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dbish

1,347 karma · joined January 7, 2013

Techno-optimist, long time AI/ML guy, love augmenting human capabilities with AI software.

Currently Director of Eng/AI building experimental AI products at Datadog (skunk works). Previously founded a small AI startup called Augmend (acquired) and love to stay involved helping AI startups in any way, reach out.

https://twitter.com/diamondbishop

diamond@diamondbishop.email

Previously led teams/orgs in the ML engineering and product space for: Meta (PyTorch), Amazon (Alexa AI and AWS Games/Simulations), Microsoft (Cortana and XboxOne spoken language understanding), Lockheed (stuff), and various other less interesting gigs before that.

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dbish··on Successful companies go blind
Yes and it’s still always better to try new things then wait for approval or something to be perfect if you want the company to keep innovating.
dbish··on Why eval startups fail (2025)
"eval startups have a hard time finding customers, because clients have to be technical developers who want to build with APIs, but also not technical enough to run their own evals"

To add to this, they have to be developers who aren't already using a fullstack observability solution, since it's fairly straight forward to add the eval startup featureset to an existing observability solution, and easier (plus cost effective) to just keep it all in one place.

dbish··on A whale necropolis has been found
The comms problems are exactly what makes it interesting to me, since autonomy is fully required really.
dbish··on A whale necropolis has been found
Yep. The AI advances and pushing for much more autonomy are why I think there’s something new possible here.
dbish··on A whale necropolis has been found
I’ve always wanted to start a company that builds automated underwater swarms of “probes” that just search and return info and carry out small exploration tasks but over long amounts of time and space.

Do it right and you can send the first underwater explorers to Europa.

Hard to find the right way to monetize in the early stages though. SpaceX had a variety of options.

dbish··on Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5
Yep. I love open source but there isn’t a model that comes close still to the closed source options like Opus 4.8 and that’s obvious from most people I see across the software industry as well. There are at least another few models after Opus from OpenAI and Anthropic most would go down the list using before any of the Chinese models at this point.
dbish··on Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs
Press x to doubt. Moving slower is never the better way to create shareholder value unless you’re implying a million other things that are going wrong in your definition of moving faster.

“Move fast with stable infrastructure” as they say.

dbish··on Why TUIs are back
It’s very easy to do the same thing in a variety of ways and simple guis are basically solved by Claude/codex for almost anything.
dbish··on Why TUIs are back
I’m relatively certain it’s just this at the end of the day. Everything I see people doing in their custom built TUIs or claude/codex CLI can be done, likely even easier, in a simplified IDE or easier to scan UI, but it feels nice/cool/cyberpunk/work-like to look like you’re doing more.

Everyone will have a “reasonable” explanation though for why they have to stay in the terminal even when they aren’t really coding anymore and it wouldn’t be hard to have a window next to your terminal if you really have to, but live and let live. Whatever makes you happy as be all become managers.

I too like a cyberpunk interface even if it’s last the need :)

dbish··on Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs
None of the important projects or FANGs build with frameworks like that, sorry. Project management frameworks are all larp and mostly used by slow moving firms from the past.
dbish··on Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs
A couple reasons I would guess:

1. Full carrying cost of an employee is much more then their salary so this math is not as straight forward if you’re just cutting time and salary to account for that time.

2. You should assume most people aren’t counting hours in places like Meta, reducing to a 4 day week imho will start making people think more about counting exact hours they’re working. It’s partially why the “4 10s” concept is also a bad idea that permeates the defense contractors.

3. Staying focused 5 days a week for one person probably has better compounding effects for that week than a few people working part time and taking longer to get the work done with longer breaks in between “sessions”. Harder to measure of course but it’s one thing I’d be worried about. Easier to think about if you say each person works 2.5 days a week for half their pay, I’d rather just have one person.

