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Alex3917

30,630 karma · joined February 23, 2007

Co-founder @ FWD:Everyone (www.fwdeveryone.com)

https://alexkrupp.typepad.com

https://twitter.com/alexkrupp

alex.krupp@gmail.com

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/alex3917; my proof: https://keybase.io/alex3917/sigs/fCFh_z2Dnx_9agwhK41ieQePaxwifpCJ9zpwDbWrTD4 ]

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Alex3917··on Email immutability matters more in a world with AI
There is at least one service that scrapes and archives the DKIM keys of popular websites.
Alex3917··on The history of cataract surgery
More common than needing stitches? That’s hard to believe.
Alex3917··on Inflammation now predicts heart disease more strongly than cholesterol
> It’s still the best measure we have, though you should obviously know that LDL measured while on statins is lower than it would be normally.

I'm not a doctor, but doesn't LDL basically just prevent the body from healing damage to the epithelium, which comes from things like high blood pressure and inflammation? Unless my understanding is wildly off base, it doesn't really make sense that a thing that merely slows down the healing process would be more predictive than the things causing the damage in the first place, given that if you aren't accumulating significant damage then your levels of cholesterol are somewhat moot.

Alex3917··on Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says
Seems like a reasonable policy. Given that the most talented tech workers, the ones the H1-B visas are designed to make it easier bring to the U.S., are getting $100M+ signing bonuses right now, a $100k/yr fee seems pretty trivial in comparison.
Alex3917··on Our data shows San Francisco tech workers are working Saturdays
Given that AI has made repeatedly pulling the lever on the world's biggest digital slot machine feel like building a valuable software business, is it really any wonder that a lot of the younger founders who are raising seed rounds are really just glorified tweakers? I was recently on the market for a new job, and within two months I talked with three different founders who, pre-AI, may well have been "employed" stripping bicycles for parts to sell for meth. But now, thanks to Claude and ChatGPT, these folks are now able to vibe up enough traction to raise a couple million bucks in a seed round.

The fact that most of these folks are going to fail doesn't especially bother me. After all, that was true for previous generations as well. What's different now is that a lot of these folks not only won't be coming away from these experiences having developed marketable skills, but many of them will have significant health problems that prevent them from doing so in the future.

I'm actually very bullish on the use of AI in software development overall. But when placed in the hands of folks who haven't yet had the time to develop hard skills, it both enables and incentivizes cutting corners to an alarming extent.

Alex3917··on Next.js is infuriating
> Next.js is easily the worst technology I've ever used.

To be fair, this is partly on the kind of people who use it. E.g. if you're trying to build something that's intended to last for 10+ years but you don't think it's worth it to spend the 20 hours watching the Udemy course on Angular, then your technology is going to be a complete dumpster fire no matter which stack you choose.

Alex3917··on Next.js is infuriating
Really just one major breaking refactor in 13 years, and that is partly because not only have we learned a ton, but browsers themselves have changed dramatically. I'm not going to say it was perfectly handled, but they also didn't have nearly as much support from Google back then.
Alex3917··on New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely
> I find it a tough sell to add another 20 years to life expectancy

20 years would be difficult, but 10 or so years would be very attainable.

Alex3917··on The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech
em dashes are for denoting emphasis, whereas en dashes are for connecting compound words or phrases.
Alex3917··on The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech
> I'm more talking about the particular contrastive structure.

But that's one of the main uses of emdashes, for signaling that the second half of the sentence is more important than the first half. If you Ctrl-F for emdashes on my blog, you can see I do it everywhere, even though all of my posts were written before LLMs existed:

https://alexkrupp.typepad.com/

Alex3917··on The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech
> I can't stop seeing the LLM verbiage everywhere I look.

emdashes have been pretty popular among net native folks for the last 20+ years, e.g. if you were to look back at the most popular Kuro5hin stories from ~2001 - 2005, you'd see them everywhere. People just aren't used to the average person being able to write well, so it looks weird to them.

Alex3917··on Typepad is shutting down
I mean with LLMs you just copy-paste in the input format of your new CMS and then upload your export file. Even if it only took 15 minutes before, it now takes 0 minutes.
Alex3917··on Typepad is shutting down
At least with LLMs, we can just write a query to migrate the export to whatever target format we want. The main issue is just breaking 20 years worth of inbound links.
Alex3917··on Typepad is shutting down
I have no doubt that it wasn't vc profitable, but my assumption (without any inside info) is that the real issue is that they were using some hacked up version of Movable Type that they couldn't upgrade.

It's frustrating though because imho it's arguably still the best blog platform to this day.

Alex3917··on One universal antiviral to rule them all?
This. Claims of a universal antiviral are as old as western medicine itself. Literally the only reason anyone knows what the Hippocratic oath is is because Hippocrates was already famous at the time for promoting elderberry as the universal antiviral.
Alex3917··on Let's get real about the one-person billion dollar company
> From that perspective a one person unicorn is very feasible if we think about it as building a network effect monopoly.

