padolsey

TL;DR: Glorified contract role for integrating your employer's APIs with enterprise customers. Like working with mckinsey vibe PMs and being sold on fat margins you'll see none of? Perfect!

I love these!

Highly relevant: "Why So Many Control Rooms Were Seafoam Green"

Link: https://bethmathews.substack.com/p/why-so-many-control-rooms...

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47518960 (3 months ago)

That's good. I wonder if it should be opt-in instead of opt-out. Disabled people are arguably less able to find random configuration options than non-disabled counterparts. I get a bit bothered with how undiscoverable these options are. But power-users by their nature don't mind going to the extra mile to get perf out of their experiences.

The author suggests they want three clicks at any pace to always == the same functionality, so they can whiz through their photos and rotate each predictably. Fair.

And it would be so much more predictable and pleasant if you could just tap the button three times at any pace you wanted without thinking, without paying attention, without getting your UI blocked by an animation that no longer helps you.

They cite accessibility.

The thing is, I can imagine the complete opposite side of the argument, where someone with motor impairments or parkinson's, for example, ideally liking if their over-clicks were ignored if they'd already locked-in their intention.

It's tricky to get this stuff right.

Rendered div soup with pictures of data isn't a web standard and shouldn't be professing to be built for a11y.

This is just the 'LLM judge', very badly implemented without any scientific prudence. What a joke. To be terse: you cannot rely on LLMs to provide standardized scores against arbitrary criteria. To get close to 'reliable' you would need highly tested rubrics, grounded in human decision-making, and you'd need to avoid all the measurement biases these things are riddled with... positional/order effects, anchoring on whatever numbers you stuffed into your own prompt, scale-format sensitivity (a 1–5 and an A–E scale give different answers for the same input), holistic-vs-isolated context effects, and lovely examples like where adding a "be unbiased" instruction makes it more biased. I've studied this at length. You cannot even _begin_ to approach this problem seriously without held-out validation, inter-rater agreement, and ground truth. This repo is just quagmire of wishful vibes with random numbers littered throughout.

These vast multi-agentic systems with roles like 'Researcher', 'Writer' (with a review loop), 'Reflection agent', seem to ~feel~ mostly right but lack evals as to the merit of agent decomposition. So it forms a satisfying enough flowchart but I see no evidence these authors actually tried other approaches or agent roles. And let's be honest: an agent is just a system prompt and output contracts, and these rich architectures seem to be pontificating beyond their worth. It all feels a bit vibe-y.

Chalkboard, pencil and paper are also technology. Ban them. Instead rely purely on the vocal chords to tell stories of old.

Tbf this is what 'defence in depth' is and it kinda works.. until it doesn't.

The most extreme virtue-signal is to go completely browser-default and have no styling whatsoever. Like lowercasing because your pinky can't be arsed to reach for the shift-key even though you've a billion dollars in series A.

Where cash is stigmatized? I haven't seen such a place except PRC.

I don't know about stigma, per se, but there are a few places where businesses have a pretty explicit legal right to refuse cash, UK, Netherlands, Sweden, US. Oddly in PRC refusing cash is illegal.

covering such lovely topics as the hardest day of my life, my biggest life challenges, and other similar “trauma-baiting” questions.

And this was for a mental health startup!? Please name-and-shame them. Awful.

Does anyone know how this even happens inside the walls of google? Is it an automated process? How is such a (presumably) high revenue account just magically blocked without human intervention? I'm quite perplexed.

Nah the bounce is gorgeous

My understanding was that strokes caused brain cell death, and that there was no coming back from that, but my neurologists would speak of 'bruised' brain cells, and that after weeks or months or even years you can see recovered function. UCLA's work here is targeting this disconnection and the lost rhythm in the surviving, distant networks. However there is, as yet, NO concievable intervention that could recover function from cell death at that center of the infarct.

For a 'happy map' there is a bizarrely puritanical deficit of orgasms. EDIT: oh wait I found one about backrubbing. That's nice I guess.