4. Layoffs let you cut by performance.

dbish··on Claude Code Routines
you're telling me dispatchagents.ai :) (open to new names if anyone has cool ones, didn't expect anthropic to start using dispatch with their agents, naming is way too hard)
dbish··on How London cracked mobile phone coverage on the Underground
You want to be aware of your surroundings.
dbish··on How London cracked mobile phone coverage on the Underground
Simply being polite. Understanding there are other people in the world you inhabit. Things like that.
dbish··on How London cracked mobile phone coverage on the Underground
Pretty neat but as someone who commutes every day on the New York subway I hope it’s never “cracked” here. Phone usage without headphones is already annoying enough and I greatly appreciate the various people trying to take calls eventually lose service.
dbish··on Ask HN: Share your personal website
https://ageof.diamonds
dbish··on Insights into Claude Opus 4.5 from Pokémon
If I recall correctly, a prior interview about claude plays pokemon stated they purposely chose pokemon as a use case that was not meant to be trained/finetuned on. That's what makes it an interesting problem, so hopefully they aren't.
dbish··on Claude Code On-the-Go
Boris who created Claude Code has a multiple clauses setup it seems as daily usage https://x.com/bcherny/status/2007179832300581177
dbish··on Show HN: I built a free kids coloring site with AI
Very cool. I built something similar but hooked it into a printer/publisher to get physical books -> BespokeBooks.io
dbish··on Launch HN: Onyx (YC W24) – Open-source chat UI
Not wanting to use Vercel is honestly a good enough reason. If you’re a heavy Vercel user you probably aren’t their target market since they’re aiming at enterprise types from what it looks like.
dbish··on Control LLM Spend and Access with any-LLM-gateway
What about forking it for your own use? Not worth it for the bugs you had fixes for?
dbish··on Control LLM Spend and Access with any-LLM-gateway
What were the problems? I've been trying it out and haven't hit issues yet, but not using it at scale yet so I'm curious what to watch out for. I figure it's open source (MIT) so I can make changes as needed if there was anything particulary annoying.
dbish··on Steve Jobs and Cray-1 to be featured on 2026 American Innovations $1 coin
Woz is awesome and as an engineer I understand the urge to say he’s the main one who should be honored but we have to be realistic. Jobs ushered in 2 eras, only 1 with Woz. The personal computer and the computer in everyone’s pocket.

That’s not touching any of the other areas like helping to drive Pixar. Woz did not have a second act, which is perfectly fine and I deeply respect him but he doesn’t have quite the same cultural impact.

dbish··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2025)
Currently using Lulu because they have a developer api and allow printing a single book programmatically, many places I found either didn’t have an api or required a min order of books that isn’t needed for a one off custom design. https://developers.lulu.com/home

My hope for this project is to get enough demand that I have an excuse to figure out a printing option myself and buy some new equipment :)

dbish··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2025)
On the side, custom coloring books for kids using nano banana, started with a project for my son, and its a little janky for some photos but have had some interest already: https://bespokebooks.io. I think it needs to be a phone app to really work for most people though, so that's next on my to do list besides some prompt tweaking.

Notebook to do it yourself here: https://github.com/dbish/bespoke-books-ai-example

I think there are a lot of really fun projects possible now in the child book creation space, particularly as you build tools that they can use themselves (like adding voice interfaces to building a book or story).

This is outside my 996 job of AI Agent/Assistant infra + ops :)

dbish··on Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says
The fee should help ensure that only higher paying jobs or truly hard to find roles would be worth paying for as well (not that this is the right option, but playing it out). You would gladly pay 100k if the role already is high paying, it will be a small fraction of the cost, you won’t do that if it’s a couple year salary. It will also help curb abuse through multiple applications. I agree hard to find jobs for highly talented people (who are paid well) should be brought in.
dbish··on Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says
Why not both?
dbish··on My thoughts on renting versus buying
Yes and they’re still much lower than buying an equivalent place. I’ve looked. Almost twice as much for a mortgage of a similar space for what I rent right now after putting 20% down. Only reason it makes sense to buy is if you really plan to keep the place for decades.
dbish··on My thoughts on renting versus buying
I think the difference for the UK is it’s HCOL but low pay, so people there can’t afford the mortgage down payment as much, which is not normal for say American HCOL cities.
dbish··on My thoughts on renting versus buying
Not in New York.
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