380pts236
medium.com 7y ago

Technology makes seemingly inconvenient tasks easier — but at what cost?

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1pts0
www.theatlantic.com 8y ago

Artificial Intelligence Shows Why Atheism Is Unpopular

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11pts1
www.npr.org 8y ago

So Your Kitchen Sponge Is a Bacteria Hotbed. What to Do

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2pts0
engaugeab.com 9y ago

Type-1 and Type-2 Error Rates Explained

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1pts0
engaugeab.com 9y ago

Show HN: Engauge, A/B testing for developers

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2pts1
engaugeab.com 9y ago

The Problem with Most Client-Side A/B Testing Tools

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1pts0
engaugeab.com 9y ago

The Problem with Most Client-Side A/B Testing Tools

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1pts0
www.npr.org 9y ago

Carrying Some Extra Pounds May Not Be Good After All

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3pts0
varianceexplained.org 9y ago

Is Bayesian A/B Testing Immune to Peeking? Not Exactly

jfaat
3pts0
backchannel.com 9y ago

The Physicist Who Sees Crime Networks

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3pts2
theintercept.com 9y ago

Apple Logs your iMessage contacts, and may share them with police

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12pts0
www.newyorker.com 10y ago

What Would Happen If G.P.S. Failed?

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1pts0
www.newyorker.com 10y ago

Facebook Live: Now You Can Never Leave

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1pts1
www.newyorker.com 10y ago

Welcome to the Future: Middle-Class Housing Projects

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3pts0
www.npr.org 10y ago

Can Computer Programs Be Racist and Sexist?

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4pts1
medium.com 10y ago

Nylas N1 now has snooze, swipe actions, and more

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3pts0
www.newyorker.com 10y ago

The Ghosts in Our Machines

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2pts0
www.npr.org 10y ago

How a Suit Against Uber Could Redefine the Sharing Economy

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2pts0
www.newyorker.com 10y ago

Hiroshima (1946)

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8pts0
www.businessinsider.com 11y ago

It looks like Apple Watch sales are tanking

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3pts0
www.newyorker.com 11y ago

Two-Hit Wonder (2013)

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14pts0
www.forbes.com 11y ago

Apple Is Being Investigated for Possibly Conspiring Against Spotify

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16pts2
www.newyorker.com 11y ago

How Much Money Does Bill Clinton Need?

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3pts1
www.upout.com 11y ago

Castles That Are Cheaper Than an Apartment in San Francisco

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94pts31
www.npr.org 11y ago

Researchers Find a Hiring Bias That Favors Women

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46pts20
rexstjohn.com 11y ago

Is React Native Cross Platform Snake Oil?

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3pts2
www.newyorker.com 11y ago

Did 1995 Change Everything?

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20pts7

I disagree. The point of the frontier models is to do everything as well as possible ("AGI" race or whatever) but smaller models with some RL are going to be the clear winner for a ton of use cases. Think about all the use cases for LLMs that would never be economical at frontier inference costs, and in no way need it. You don't need or even want a phd polymath helping you with small productivity tasks that most people use computers for every day. It's often overwrought and annoying. I don't even really like the frontier models for coding for this reason. They're constantly blowing up scope and you have to fight it constantly.

That's why I'm switching to open weight models. I'm running models locally, self-hosting and using third party for various things. Like it says in the article each model has its strengths and none of the proprietary harnesses allow you to orchestrate different models depending on their strengths. It's cheaper, more flexible, private, more resistant to rug pulls, and brings back some fun to building for me vs just auto-accept, yell BAD CLAUDE when it breaks, repeat ad nauseam.

Yeah this is sounds close to my workflow and its good to hear you've find a nice flow too! It frees me up to spend that effort on doing more things in parallel and focusing way more on the specs which is usually a good idea anyway.

My whole point is that I don't want it to build an entire feature from one prompt. At most, I want to work with an agent to nail down the spec and then work with an agent that orchestrates the implementation via other agents, same for testing, etc. None of that requires frontier capabilities, it requires a little bit of work on a harness, a little bit more of my input, a little more of my brainpower. I _want_ to build tools that make it work better and don't change when the CC team gins up some default for their harness and foists it on me. I don't see that as a tradeoff at all and I think engaging in my work process more than fire and forget (and literally always in my experience fix stuff later) is more fun and rewarding once the 'holy shit this is now possible' high wears off. Doubly so once the frontier model gets nerfed mid-cycle and now I have to undo the mess because they released v*.x++ and I fell for it again by trusting it to do these agentic tasks without my involvement.