This is fun. I'd like to see the same idea but oriented for richer tokens instead of simpler tokens. If you want to spend less tokens, then spend the 'good' ones. So, instead of saying 'make good' you could say 'improve idiomatically' or something. Depends on one's needs. I try to imagine every single token as an opportunity to bend/expand/limit the geometries I have access to. Language is a beautiful modulator to apply to reality, so I'll wager applying it with pedantic finesse will bring finer outputs than brutish humphs of cavemen. But let's see the benchmarks!

Knowing the nature of a test ahead of time, building out your capabilities and tooling before entering the exam hall when your peers don't have that advantage, makes you a cheater.

If true, this is essentially what Dspy does https://github.com/stanfordnlp/dspy (it was made back in 2023)

Precisely. I dare say software developers bemoaning this new world don't realise that they - too - are supplanters of a prior world. A sweet irony.

Does it have to be mutually exclusive? On-the-fly software does not destroy software. Gatekeeping software creation does not mean shoving the existing creators out, it just means creating a larger space that others can occupy, like when 'real' programmers had to slowly permit 'script kiddies' into their spaces. All feels a bit 'old guard' vs 'new guard'.

There is indeed a painful dissonance here. I like this new world, but feel sorrow for the loss of something. I try to remember how empowering AI is. It is already allowing millions of people to finally use the devices they've been sitting in front of all these years. No longer do they have to feel constrained by software creators who have made choices for them. Now it is their tool through-and-through, and they can construct software on-the-fly to match their needs precisely. They have been buying computers with both hands tied behind their backs. Now they are in control.

Can anyone familiar with the technology help disillusion naive people like me as to why on earth palantir needs to exist? It feels like a big pile of nothing. But tbf that's how I feel about Salesforce and Jira too. Big fat database schemas with big fat CRUD atop and layers of snazzy sparklines to make PMs and clients feel nurtured and fuzzy that they've done something material.

Yep :/ There are just no good heuristics left for quality clothing. It's horrible. One thing I do genuinely have good experience with is Japanese denim. But that's about it.

My approach is that, "you may as well" hammer Claude and get it to brute-force-investigate your codebase; worst case, you learn nothing and get a bunch of false-positive nonsense. Best case, you get new visibility into issues. Of _course_ you should be doing your own in-depth audits, but the plain fact is that people do not have time, or do not care sufficiently. But you can set up a battery of agents to do this work for you. So.. why not?

I work in software and for single line I write I read hundredths of them.

I'm not sure whether this should humble or confuse me. I am definitely WAY heavier on the write-side of this equation. I love programming. And writing. I love them both so much that I wrote a book about programming. But I don't like reading other peoples' code. Nor reading generally. I can't read faster than I can talk. I envy those who can. So, reading code has always been a pain. That said, I love little clever golf-y code, nuggets of perl or bitwise magic. But whole reams of code? Hundreds upon hundreds of lines? Gosh no. But I respect anyone who has that patience. FWIW I find that one can still gain incredibly rich understanding without having to read too heavily by finding the implied contracts/interfaces and then writing up a bunch of assertions to see if you're right, TDD style.

Not a group per se but I maintain an index of 'good' people in tech here, and their contraries - https://goodindex.org

Before you fully delete your account, don't forget to first save your chats! Go to https://chatgpt.com/#settings/DataControls and click Export under "Export Data".

The AI industry, and SV tech generally, has a pattern of recruiting talent by flattering people's self-image as builders and discoverers, which makes it psychologically very difficult for those people to reckon honestly with downstream harm.

Because no one believes these laws or bills or acts or whatever will be enforced.

Time will tell. Texas' sat on its biometric data act quite quietly then hammered meta with a $1.4B settlement 20 years after the bill's enactment. Once these laws are enacted, they lay quietly until someone has a big enough bone to pick with someone else. There are already many traumatic events occurring downstream from slapdash AI development.