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jdauriemma

1,019 karma · joined February 22, 2015

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jdauriemma··on Show HN: Ive Sent It – online courier for files, with signed proof of delivery
At least 250% more pulsing dots!
jdauriemma··on Can we stop with the uptime percentages?
I think this idea is objectively good, but practically hazardous. "Four nines" is a meme at this point, and it's a helpful one: a commonly understood gold standard. Few people know that translates to roughly 4 minutes and 19 seconds of downtime per month. Since service quality is degrading, I fear that changing the way we express those uptime might also unintentionally provide convenient cover to reset expectations, e.g. 10 minutes of downtime is the new norm for reliability. Or 30 minutes. I don't think we should yield the Overton Window, so to speak, to this.
jdauriemma··on Bob and Van
That's a narrower framing than I had in mind for my original comment. My whole point is that "politics" has transcended any single issue and has become indicative of a much broader world view. Sure, if you zoom in on any policy question you'll find plenty of places where reasonable people can honestly disagree. But that's not the way our political system functions.
jdauriemma··on Bob and Van
I do talk to people. A lot. I live in a politically mixed area, a lean-red town in a solid-blue US state. Most people keep their "political" leanings to themselves but it doesn't take very long to get a clue. I'm thinking of one friend-of-a-friend with whom I interact fairly frequently. I know their views on current events not because they've said anything directly to me but they're active on Facebook and other friends have shown me some posts. What do I do? Pretend it doesn't bother me that they have chosen to advance causes that I believe are actively undermining our society? Right now I'm polite to them. But I feel like it's dishonest on some level.
jdauriemma··on Bob and Van
I struggle with this. Where I live, it's harder nowadays to compartmentalize how someone votes from their core values. What we used to call "politics" now encompasses some fundamental aspects of how we observe and process our daily lives.
jdauriemma··on I wanna live an NPC life
I think this stretches the "NPC" term beyond its utility. It’s a cute little insult, but once you redefine it to mean “ignore status games, stop worrying about what other people are doing, and live according to your own priorities,” you’re basically just restating advice that’s been around for millennia. That’s Stoicism, Buddhism, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, etc. I’m not sure this new metaphor is adding anything.
jdauriemma··on A2A: Adversary to Adversary?
You make a fair point, though I'm not sure how it might handle negotiation. MCP = RPC, and I'm not sure how you RPC your way into handling an open ended conversation
jdauriemma··on As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
No doubt, but I'd expect that to be accompanied by something like "I know App X and App Y do $THING, but here's the distinction between how they do it and how my App Z does it." I don't think I've ever seen that sort of nuance expressed in this context, which makes me doubt that they grasp the ecosystem.
jdauriemma··on As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
One can hope!
jdauriemma··on As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
I see symptoms of this all the time. For example, it's a weekly annoyance for folks to pop into /r/strava to showcase their vibe-coded app that uses the Strava API to do $THING. Then someone invariably points out that an existing app (or even Strava itself) already does $THING, and often it's free. I don't mean to be negative, I think it's great that people are building useful niche software and I don't blame them for wanting to share it. A significant part of the problem is that it's much harder nowadays to find "prior art" because keyword/boolean web searches have been FUBAR.
jdauriemma··on You can't prompt your way into policy
Thank you! Yeah, I think a useful thought experiment is that controls made up of boolean inputs should never be expressed as prompts. Encapsulate those into a tool, ideally one that's generated from existing business nouns and verbs.
jdauriemma··on Show HN: Putt.day a daily mini golf game
I scored 5. Bank at max power at 5 o’clock from tee, the ball bounces over the wall and skips most of the course.
jdauriemma··on Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't
I'm happy for you; clearly you've had a good experience.
jdauriemma··on Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't
I say the following with sincere concern.

AI is a cool technology but anthropomorphizing it and using the L-word to describe your relationship with it is a symptom of AI psychosis. Respectfully, I suggest that you take a break and touch grass.

jdauriemma··on Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't
> Compilers do not generate impact by themselves either

I did not mean to give the impression that Compilers and other key infrastructure are not impactful. I believe these are deeply impactful.

jdauriemma··on Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't
That both fair and also charitable to the commenter. It's not a given that Fable is "above that baseline," all we can go by is anecdotes and Anthropic's marketing materials. Both tend to be puffed up. And if they're speaking generally about LLM-assisted coding, they could have chosen to say it that way.
jdauriemma··on Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't
The most wide-eyed AI believers I've met are tinkerers. And that tracks; the speed at which we can tinker has become so marvelous thanks to LLM-assisted coding. Tinkering is a process; people get a lot of joy out of the act of building and tweaking things. Outcomes are a secondary or tertiary considerations. AI has massively expanded our ability to act (and therefore tinker) but it can't generate meaningful impact (e.g. "engineering") by itself. Impact > activity.
jdauriemma··on Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't
I'm sorry, but this is borderline silly. Fable has been out for less than a week and you're already making grand pronouncements about its superiority? How much first-hand evidence could you possibly have for that claim?
jdauriemma··on Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes
I'm curious about LLM adoption by faculty. Is it possible that lesson plans and/or slides are being vibe-produced by professors/TAs, potentially reducing quality of instruction?
jdauriemma··on What I've learned about the trombone
There are limits to the web audio API :) but I did conform to the known waveforms of the trombone when setting the synthesizer values. The frequencies and proportions of the slides and partials are very precise!
jdauriemma··on What I've learned about the trombone
I think you'll enjoy this: an acoustically-accurate trombone in the web browser. https://github.com/bignimbus/trombone.js
jdauriemma··on How to convert between wealth and income tax
Can you share a source? Of course the top 5% of _earners_ would pay more, but that's not necessarily the same crew as the top 5% in net worth. And 5% is a large share of the population. I'd be more interested in the top 1% of 1% in terms of wealth.
jdauriemma··on Appearing productive in the workplace
Whenever I see a document with horizontal rules between headers and the blues and purples that Claude Cowork adds to .docx files, I sigh.
jdauriemma··on Taste in the age of AI and LLMs
To that I'd add:

* an abundance of ordered and unordered lists

* paragraphs are <= 3 sentences

* _it's not X, it's Y_: "The goal is not to let AI choose for you. The goal is to build a sharper rejection vocabulary." "The biggest decisions are not formatting decisions. They are directional decisions."

* a lot of <h2> breaking up the prose, if you can call it that

* setup statement, then a colon, then a punchline: "AI and LLMs have changed one thing very quickly: competent output is now cheap."

AI-generated essays are listicles at heart

jdauriemma··on Ask HN: Any interesting traffic patterns in your llms.txt?
I have seen something similar in a site I work on
jdauriemma··on ATMs didn't kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did
+1, this is my use case as well
jdauriemma··on RFC 454545 – Human Em Dash Standard
The RFC is a joke, if you couldn't tell. Those are quotes from the text :)
jdauriemma··on RFC 454545 – Human Em Dash Standard
Next time you post a HN comment, try audibly sighing or pausing for 137 milliseconds first?
jdauriemma··on No right to relicense this project
> "Training" an LLM ist not the same as training a human being. It a metaphor. Its confusing the save icon with an actual floppy disk.

Maybe? But the design of the floppy disk is for data storage and retrieval per se. It can't give you your bits in a novel order like an LLM does (by design). From what I can tell in this case, the output is significantly differentiated from the source code.

jdauriemma··on No right to relicense this project
This is interesting and I'm not sure what to make of it. Devil's advocate: the person operating the AI also was "trained with the code," is that materially different from them writing it by hand vs. assisted by an LLM? Honestly asking, I hadn't considered this angle before.
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