Jgrubb

Can you elaborate?

I mumble this line to myself off and on over the years -

Everybody's job looks easy until you have to do it yourself.

It occurred to me yesterday that this AI moment is an extreme expression of that for most people, ie managers who don't understand why throwing token spend at everything isn't making the whole thing go 5x faster.

Rumsfeld put in the work and was very smart. His natural disposition was such that, when given the ring of power, things went badly.

The current head of DoD is basically a manosphere influencer that bumbled into this job.

Now, I'm not an endocrinologist, just an aging guy, but from my current vantage point it appears that over the course of my life, many stupid decisions have been made that I have lived to tell about. I can't help but feel that my "wisdom of age" might just be testosterone getting out of the way.

This is all to say that our current "situation" just kinda looks like one insecure guys roid rage when you take a big step back.

Maybe doesn't mean that when _you_ do it, but do you work in this team at OpenAI?

In short, a rock solid data analysis artifact takes a lot longer than just running the queries.

I don't know "how big", but I do know that it's a 7.2kV line, and that there are 6 houses on it, and that mine is pretty far away while the other houses are quite close to the transformer.

Like I said, it routinely drops to or below 100v. It's most noticeable after an outage is restored when everyone's hot water heaters and fridges kick back on at once.

This. Putting together a complaint in the language of a electricity service professional(?) with proper citations etc.

I read and article on here some months ago titled something like "Leftist usecases for LLMs" and one of them was negotiating bureaucracies, and that reminds me, I need to call back JCP&L about my Board of Public Utilities complaint that an LLM helped me out together.

You see, I live with in a rural area and especially since LED light bulbs have become the thing, it's been clear that we are delivered far less than 120v service a lot of the time. We live about 200 yards from the transformer that we share with several other houses, too many I believe. About two years ago I set up Home Assistant and bought one of those power monitoring rigs that you put on each circuit in your breaker box, mostly I just wanted data about where my power bill money was going. I work in FinOps in case anyone was curious.

Anyhoo, couple years later I'm analyzing several months worth of power bills vs the circuit meter readings to quantify where I can make some upgrades and save some money. After a day or so of this I mention to Claude about the voltage issues and sure enough, it puts together a whole packet for me documenting brownouts down to 95v and routine brownouts below 110v. It helps me fill out the BPU complaint form.

2 days later I get a call from JCP&L (unfortunately to my wife's phone because it's her name as the primary on the account). I want a new, larger transformer for myself and my neighbors, so I need to call them back today.

What's he gonna do? There is no "enough" with some personalities, there is only "more".

I think you're misunderstanding me. I'm saying "It gets paid by the word and you get back walls of text." - ie, what you don't want to think is happening is very obviously what is happening.

It charges by the unit and it decides how many units it produces. It decides how much money it makes, therefore it decides "more".

What's tin foil about that? It gets paid by the word and you get back walls of text.

I guess we'll see about that.

What is there even to say about this? Where does one even begin?

I suppose if you observed every Facebook product development since those days it would seem like a founding value.

No, he actually became one of the richest ppl in the world by stealing that idea from somebody else.

"Privilege is thinking that something isn't a problem because it doesn't affect you personally." is a sticker I bought once.

On the other hand, basically every beat lines up with our experience, so :man-shrugging:

I asked Claude some ways I could make my teeth whiter, it suggested DuckDB!

I believe that the explosion of software _production_ in the last 6-12 months in all areas of society is beginning to run headlong into a global bottleneck in the capacity to _deliver_ and _distribute_ that much more software.

Unlike previous boom/bust cycles, I do not believe that demand that's driving the capacity bring-up that's underway right now is going to level off in the near future.

I am personally witnessing teams at my employer that were previously unable to produce software - non-Eng teams - that are now empowered to do so, and some of them are building some cool stuff. I think this is happening at every company everywhere, and I think when we and everyone else solve the "how do we deliver and govern this stuff?" problem there's going to be an even bigger unlock.

Wild times.

I have too much actual wood to split but I like where you're head is at.

Yes, but obviously this toy faces a challenge when folks who take this stuff seriously walk by. I immediately want a bungee to put around it so the wood doesn't go everywhere. I also want to split it finer than in quarters. Had to nope out.

The tokens are still being burnt, they're just doing so in a parallel dimension from the users main context window.

Feels like it's geared toward actually enabling the "dark factory", which is pretty difficult with enterprisey, seat based SaaS like GitHub and Jira. Will definitely check this out.

If only there were some interest on the part of Big Telco to solve these types of problems.

Yes. Not to mention, I have several crates of records that I've had since the 90s. Some of those were taken from my dad collection that he bought new back in the 60s. Those albums still play just fine, despite less than archival care taken.

Contrast that with several folders of CDs I still have which have begun to delaminate and are plastic trash now. CDs were largely an invention to allow record companies to resell back catalogs, and it worked.

Vinyl is a terrible technology?? Have you never put on an old record and considered the miracle of it?

70 years ago Miles Davis vibrates some air with his horn, which is translated into electricity by a microphone, which is translated through magnetic tape and eventually back into electricity and then back into vibrations on a disk. 70 years later I can take that disk and turn its vibrations back into electricity that moves the air on my living room. No encoding, no decoding, just air and electricity that my ancestors will be able to replay until the end of time.

That's as close to magic as anything humanity has ever come up with in my opinion.

I don't know what's gonna happen man, but I'm gonna have my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames.

- Jim Morrison

I think actual thinking is now more valuable than ever.

Part of the magic of their account rep strategy is how they keep them on your account for so long, you get to develop not just a rapport but a trust that they truly understand your business. It gives me faith that when they advise us on their new AI products, they're going to be a good fit.

Edit: I forgot to mention the curiosity and humility they bring to our calls. If I point out another vendors approach to a problem that we have, they always lean in and want to help improve their offerings from our feedback. They know it's not enough just to "be Google".

Railway has not had the best month in the tech press have they? And in both cases it was an automated process belonging to some other party that put them there, damaging their reputation.

I was going to talk to our google rep about their killing the Gemini cli but this is way more concerning.