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Denzel

1,482 karma · joined October 28, 2012

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denzel dot morris one at that google service

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Denzel··on Meta Blocks President Lula's Facebook Page, Campaign Ads 2 Weeks from Election
Meta hired Dina Powell McCormick into a position directly under Zuckerberg after the election and appointed Dana White to their board of directors. Is that enough water?
Denzel··on Geothermal heat map of US hot springs
Similar experience at the Arizona Hot Springs, we sat in there nestled between a slot canyon as the sunset and the moon came out. Magical. One of the most memorable experiences of my life.

The hours-long hike back through the desert in the dark of night though, kinda scary. Felt like we were walking on Mars.

Denzel··on Fable 5 – Median thinking declined in August
Exactly, it’s not a good business to be in if they’re capacity-constrained and can’t raise prices.
Denzel··on Fable 5 – Median thinking declined in August
I’m not sure why this point keeps coming up — if your service/product is so popular that it’s capacity-constrained, then the answer is to raise prices, not degrade service, because the demand should be inelastic.
Denzel··on Flock worker calls police on reporter filming public camera installation
Fair, we're on the same side btw. I'd encourage your group to run for office or organize around people running for office so there's at least a chance to durably change the system with legislation.
Denzel··on Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously
Cool that he's writing about this publicly, but for someone that's so business-minded I find it odd that he never renders any of these AI experiments in terms of ROI. Hard to find any signal in those posts on whether it's profitable to automate these processes with AI vs. alternatives.
Denzel··on Flock worker calls police on reporter filming public camera installation
I don’t understand your point.

> We managed to swing a couple of the county commissioners who were in favor of it before and were not in favor of it after hearing about the constitutional issues as well as the cyber security issues that flock doesn't really care about.

Do you not see the problem here?

Pasco County has a $2.2B annual budget. These county commissioners have the financial resources, organizational access to expertise, and time to focus on these problems.

Do they really need an under-resourced citizen to inform them about the constitutional issues after deployment? And then they just say “Aw shucks, whoopsies, now I see the light.”

I don’t think it’s fair to call this learned helplessness (a lingering belief after the threat has vanished) when we’re facing off against an active, persistent adversarial threat.

Your county commissioners didn’t make a “whoopsies” when they took a deliberate, informed action against your interests.

Furthermore, it’s unsustainable to require citizens to pour significant time and energy into forcing their representatives to faithfully represent them. That quite literally defeats the purpose of a representative governing body.

Denzel··on How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
The actual quote and topic is far different than you’ve portrayed it. Here’s the actual quote: “ yet the company says that it expects to make $11.6 billion in 2025 and *$100 billion by 2029*, a statement so egregious that I am surprised it's not some kind of financial crime to say it out loud.” from https://www.wheresyoured.at/oai-business/

He goes on to specifically discuss how unrealistic $100B by 2029 is given that OAI is structurally unprofitable.

The fact that you’re skewing your misinterpretation of what he said so much shows your own bias I’m afraid.

Denzel··on As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
You’re missing the bigger picture concepts of value exchange vs. value extraction and how those magnify power differentials in groups.

> I feel no more entitled to exclusive use or credit for my ideas as used by AI

Do you feel you have the right to decide whether to exchange your ideas or not?

> if I had talked to someone at a conference who went on to be influenced by my ideas to do something good after forgetting my name.

Yes, you’ve decided to share that information freely with that person. Do you decide to share every idea or thing you do for free with everyone? Why or why not?

> The prospect of all human ideas accumulating inside a machine that makes these ideas accessible

Right now, this idea of “a machine” is trending towards private ownership — an extractive process that does not incentivize further contribution.

Accessibility is no longer determined by you, you don’t have a decision point on the production side (deciding whether to share) nor the consumption side (guaranteeing access). We might even say your rights have been reduced.

It should be obvious to see how a healthy society is built upon value _exchange_ over _extraction_. Extraction typically leads to destruction… by definition.

