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ibejoeb

5,575 karma · joined September 28, 2009

joe at bokengroup dot com

https://keybase.io/joeb/chat

Technologist-at-large.

Recently: fractional CTO, LLM operations and automation, mobile apps, browser extensions, due diligence, business combinations and integrations.

Formerly: multiple CTO roles, head of product, chief architect, VP Eng., and many different IC roles. A few acquisitions including a cloud financial software company and an Inc. 500 startup. Also experience in healthcare, industrial engineering, transportation/logistics, and manufacturing. I studied maths-based computer science.

The things I like:

1. Pro bono technology implementation and management for charitable concerns.

2. Exigency: contact me if your situation might benefit from external support.

3. Data modeling, data migrations, and making your data systems work really well, i.e., not just fast, but correct. I can help you get the most out of the technology in which you're invested. "You bought it, so you ought to use it."

4. Green fields, end-to-end development.

5. Opportunities to employ ML-family languages for practical applications. (F# f#@<ks.)

6. Low-level odd/embedded platforms, like printers, fabrication machines, industrial automation controllers, and low-power devices, especially building drivers for newer connectivity like WebBLE and WebUSB.

I work a lot with React Native, Expo, React, TypeScript, Python, and Rails. I have a lot of practical, production experience in the cloud on AWS, Azure, and GCP. I'm also comfortable in a traditional datacenter after many years of building servers and running co-lo. My relational databases of choice are Oracle (ask me why) and PostgreSQL. My graph database of choice is Neo4j. I have a long history with Java and the EE platform, Spring, and all sorts of other things in that ecosystem.

I'm also somewhat of an expert in certain areas of financial reporting: FAS 109, FAS 123(r)/ASC 718, FAS 128, FAS 5, FAS 114, FIN 48, transfer pricing, GAAP/IFRS convergence.

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[ my public key: https://keybase.io/joeb; my proof: https://keybase.io/joeb/sigs/iywPxIUXq1g8UfPHGaDKhWNw5opq-mXsGfuK9W9PKAo ]

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meet.hn/city/us-Miami

Interests: Mobile Development, AI/ML, Fintech, Entrepreneurship, Martial Arts, Privacy

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submissionscomments
ibejoeb··on Dots: Always-on agents
I think it's pretty subjective if you mean "lead" to be capability and not raw number of users. I jumped back and forth quite a bit last year because there were some pretty major shortcoming in both. Now they're both quite reliable without too much hand-holding. Codex now consistently works better for the kind of work I'm doing, and it's good enough that I'm not inclined to go to claude, because I don't have any significant problems.
ibejoeb··on Unknown number of Texas voter registrations went unprocessed due to DPS error
I posted 2 sources. I did not post a comment. Take it up with the authors.
ibejoeb··on Unknown number of Texas voter registrations went unprocessed due to DPS error
That's all in the cited sources. I didn't offer an opinion. I added contextual information related directly to your positions.
ibejoeb··on Allow Carriers on Planes
I don't think that's actually what the FAA has reasoned.

FAA calls all of these devices, in general, child restraint systems. Rigid seats with harnesses are allowed under FAA rules. The real consideration is blocked egress, since a large, rigid device strapped to a seat could actually make egress more challenging. That is covered in a more subjective advisory circular, which allows airlines to make policy, e.g., it may only be used at a window seat of a non-exit row.

Since FAA just this month has decided to start enforcing a 1992 rule requiring even so much as a paper cup to be stowed before pushback citing the egress concern, we might even expect some new policy on this.

ibejoeb··on Unknown number of Texas voter registrations went unprocessed due to DPS error
For context:

Illegal immigrant voted: https://www.justice.gov/usao-mdfl/pr/colombian-national-plea...

6,600 noncitizens registered, 400 noncitizens voted, undisclosed how many, if any, are unlawfully in country: https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/elections/2026/6600-nonci...

ibejoeb··on google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update
I use kagi exclusively because it works. I get the results I need every time, and it's not annoying. I haven't used Google in years. Simply no need. I really hope people keep paying kagi so they stick around.
ibejoeb··on OpenAI considers slowing advanced AI development, Sam Altman tells employees
Thoughts and open (I think) questions:

1. What are we actually talking about, slowing development or slowing public release? I can't imagine the the US is keen to slow actual development when we have adversarial state-backed labs continuing development. Seems to me that this is a global pact or it's nothing. Stopping a single lab, even if it's the current leader, won't put the genie back in the bottle.

2. Unless they stop actual advancement, isn't the risk essentially identical? At this point, it's an arms race between the lab and its own model. I don't think it far fetched to think that it might successfully exfiltrate its weights, for example.

3. There are going to be factions who don't want to stop. Should we worry about them defecting to other labs or other countries?

ibejoeb··on Matt Mullenweg tells Automattic staff in Slack he's back in control after ouster
Then released under the MPL
ibejoeb··on Matt Mullenweg tells Automattic staff in Slack he's back in control after ouster
I don't know... WordPress is a pretty huge open source project and community. He also opened Pocket Casts.
ibejoeb··on NTSB issues investigative update on B-767 runway excursion accident in Miami
The PM got his rating about 18 months ago. The PF only got his this past May. The PM had more overall hours, but this is looking a lot like a skills issue. He was flying an unstable approach. He wasn't configured for landing.

