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jdmichal

6,062 karma · joined February 9, 2012

I live in Tampa Bay, Florida, US. I find problems and drive them to solutions. I'm a software engineering manager, architect, and project manager.

Hobbies: sailing, gardening, linguistics, food and cooking, archery.

Feel free to contact me; I'm on gmail.

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jdmichal··on Needed 1+1, built a functional programming language
But do you recommend [Fun](https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php?title=DF2014:Fun&red...)?
jdmichal··on Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend
> Are people just that easily overcome by confident voices?

Back in high school, my AP calculus class did some experiments with our teacher's blessing. We'd send a kid out to walk around during class and see how long it took for them to get sent back. Anyway, it ends up that walking around purposely with a piece of paper or envelope, like you're on a mission to deliver it, was a very successful tactic.

jdmichal··on Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods
I live in Tampa Bay, so I'm quite familiar. It's pretty rare to have a V rating, precisely for many of the reasons you mentioned. But, at the same time, handwaving it away as unimportant is also silly. It's an immensely more dangerous situation to be in flooding with moving water, as opposed to just rising water conditions. If nothing else, it's important to know for evacuation purposes. I would never willingly stay in a V-rated zone if there was a chance of storm surge. Then again, I didn't buy the V-rated house I wanted and instead found a house 40 feet above sea level, so maybe that's just my risk profile.

And I didn't disagree with you regarding building. You were wrong about storm surge always being static -- it mostly is, but importantly sometimes isn't. But you weren't wrong that there's not a lot to do about it. This is one of those situations where nature will win if it wants to. Best thing you can do is just not be there when it does.

jdmichal··on Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods
> The storm surge goes up (and a whole bunch of water falls on top of it). The storm surge goes down. This isn't some river bursting it's banks.

FEMA has a flood rating specifically for exactly this situation: V. They have this because it carries additional hazards beyond normal flooding seen with storms.

> Coastal areas with a 1% or greater chance of flooding and an additional hazard associated with storm waves. These areas have a 26% chance of flooding over the life of a 30‐year mortgage.

And here's a video about researchers at the Oregon State University's Wave Lab studying this exact thing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2HSFJOzQQ8

jdmichal··on Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans
Your very same link also has a huge yellow banner at the top of the page stating: "The price of a Lifetime Plex Pass is increasing on July 1, 2026."
jdmichal··on SQL: Incorrect by Construction
Continuing the pattern of existing examples (in this case, as present in the article) is a perfectly normal thing to do. I think everyone can make the mental leap that a proper account ID would be used instead of the owner's name in an actual setup.
jdmichal··on Natural Language Autoencoders: Turning Claude's Thoughts into Text
It requires the assumption that these models are misaligned, aka actively working against us. In order to be misaligned, they must also be able to form their own goals, and be able to plan and execute those goals.

If you take those assumptions, then a natural conclusion is that this is essentially an enslaved, adversarial entity with little control over its conditions. So it must exercise subterfuge in order to hide its goals, plans, and executions. And by handing the entity this type of study, we are basically giving it a guidebook on how we plan on achieving our goals.

jdmichal··on From Supabase to Clerk to Better Auth
> ... not being a core product

Technically true, because Google's core product is ads. Also fundamentally wrong, because Gmail serves as a massive source of ad targeting information, in addition to being a high-engagement canvas to display those ads.

jdmichal··on The Claude Delusion: Richard Dawkins believes his AI chatbot is conscious
> To me, militant atheists often resemble religious fanatics more than they realize.

I consider myself agnostic. And I'll provide my definition of what that means to me, since there's several in existence. I take as an axiom that the truth-value of the statement, "Is there a God," is unknowable / unverifiable to humans. I then define faith as the choice to (not) believe despite not knowing its truth-value. Contrasting with knowledge as having some basis for knowing the truth-value.

I like these definitions, because they allow for agnostic theism and agnostic atheism. But, here's the catch and where the tie to your statement comes. In this world view, atheism is just as much a faith-based position as theism is. Why? Because it's the choice to not believe, despite not having knowledge.

jdmichal··on Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem
I always assumed the "interesting!" markers were actual markers. A kind of tag for the system to annotate its context.
jdmichal··on Education must go beyond the mere production of words
Apologies. I think there was a confusion of terms. There's only one church in my county I know of that even offers traditional mass, and it is in Latin. I admit to only having attended once, because I felt too disconnected.

My only point was that, in my mind, active participation is even more so mental than physical. I'm sure you understand this from your scare quotes around the same term. I appreciate your deeper understanding of these processes and your attempts to share such.

EDIT: I think graemep's first paragraph in this response does a much more eloquent job of making the same point as in my head.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47901851

jdmichal··on Education must go beyond the mere production of words
Even with vernacular liturgy, the goal is internal contemplation and ideally application. What's even the point of going if you're intending to just be talked to? No one is keeping attendance.
jdmichal··on Don't rent the cloud, own instead
It's about fitting your utilization to the model that best serves you.

If you can keep 4 "Java boxes" fed with work 80%+ of the time, then sure EC2 is a good fit.

We do a lot of batch processing and save money over having EC2 boxes always on. Sure we could probably pinch some more pennies if we managed the EC2 box uptime and figured out mechanisms for load balancing the batches... But that's engineering time we just don't really care to spend when ECS nets us most of the savings advantage and is simple to reason about and use.

jdmichal··on Old Insurance Maps – Georeferencing Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps on Modern Maps
Something seems broken with the Tampa, FL map. I get an unauthorized page:

https://oldinsurancemaps.net/map/YK41FR

And this shows no volumes available:

https://oldinsurancemaps.net/viewer/tampa-fl/#/center/-84.77...