Denzel··on I Tried Building a Real App with AI. It Took a Year
> keeping track of time and tasks

Amazing how many software engineers don't do this and continue to fool themselves into thinking they're faster with AI. If only more people would track and reflect on their time use.

Denzel··on Networking and the Internet, from First Principles
Writing out my nod of appreciation to counterbalance some of the negativity. I do enjoy the effort and thought you into this essay. I didn’t read the whole thing, just a few sections from the beginning, and I think you do a great job explaining how these concepts evolved from simple beginnings.

You’ve condensed down a lot of concepts I learned through research and trial-and-error over my career as a SWE.

Thank you for sharing Faza. Please continue putting in the effort and sharing these essays!

Denzel··on Temporary Cloudflare accounts for AI agents
About half of US households don’t have any retirement at all. Making their point that “shareholders” are a distinct class separate from the whole of the population.
Denzel··on Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post
Yes, DeepSeek is open-weight, but these third-party providers offering similar prices are subsidized with VC money as well. And you can find a range of prices for deepseek-v4-flash going up to and over $1/Mtok.

Even that $1/Mtok provided by Together AI is heavily subsidized by more than $1B in VC money.

This makes it unclear how the true cost curve is progressing. It’s not possible to confidently comment one way or another on the rate that cost is coming down when the entire industry is so heavily subsidized.

Denzel··on Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post
Aren’t DeepSeek models deliberately priced lower than the cost to deliver? They’re subsidized which means the true cost is more than $0.2/Mtok.
Denzel··on I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit
Unless your insider is the CFO, I wouldn’t trust these sources to have the access, knowledge, or insight to determine whether they’re running inference at a profit.

Simple test: can they get their hands on a data center contracts and financials?

Search isn’t anywhere near as high profile as the profitability of AI inference, and yet, even aspects of the Search org were walled off from the rest of the company such that other employees couldn’t see what we see.

Denzel··on Ask HN: Is the Job Market Actually Bad?
I say the following not to brag but to offer up some more perspective for you: you’re comp is in the lower-mid range of the market. Comp was there for remote, startup eng positions back in 2017.

As you move up in comp, the market actually gets more difficult, not just because the market is more competitive but because some companies won’t even interview qualified engineers with FAANG on their resume because they don’t believe they can afford them.

So I can understand why you might have an easier time compared to other engs.

Denzel··on Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic
None of these projects sound like weeks worth of scope w/o AI.
Denzel··on AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying
Thanks for point-by-point.

Your first two quotes are about targeting in the Iraq War; specifically how the breakdown in careful analysis, precipitated by the new systems, led to the exact mis-targeting they were trying to solve. That’s what the entire article is about.

And your third quote is from an ex-official commenting on the event after the school strike happened.

These quotes contradict your original point, ie they show how careful analysis has been designed out of the system.

> We killed young kids, but not on purpose. We targeted a building and intent matters. I refuse to believe anyone in the decision chain would move forward if they believed kids were going to be killed. If you do - how can you? Why would they?

This sounds incredibly naive. For starters, plausible deniability due to diffuse responsibility is a thing.

“Of course we don’t target schools and kill children, this was a system error.” But the message gets sent regardless and meanwhile we have people arguing back-and-forth over grains of sand because they took an action with deliberate plausible deniability.

For a historical analog that involved killing US children “unintentionally”, you can read up on the Ludlow Massacre - https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/rockefe...

Of course they didn’t intend to kill the children, they only intended to disperse the strikers by setting their tents on fire. It was simply a mistake.

Denzel··on AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying
Friend, TFA commonly refers to the effing article that’s posted for discussion.

EDIT: The irony that GP then goes on the quote TFA and not NYT.

Denzel··on AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying
You’re acting like the U.S. government is a monolithic good faith actor right now. The current administration’s behavior is qualitatively different than past administrations.

