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gashad

93 karma · joined March 21, 2013

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gashad··on 2x, not 10x: coding with LLMs in 2026
This reminds me of themes I recently saw in [Harness Engineering is not Enough: Why Software Factories Fail](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ib5GBkD555M) (Warning: the last 3 slides seem like an advertisement). One thing I liked is how Dex has a little graphic he glossed over showing software development is

- 25% planning & aligning with other teams

- 25% coding

- 25% testing/verifying

- 25% code review/rework

One argument was that agentic coding speeds up that coding part a bunch. So maybe there's 2x speedup in coding. But that's only a small speedup in the totality of everything software engineers do.

gashad··on Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info
Ken Kifer wrote a bunch of amazing bicycle content! Here's a mirror of his pages: https://www.phred.org/~alex/kenkifer/www.kenkifer.com/
gashad··on AI companies cause most of traffic on forums
What sort of effort would it take to make an LLM training honeypot resulting in LLMs reliably spewing nonsense? Similar to the way Google once defined the search term "Santorum"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_for_the_neologism_%22... where

The way LLMs are trained with such a huge corpus of data, would it even be possible for a single entity to do this?

gashad··on Coronal mass ejection impact imminent, two more earth-directed CMEs
Not saying anything about the current storm, but a storm as strong as the Carrington Event[1] would make modern day life on Earth pretty unpleasant. Some of the potential impacts are documented in Severe Space Weather Events: Understanding Societal and Economic Impacts [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event [2] https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/12507/severe-space...

gashad··on A large network of fake Google Maps comments/reviews and fake businesses
I researched duct cleaners recently and found a similar set of dubious businesses. There are several businesses named "American Air Duct Cleaning of [insert city name]". Google Maps has 70-120 5 star reviews. They all say things like “David and Oscar did a great job”…. from Florida to Texas to other states... always David and/or Oscar for each place! All the reviews are in the last 6 months or so. All the reviews are relatively unique and the reviewers are not new Google reviewers… there’s definitely some sort of weird Google Review scam going on here. All the websites say “Family/Locally Owned & Operated" yet they're identical web pages.

I'm surprised by how unsophisticated the approach appears. Interesting to see the problem is not limited to duct cleaning businesses.

gashad··on Robinhood is limiting purchases of stocks: AMC, Blackberry, Nokia, and GameStop
I just learned about the Citadel/Robinhood connection from this https://marketsweekly.ghost.io/what-happened-with-gamestop/, which the author https://twitter.com/alexisgoldstein/status/13546053632874864... explained as "Why it's not Robinhood/Reddit vs. Hedge Funds. It's Hedge Funds vs. Hedge Funds vs. Wall Street, with Robinhood as a fig leaf". The sidebars in the article explain a lot of the lingo.
gashad··on Facebook Indefinitely Suspends Trump
Anyone else not logged in to Facebook find the "See more of Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook" pop-up a bit disconcerting?
gashad··on Ask HN: Who is hiring right now?
Maxar (Formerly DigitalGlobe) is hiring a software engineer for the Product R&D group based in the Westminster, Colorado office. Maxar operates the highest resolution commercial imaging satellites in the world. See some Maxar images here https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/asia/100000007013566/cor... and apply for the software engineer position here: https://digitalglobe.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/MAXAR/job/W...
gashad··on Supercomputers will start building a 3D map of the world
Good question! This does seem like an embarrassingly parallel problem. Whenever I've used the big HPC centers, the secret sauce has been a fast low latency network interconnect. The fast interconnect is useful for PDE solvers which need a lot of processor-to-processor communication (i.e. for sending data back/forth periodically along the boundaries of the grid cells you're solving for).
gashad··on AI is supercharging the creation of maps around the world
Yes, see also "Corporate Editors in the Evolving Landscape of OpenStreetMap" https://www.mdpi.com/2220-9964/8/5/232/htm

Figure 3 demonstrates the scale of corporate OSM edits.

gashad··on I was a corporate restaurant consultant
It's got to be Pei Wei. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pei_Wei_Asian_Diner Corporate is based in Arizona, has 200 stores, talks of a rollout of Quinoa, etc.
gashad··on Reddit’s Redesign
I'm surprised the article didn't call out what happened to Digg during their redesign and subsequent flood of users leaving for Reddit. I figured that's why Reddit thought it was worth the money of hiring 20 designers.
gashad··on Data Wrangling at Slack
AWS doesn't charge to put data in to s3. It's free to pull data out from its region to any AWS service within the same region. It can get expensive to pull data out across regions or out of AWS infrastructure (ie. to your private data center).
gashad··on Why There Are More Consumer Goods Than Ever
Click "Web" below the article title on HackerNews. Then click the first result in the Google search.
gashad··on Amazon Building a Tech Business for the Long Haul
Such a good read. Fun fact: it was first published 4 years ago to the day.
gashad··on The Virtual Reality of John Carmack
"“It was a binary thing,” he says matter-of-factly. “We didn’t get into suborbital space within the 10 years; thus it was not a success.”" I had to read that sentence twice. I saw "binary" and didn't think 10=ten.
gashad··on In Lieu of Money, Toyota Donates Efficiency to New York Charity
> "... [Toyota engineers] drew a layout identifying spots where there were slowdowns. They reorganized the shelves by food groups and used colored tape to mark the grain, vegetable, fruit and protein sections. The time clients spent in the pantry was reduced nearly by half."

Ikea needs to hire Toyota to cut the time I shop there in half. That place is a maze! Maybe it's by design . . .

gashad··on The biggest merger you didn't hear about today
> People could care less about Warner Chilcott

Couldn't. "People couldn't care less ..."