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disgruntledphd2

8,372 karma · joined September 18, 2011

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disgruntledphd2··on Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX
The integrated review UI is super helpful, but apparently nobody reviews code anymore except me.
disgruntledphd2··on Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX
I've recently moved to a company that uses Cursor, and I'm actually quite fond of it.

I basically never use the editor but the fact that there's a review UI for all the agent work is incredibly helpful.

For me, that makes the models much more usable. I've also been using GPT models a lot, as they're cheaper and less vomit inducing than Claudes text, so this is definitely bad news for me.

disgruntledphd2··on I used AWS cognito for a startup. I wouldn't do it again
I haven't used much GCP, I'm just being snarky.
disgruntledphd2··on Judge rules Trump administration’s blacklisting of Anthropic was illegal
Surely if this is a problem, then heavy subsidies from private capital is also a problem?

If there's a difference, I haven't heard a good explanation of it.

disgruntledphd2··on I used AWS cognito for a startup. I wouldn't do it again
I've been making this joke about Google (big tech in general) for years.

There are two ways to do everything; one is deprecated and the other is not yet feature complete.

Glad to know that they're allowing their customers a taste of what it's like to work at Google.

disgruntledphd2··on I used AWS cognito for a startup. I wouldn't do it again
> That’s my experience with any of the 3 hyperscalers when reading docs.

I used to hate the AWS docs, now I use Azure and I hate that so much more. At least AWS had loads of (bad) docs that you could string together to figure out how to do something. With Azure, there's just no docs (except for bad videos), and they literally tell you (at the top of every page) that you can do this with AI (I know I can do it with AI, but I'd prefer if I could read your docs to make sure the machine isn't doing something dumb).

My expectation is that I'll end up on GCP in a few years, and that will be bad in hilariously different ways.

disgruntledphd2··on Stripe acquires Clerky
> some fraud detection

Fraud detection is really, really, really, really hard so I would probably stick with someone like Stripe for this, as they have so much data that they can do a really good job.

And fundamentally, the moat for Stripe isn't just the front-end APIs, it's all the work that they do (and there's a lot) in connecting together financial infrastructure. Even if you could wave a magic wand and generate all the code Stripe has (which you can't, currently) then you'd still need to build out all the partnerships, which is a lot of work.

Disclaimer: former Stripe (though only a tourist), still hold some of their shares.

disgruntledphd2··on Woman stranded in Spain after UK's eVisa system mistakes her for twin sister
Yeah, our first was during Covid so we had to do it, and then I just did child number two.

> The hilarity of having to compare a baby picture with a 5 year old kid stood in front of you is a separate problem.

Yeah, it's pretty ridiculous, I'd imagine that most border guards will just check the last name and assume it's OK in that case.

disgruntledphd2··on The treasury bond mess: is this the demise of the US as a safe haven?
> Whereas the US's two legislative houses are 100% supportive of this.

I think that it's more likely that many of them just like their jobs, and Trump has a history of orchestrating primary challenges against people who disagree with them.

Now, one could additionally argue that this is only possible because of their frankly insane gerrymandering, and one would be correct, so maybe it is ultimately their fault.

disgruntledphd2··on Woman stranded in Spain after UK's eVisa system mistakes her for twin sister
> My favorite part of the UK’s eVisa was taking a portrait photo of my 1.5y old.

I have had to take photos of each of my two kids at six months old for passports. That was not a lot of fun (though it's nice to look at the baby photo for the older one now).

disgruntledphd2··on Building an (almost) fully self-hosted, sandboxed, agentic software factory
While this may be a common understanding in this community, it's worth repeating so that this community can tell everyone else, as I don't think most people understand this currently.
disgruntledphd2··on Anthropic IPO filing will show AI backlash as a risk factor, sources say
Still no S-1, though. I really want to see it, have been on the edge of my seat all summer.

