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JohnBerryman

163 karma · joined September 25, 2014

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JohnBerryman··on OpenAI is well positioned to fast-follow Jev
Welp... it took 2 weeks for my prediction to bear out – https://huggingface.co/blog/sora-2/what-is-openai-decisions-... https://openai.com/index/devday-2026-recap/
JohnBerryman··on OpenAI is well positioned to fast-follow Jev
Panagram seems fun! I tried it out with a large chunk of my post (whole thing wouldn't fit). Panagram says it is 98% human. Feels right, to me b/c I aggressively edit whatever comes out. The thing that I'm avoiding is the ominous blank page - I just freeze. If there's text there I can always reshape it. And I do, heavily.

prodigycorp is entitled to their opinion

JohnBerryman··on OpenAI is well positioned to fast-follow Jev
Partially. I'm a terribly slow writer and get stuck on phrase choice, but I'm good at content ideas, outlines, and editing text already on the page. So I have AI do the bit that I'm not as good at.

Process: First, actually have ideas :D Then, I write an outline for what I want to talk about at basically a sentence-by-sentence level. (This is me yelling things at my computer.) And then I have the AI convert a chunk at a time into prose. I reread it and rework it to be my voice.

Then I have the AI help with things like subject titles and social posts.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

JohnBerryman··on OpenAI is well positioned to fast-follow Jev
For me, I think the big deal is that it promises to be general and broadly applicable and high quality. That's new and special. But we'll wait to see if the claims actually hold.
JohnBerryman··on OpenAI is well positioned to fast-follow Jev
You might find my old post interesting https://arcturus-labs.com/blog/2025/03/31/supercharging-llm-...
JohnBerryman··on OpenAI is well positioned to fast-follow Jev
I'm glad someone noticed :P - It was hilarious once we figured out what was going on. We had literally removed it's ability to shut up.
JohnBerryman··on OpenAI is well positioned to fast-follow Jev
chaotic neutral
JohnBerryman··on OpenAI is well positioned to fast-follow Jev
Nope. Here's the closest I got https://arcturus-labs.com/blog/2025/03/31/supercharging-llm-... - 1.5 years ago! But I never really did anything with it. And I wasn't thinking about reinforcement learning anything.
JohnBerryman··on AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will
I think that ego/status is a big part of it. And the loss aversion bias. Our thought process is "This thing is going to be able to do software as well as a human, therefor it is going to take my job." When a more optimistic and probably more realistic take is "This thing is going to do the boring parts of software, so I can spend my time building out the more interesting, big-picture parts of code. I'm going to be so much more productive." But the fear of loss is so much more distracting than the potential gain. ... And what is it that we fear losing? Status! Software development is in high demand, it's a sought after role, we feel "special".
JohnBerryman··on Show HN: cataclysm v0.1 – the final Python module?
Now that it's released, it's time to experiment with what it can do.

``` from cataclysm import doom

def mystery_func(): while True: pass

# predict if specified function halts print(doom.does_it_halt(mystery_func)) ```

JohnBerryman··on Ask HN: Considerations when asked to write a book?
I wrote a book (https://www.manning.com/books/relevant-search). Considerations: are you willing to write the book assuming that you will effectively make nothing in direct proceeds from the book? (Close to true.) The upside from a book is in monetizing on it indirectly. For instance, as a "though leader" you'll be able to garner a higher salary at your next job or you'll be able to ask for higher rates for consulting. But the catch here is that you've got to be willing to put yourself out there, otherwise it's a nice bullet point on your resume.

Oh yeah - and don't underestimate the time and effort involved. (I know you mentioned it in your post, but still.) A due date, even if fairly far off, looms ominous. For a year you'll have trouble relaxing and having fun because you know you should be getting work done on the book. You won't have weekend back for quite some time.

Would I do it again? Yep. Will I do it again? Nope. (At least not likely :D )

Good luck!

JohnBerryman··on Chindōgu
https://twitter.com/JnBrymn/status/562822888102060032
JohnBerryman··on Ask HN: What DB to use for huge time series?
DataDog uses elasticsearch for their timeseries data store: http://www.elasticsearch.org/content/uploads/2013/11/es_case...

Elasticsearch might seem like a strange option at first since it's historically a text search engine, but it's main datastructure is a compressed bit array which is ideal for OLAP processing.