This pairing, considering past incidents with similar airframe vs. total hours disparity, really does look to be bad practice. You've got to acknowledge the human psychology. Part of it is probably the crazy pipeline over the past few years where people are racing to 1500 hours no matter how they log them, or they're getting on restricted certs with lower hours.

ibejoeb··on Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence
And the part that is being litigated is whether that is, in fact, fair use, correct?

I like the comparison to Chrome and Chromium. I don't know the timeline of the whole wordpress IP. At this most it has arguably undergone genericization. That's why I think it's complicated enough that there is merit to arguments on either side.

ibejoeb··on Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence
Open to correction here, but I understand it to be like this: the kernel of the contention is about the use of the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks, not the software itself. Essentially, WP Engine is a commercial entity profiting from the use of the trademark. Regardless of how it has been handled, it does not seem to be a frivolous claim.
ibejoeb··on Hitachi launches CO2 heat pump water heaters with solar-friendly tariff controls
Interesting that that's a feature of the water heater and not the tub. It has to travel through the plumbing all the way round-trip to the heater? You must have isolated recirculation plumbing to deal with the grey water, yeah?
ibejoeb··on bzip3
Practically, no. But that specific disclaimer could lead on to think that there may have been some observed data corruption in practice that isn't disclosed. I have no idea if there is, but I'm not keen to discover it myself.

Also practically, this isn't MIT. It is LGPL 3, which I believe includes the warranty terms of GPL 3, i.e., no warranty. So we're in the same place anyway.

ibejoeb··on Flock used >100 times to track veteran who recorded traffic stop
It doesn't hold up? What the implication, then? That the recording was illegal and the post-arrest investigation yielded the wrong result?
ibejoeb··on Florida revokes permits for license plate readers on state highways
The constitutional arguments have actually already been heard, and the court has determined that there is a reasonable expectation of privacy from continuous government surveillance of movement. The relevant cases are Carpenter and Chatrie.
ibejoeb··on Florida revokes permits for license plate readers on state highways
The governor did address this. The primary concern is that these systems are being intentionally diminished as LPRs, and he specifically warned of a "digital AI surveillance state" when giving comments about it.

He has also suggested ending toll programs, or exempting residents from tolls, so this is pretty consis

ibejoeb··on Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?
Room 641A is being cleaned, but we'll hold your bags for you.
ibejoeb··on Grok outage
Seems like openai is recovering. But even if it's only 30 minutes, it's a pretty interesting experiment.

I'm only half joking when I say that I'll write code by hand for money.

ibejoeb··on Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?
Oh man. Some low effort supply chain attack that turns every GPU into a cryptominer. It's funny because it's plausible.
ibejoeb··on ChatGPT outage – Resolved
The moment we've been waiting for. Who else remembers how to fizzbuzz? We're gonna be rich.
ibejoeb··on Twitter Viewer – View Twitter Without Account
That's when the LLM labs emerged and started collecting the data en masse. Likewise, virtually all other major social media players added barriers to unfettered anonymous access. Reddit worked without an account, and with multiple alternative client apps, until spez changed it, right?
ibejoeb··on Twitter Viewer – View Twitter Without Account
I'm fine with the criticism, but what's the solution? And what makes this a uniquely Elon problem when the rest of the social media industry does the same? There was backlash when the models learned computer programming from open source repositories, so I wonder if the same applies to casual speech.
ibejoeb··on Grand jury declines to indict Ohio man charged with destroying Flock camera
All the reasons in the other repliues, and it's also not just an ALPR.
ibejoeb··on Instant (Instantdb.com) Sunsetting
Post text

---

Hey there, you’re one of our active users and we wanted to let you know we’re sunsetting Instant.

In more detail:

    New signups will be closed soon. We recommend migrating your apps off of Instant Cloud within the next 12 months. Any subscriptions that were started after July 31st, 2026 will be fully refunded.
    On August 31st, 2027, all cloud apps will shut down. Backups will stay available for 12 more months, until August 31st, 2028.
    We’ve written a guide to help you self-host Instant and migrate your apps too. All of Instant is open source, and we’ve worked to make the migration process as seamless as possible.
The idea behind Instant started in 2021. We shared a blog post about a database in the browser. It was only an idea, but the more apps we built, the more we saw the need for it. We joined YC in 2022, built a prototype, and shared a version zero.

Turning a prototype into something production-grade was a long journey. The work was hard, but there were many moments of joy. Very early on Daniel joined the team and helped solve some of the gnarliest problems in sync tech. Our community grew, more folks joined [^], and we officially open sourced. From there it was maelstrom of feedback and making Instant better. When time came to really make our TypeScript SDKs ergonomic, Drew joined the team and did just that. From there, over 17,000 users got to try Instant. They made 400,000 apps, and those apps processed about 2.5 billion *transactions.

We’ll be starting a new journey and hope to share more details soon. In any case, it’s been an honor building for you!

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ibejoeb··on London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces
No matter what position one might take, for context, that's less than 1/4th.
ibejoeb··on Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification
Come on. Now you get face and body scans. That's not better. And when the machine randomly selects you, you take off your shoes anyway, and then they frisk you.
ibejoeb··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)
Does it have any make-specific features? For instance, I've used vcds for VW/Audi since it has better reporting than generic odb2 code readers.
ibejoeb··on Zed DeltaDB
Of course you are right. I could write my own software to do what I want. Or, I could just do it all myself manually. This argument is valid in pretty much all cases, so I concede the point.
ibejoeb··on Zed DeltaDB
Jujutsu is great, but it does not do this. It has no knowledge of agent sessions.
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