I reckon they'll chicken out, though.

disgruntledphd2··on Canada will match US tariffs 'dollar for dollar' as trade talks break down
I'm Irish, btw. I agree with the food regulations but they do exist.
disgruntledphd2··on Canada will match US tariffs 'dollar for dollar' as trade talks break down
To be fair, EU standards prevent the sale of lots of US products so that point, while misleading, is not entirely incorrect.
disgruntledphd2··on Canada will match US tariffs 'dollar for dollar' as trade talks break down
Honestly, if Trump keeps giving intelligence to Ukraine against Russia, then it was worth paying the (idiotic) tariffs.

That was the EUs top priority. The other issue was that each country had its own products they didn't want to lose sales from.

More generally, the EU isn't built for a world of presidential powers exercised at whom, which is becoming more of an issue this decade.

disgruntledphd2··on Three important steps in my maturation process
Our measurements of the brain are derived from small samples, have a bunch of weird priors encoded in them and are mostly correlational, so I don't think we can make strong statements like in your first paragraph.
disgruntledphd2··on Three important steps in my maturation process
To quote a 17c vulgarity, reason is a whore.
disgruntledphd2··on I'm becoming AI-blind
GPT is less bad for this, which is why I've mostly shifted to using it.
disgruntledphd2··on How to compromise your system with a job interview
> It's every company. If you reject companies for this, you are living under a bridge right now.

I just finished a successful job search, and only had 1 company (of maybe 50 applications) try this.

disgruntledphd2··on How to compromise your system with a job interview
> Well then it's not financially worth it to have a job, because every company does this because if they didn't they'd need to triple in size with recruiters.

Every company does not do this. I always refuse tasks like this unless I've talked to a human before hand, as unless the company has invested a little effort, then I won't invest any effort.

disgruntledphd2··on US debt tops $40T as Treasury doubles bond buybacks to calm markets
> But, in US, people are so alarmed about US' economy collapsing.

It's more than US Treasuries (debt) are the safe asset upon which all other assets are priced. If they go mental, then lots of assumptions break and the machines will create a financial crisis for us (humans too, but the machines will start it).

disgruntledphd2··on There's no such thing as a small software team anymore
> Inference is profitable

Let's wait for Anthropic's S-1 to see if this is actually true.

Fundamentally, if Anthropic ain't profitable with all the investment and usage they get, then it's possible that it may not be economical to train new models in the future (I agree that inference for already trained models makes money, but the real question is if this money will pay for the cost of training & employees).

disgruntledphd2··on Harvest hikes bills by 1500% after purchased by Bending Spoons
Same model, but they're more like a holding company for a bunch of tech stuff.

They're apparently a great employer in Italy, which is a much better cost structure than the US (from their perspective).

disgruntledphd2··on Pacing model development in an era of cyber-critical capabilities
> The fact the Anthropic announced that their own model did basically the same thing within a couple of weeks does, to me, suggest their is a strong PR driver to all this.

A more likely explanation is that RL training incentivises basically any behaviour that will get the model a reward. This has been happening in video game RL research for over twenty years, and the difference here is that we're now hooking up these systems to the real world, where the reward hacking is more visible.

disgruntledphd2··on GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter
Anthropic are definitely profitable on my 20 eur subscription, as I have kids and no time.
disgruntledphd2··on Incident with Github.com [resolved]
> Big enterprises are on a different github deployment, so I doubt they are affected by this

Depends, some of them use GH Enterprise but many (surprisingly) don't.

disgruntledphd2··on On AI regulation and messaging
This plan would still take 3-5 years, even in the best case scenario. Clinical trials are really hard.
disgruntledphd2··on On A.I. regulation and messaging
And hands.
disgruntledphd2··on On A.I. regulation and messaging
> Drug discovery is similar AFAIK. The space of possibilities is even larger than protein folding, but it's structurally similar enough that I think AI will help to make progress on the discovery side.

I do agree that this kind of targeted approach makes sense.

However, discovery is not really the issue here. Running the clinical trials (1/2/3) is much much more difficult, and consumes basically all of the time in drug development, so even if LLMs perfectly automate this, the speedup will not be particularly large.

disgruntledphd2··on On A.I. regulation and messaging
Yeah, it's particularly common when the EU does stuff.
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