To build a one person unicorn, the main thing you need is an arbitrage opportunity for getting users that is unattractive to multi-person companies. Once established, this business may well turn into a network effect monopoly, but I don't think that is the crux of what is needed to get going.

Alex3917··on The surprise deprecation of GPT-4o for ChatGPT consumers
When using it to write code, what I'm seeing so far is that it's spending less effort trying to reason about how to solve problems from first principles, and more effort just blatantly stealing everything it can from open source projects.
Alex3917··on Python performance myths and fairy tales
> A decent case of Python 4.0?

I definitely agree with this eventually, but for now why not just let developers set `dynamic=False` on objects and make it opt in? This is how Google handles breaking Angular upgrades, and in practice it works great because people have multiple years to prepare for any breaking changes.

Alex3917··on So you want to parse a PDF?
> This is exactly the reason why Computer Vision approaches for parsing PDFs works so well in the real world.

One of the biggest benefits of PDFs though is that they can contain invisible data. E.g. the spec allows me to embed cryptographic proof that I've worked at the companies I claim to have worked at within my resume. But a vision-based approach obviously isn't going to be able to capture that.

Alex3917··on Live coding interviews measure stress, not coding skills
> Everyone is still guessing.

This isn't actually true, as the article points out; there is actually tons of empirical research.

Alex3917··on The half-life of tech skills
If you think about all the software you use or interact with on a daily basis, the median one is probably around 30 years old. The issue isn't that skills are becoming less valuable, it's that folks have attention spans that are too short to learn how existing systems work and/or finish what they start.
Alex3917··on Dear valued user, You have reached the error page for the error page
Yeah unfortunately they are tricky to get rid of once you have them. In theory I can forward the email from one account to another, but in practice it's hard to think through all the weird security issues that might arise from doing so.
Alex3917··on I'm switching to Python and actually liking it
I don't remember the exact details, but it basically involved something along the lines of:

1) Loop through a list of permissions in a for list

2) After the loop block, check if the user had a certain permission. The line of code performing the check was improperly indented and should have failed, but instead succeeded because the last permission from the previous loop was still in scope.

Fortunately there was no real impact because it only affected users within the same company, but it was still pretty bad.

Alex3917··on I'm switching to Python and actually liking it
> `for i in range(5): ...` will leave `i` bound to 4 after the loop. reply

This "feature" was responsible for one of the worst security issues I've seen in my career. I love Python, but the scope leakage is a mess. (And yes, I know it's common in other languages, but that shouldn't excuse it.)

Alex3917··on Show HN: Improving search ranking with chess Elo scores
Out of curiosity, is there a reason why you are using ELO proper, rather than one of the ELO variants that doesn't make assumptions about the distribution of results? E.g.:

https://github.com/pfmonville/whole_history_rating

Alex3917··on Brian Wilson has died
The ambient soundscapes of Burial's self-titled album have some similarities to the sonic soundscapes of pet sounds.
Alex3917··on Open guide to equity compensation
> And from an employee perspective, it’s almost always the right decision to place very little value ($0) on the stock option component of your offer. The vast majority of cases stock options end up worthless.

This isn't actually true from a historical perspective. The primary reason why the gap between the wealthy and and everyone is increasing is that employees started preferring cash compensation over equity. Joseph Blasi documented this in his book The Citizen's Share, and that book is why Elizabeth Warren recently passed legislation making it easier for employers to give equity to their employees.

Alex3917··on An unused nuclear power plant became home to a world-class acoustics lab
> Does the world-class acoustics lab earn so much money, it can upkeep the industrial facility its housed in?

Obviously not, but there isn't much else the space can be used for. Power plants are extremely polluted because the PCBs from the turbines and transformers drip into the concrete floors and stay there forever, so these spaces generally can't be repurposed in any meaningful way.

Alex3917··on Let's Ban Billboards
This is what Adbusters has been supposed to be advocating for for decades. Except for that instead of just focusing on getting ads banned, they switched focus and started complaining about George W. Bush instead. And that is why we still have billboard advertising to this day.

It's the best case study I know of on the importance of just sticking to your one issue and not getting caught up trying to fix everything else that's broken in the world.

Alex3917··on The Toyota Prius transformed the auto industry
The problems with the Prius are basically:

  - Terrible in snow and ice
  - No way to defrost your windshield, unless you're already driving
  - Poor rear window visibility
If not for those things it would be great, but unfortunately they've made zero progress on fixing any of the core issues for the last 25 years. The new models definitely do look cooler, and I appreciate that they accelerate faster, but I personally care much more about the stuff that could potentially kill me when I'm driving.
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