Do you also believe this administration will ever officially confirm Renee Good and Alex Pretti were not domestic terrorists?

It’s hard to interpret your points charitably here.

Denzel··on AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/11/us/politics/iran-school-m...

> An ongoing [United States] military investigation has determined that the United States is responsible for a deadly Tomahawk missile strike on an Iranian elementary school, according to U.S. officials and others familiar with the preliminary findings.

Denzel··on AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying
So I read the entire TFA, where do you see “quotes [from] those in the know who believe this should have been eliminated as a target”? I saw no such quotes about the school in TFA. Maybe I missed it.

> there was precisely one mis-strike in 1000s of sorties

How did you verify this? Because I’ll remind you, the U.S. administration denied responsibility for some time before owning up to this due to public pressure. Absent public pressure, I guess we would’ve had zero mis-strikes.

> so this already is a low error rate

As a father of similarly aged daughters, I can’t express enough how grotesque and disturbing the term “error rate” is here.

We targeted and killed young children. Plain and simple.

> However, you have made a very, very strong assumption that these targets were not carefully evaluated.

Let’s take the opposing assumption that this target was carefully evaluated then. Please reason through the implications now?

Denzel··on Autoresearch on an old research idea
How much did this cost? Has there ever been an engineering focus on performance for liquid?

It’s certainly cool, but the optimizations are so basic that I’d expect a performance engineer to find these within a day or two with some flame graphs and profiling.

Denzel··on Agentic Engineering Patterns
Mind linking the project so we can see the PR’s?
Denzel··on Claude Code is being dumbed down?
Apologies, I may have misinterpreted the passage below from your repo:

> This crate was developed with the assistance of Claude Opus 4.5 initially to answer the shower thought "would the Braille Unicode trick work to visually simulate complex ball physics in a terminal?" Opus 4.5 one-shot the problem, so I decided to further experiment to make it more fun and colorful.

Also, yes, I don’t dispute that human written software takes iteration as well. My point is that the significance of autonomous agentic coding feels exaggerated if I’m holding the LLM’s hand more than I have to hold a senior engineer’s hand.

That doesn’t mean the tech isn’t valuable. The claims just feel over exaggerated.

Denzel··on Claude Code is being dumbed down?
First, very cool! Thank you for sharing some actual projects with the prompts logged.

I think you and I have different definitions of “one-shotting”. If the model has to be steered, I don’t consider that a one-shot.

And you clearly “broke” the model a few times based on your prompt log where the model was unable to solve the problem given with the spec.

Honestly, your experience in these repos matches my daily experience with these models almost exactly.

I want to see good/interesting work where the model is going off and doing its thing for multiple hours without supervision.

Denzel··on Claude Code is being dumbed down?
Weird, I broke Opus 4.5 pretty easily by giving some code, a build system, and integration tests that demonstrate the bug.

CC confidently iterated until it discovered the issue. CC confidently communicated exactly what the bug was, a detailed step-by-step deep dive into all the sections of the code that contributed to it. CC confidently suggested a fix that it then implemented. CC declared victory after 10 minutes!

The bug was still there.

I’m willing to admit I might be “holding it wrong”. I’ve had some successes and failures.

It’s all very impressive, but I still have yet to see how people are consistently getting CC to work for hours on end to produce good work. That still feels far fetched to me.

Denzel··on The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat
Good points - admittedly, I didn’t put enough effort into building connections through different pipelines back when I was contracting. Upwork and a few personal connections were my sole sources.

It just felt really difficult to do both the engineering work while trying to do customer development at the same time.

The fact that OP has been able to do this for so long, while supporting a family, piqued my interest.

Denzel··on The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat
Are you a one-person shop? How do you find clients?
Denzel··on Ideas are cheap, execution is cheaper
Very interesting, thanks for sharing! Looks like you have considerable experience with vibe coding to be able to produce that in 2 hours.
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