We built our own and aren't done open sourcing it but before that I got to a really good place with opencode plus some custom agents, pi family is good too although I haven't used it as much. We made an agent to design a spec, one to implement by dispatching subagents, one to validate against the plan, things like that. All of this helps claude/gpt too IME. For open models it has helped them stay out of loops (e.g. Kimi's but WAIT) and for frontier it helps them stay on task and not invent bloated patterns

but if you only want to use the best model available, it isn't there yet

I'm trying to wrap my head around exactly why so may people seem to want the best model available when it has recently become clear that most halfway decent models can write damn good code for a fraction of the price. And the frontier models get nerfed constantly so you with open weight you can get something slightly less performant but way more stable. Almost like buying a Ferrari for your daily commute instead of a Toyota or even a Mercedes.

I think there are several factors. Certainly marketing making us think we need the shiny thing which is rampant online and very smart people think they aren't susceptible to. There's a lot of really odd 'I trust Anthropic/OpenAI more than Deepseek' which tends to ignore, for starters, that you can run choose your provider and still save a ton. I also think there's some amount of addiction and brand loyalty where a Ferrari is one hell of a drive so that you turn your nose up at that sensible Toyota. Oh the other one I see used is like oh only fable can oneshot updating my embedded systems thing from 1975 to rust which is great but let's recognize how niche that is.

And it ends up just coming across as people are getting SO reliant on the tools so fast. Maybe it's ok to think and like read a few lines of code and work with these agents to convert your thing to rust or center your div. Even if coding is over which in some sense it certainly is, don't turn your mind into the wall-e people yet. I found myself guilty of this so often. It takes way more time and effort to do things via prompt and I wouldn't just open the editor and fix it because that dopamine hit of the magic the abstraction provided was so strong.

So I'm pretty much done using the 'best' (on benchmarks, if money isn't an object, etc etc) models available. After a year on Sonnet/Opus/GPT5x I'm having way better results with open weights models that don't get lobotomized weekly. I'm finding ways to do the crafting part of building software by focusing on honing my harness and workflow. I'm enjoying changing the oil on my Toyota after a year of almost flying off cliffs in my Ferrari and if I can check my ego it's a purely positive thing.

Known to who? I just did a quick search didn't see anything that like a scientist or physician said about this. Someone who describes himself as a 'biohacking educator' said it without citing sources though.

Yeah that's a good idea. I played around with kimi2.5/gemini in a similar way and it's solid for the price. It would be pretty easy to build some skills out and delegate heavy lifting to better models without managing it yourself I think. This has all been driven by anthropic's shenanigans (I cancelled my max sub after almost a year both because of the opencode thing and them consistently nerfing everything for weeks to keep up the arms race.)

I see some chess players so I want to plug the chess coaching app [0] I'm building. I don't know many chess players and could use feedback, but I had been paying for chess.com premium and tried some others and it's always game-level feedback which is insane to me because it's really not that helpful (as evidenced by my abysmal rating.)

I'm running games through stockfish/lc0/Maia and doing some analysis of patterns across multiple games, then feeding that to an agent who can replay through positions and some other fun stuff. Really keen to find out if it's helpful for anyone else!

[0]https://chessfiend.com

I have a lot more to optimize before I'm crunching down the positions but I just made a chess platform[0] with the intention of tracking your play style over many games (integrated with chess.com only for now) because the other ones I've used (including chess.com somehow) only really analyze a game at a time. It was a lot of fun to build and it's been really useful for me to identify some weaknesses and have a 'coach' to talk through them with and replay positions. I'd love feedback from any chess players! (email is in my bio)

[0] https://chessfiend.com

It's really amazing. One of the greatest experiences of my life was diving at night in a bioluminescent cove. I turned off my torch and the glow from my dive buddy's finning afforded all the viz I needed. Diving always feels so viscerally otherworldly but never quite as much as it did in that moment.

I noticed railway being slow then got an error message saying deployments are paused with a nice upgrade to pro button. Status says it's fixed but still only for pro. I'm a paying user, but I guess not enough.

What language do you think they use?

Frequently, Chinese or Japanese. For example companies in these countries employ translators. Are you suggesting they rely on primary school-level English to negotiate?