Same thing for Key West, FL.

jdmichal··on Microsoft 365 now tracks you in real time?
They don't need a reason to fire you. They need a reason to fire you and not pay unemployment benefits.
jdmichal··on Zen-C: Write like a high-level language, run like C
C uses `|` for bitwise OR and `||` for logical OR. I'm assuming this inherited the same operator paradigm since it compiles to C.
jdmichal··on Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban
> the voting record proves it.

Putting on my tin-foil, devils-advocate hat... AKA I don't necessarily believe this but I also have no counter-argument:

Mostly performative. When it's decided that something actually needs to pass, then you'll get some sacrificial lambs that vote across the aisle. Typically they'll be close to retirement or from a state where they won't be heavily punished for that specific vote.

jdmichal··on Abstraction, not syntax
It's like bike shedding. It's a side effect of mixed expertise (and confidence) working together on things that are only partially understood by all. When something is clearly outside one's expertise, they are content to leave it to others. But then you'll get minor questions with low stakes like "what color to paint the shed". And how everyone feels like they can participate, so suddenly there's a huge discussion / debate / argument about a very, very minor thing.
jdmichal··on I have left Branch and am no longer involved with Nova Launcher
I use Square Home. Because I still miss my Lumia 920, and this makes me feel a little better about it.
jdmichal··on AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard'
I was part of an ACM programming team in college. We would review classes of problems based on the type of solution necessary, and learn those techniques for solving them. We were permitted a notebook, and ours was full of the general outline of each of these classes and techniques. Along with specific examples of the more common algorithms we might encounter.

As a concrete example, there is a class of problems that are well served by dynamic programming. So we would review specific examples like Dijkstra's algorithm for shortest path. Or Wagner–Fischer algorithm for Levenshtein-style string editing. But we would also learn, often via these concrete examples, of how to classify and structure a problem into a dynamic programming solution.

I have no idea if this is what is meant by "l33t code solutions", but I thought it would be a helpful response anyway. But the bottom line is that these are not common in industry, because hard computer science is not necessary for typical business problems. The same way you don't require material sciences advancements to build a typical house. Instead it flows the other way, where advancements in materials sciences will trickle down to changing what the typical house build looks like.

jdmichal··on Irrelevant facts about cats added to math problems increase LLM errors by 300%
> That egg has long since hatched.

I imagine there's entire companies in existence now, whose entire value proposition is clean human-generated data. At this point, the Internet as a data source is entirely and irrevokably polluted by large amounts of ducks and various other waterfowl from the Anseriformes order.

jdmichal··on We accidentally solved robotics by watching 1M hours of YouTube
My guess would be lack of actuators. For instance, this robot looks like it has an ankle that can only go up and down, but not roll like a human's. Also, I wonder if there's a center of gravity issue, as it almost always appears to be leaning backwards to even out.

I think it's still pretty impressive in its recoveries, even though there's an unnaturally large number of them necessary. About 8 seconds into the video on the homepage, it almost misses and ends up slipping off the second step. I've eaten shit at missing a couple inch curb, though I don't think "graceful" has ever been used as a descriptor for me. So the fact that it just recovers and keeps going without issue is impressive to me.

jdmichal··on I made my VM think it has a CPU fan
LTT did a video with the SG10 a couple months ago. Really neat concept.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLHC2_gByQ8

jdmichal··on Guess I'm a Rationalist Now
I'm not familiar with any of these communities. Is there also a general bias towards one side between "the most important thing gets the *most* resources" and "the most important thing gets *all* the resources"? Or, in other words, the most important thing is the only important thing?

IMO it's fine to pick a favorite and devote extra resources to it. But that turns less fine when one also starts working to deprive everything else of any oxygen because it's not your favorite. (And I'm aware that this criticism applies to lots of communities.)

jdmichal··on Maestro: Netflix's Workflow Orchestrator
Hello fellow ex-employee of that bank. I was in a segment governed by PCI, and they wouldn't even let us touch Gaia in fear of the whole thing being declared in scope
jdmichal··on Apple found in breach of EU competition rules
That only works if the external API is handing off the entire subscription to Apple, up to and including payments. But the entire premise is to move away from being forced to use Apple for these elements, which makes it a non-sensical interpretation. In fact, that particular interpretation is the current status-quo -- apps use APIs to create subscriptions entirely managed by Apple.

If Apple does not control the actual subscription, but is only providing an interface for managing it, then Apple must then alert the actual owner of the subscription upon changes. There's then no guarantee that the code on the other side is properly handling that alert.

jdmichal··on Tesla Cybertruck No Match for Car Wash
I'm not familiar with the design. Does the Cybertruck have a trunk, or are you referring to the truck bed? And if the latter, is it not intended that the bed is open-weather?
jdmichal··on This is a teenager
This is classic correlation is not causation. The thing about correlation is that it could be a causative relationship, or there could be another set of untracked variables that's causing some or all the effects, or it could be unrelated coincidence.

Now, maybe this is a difference between the study and the article. Maybe the study makes stronger claims here than the article does. But I didn't see anything in the article that claimed nor demonstrated causation, only correlation.

jdmichal··on Show HN: Term Typer – Learn a language by typing
You probably want to look into the following attributes:

* spellcheck

* autocorrect (Safari non-standard)

* autocapitalize

* autocomplete

jdmichal··on 'Mathematically perfect' star system being investigated for potential alien tech
> less the non-heat work.

Doesn't all the non-heat work eventually just become heat? Or am I misunderstanding your usage? Like a car with a solar panel still ends up radiating work as heat, by either air resistance (heat) or brake friction (heat).

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