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jtfrench

227 karma · joined February 12, 2010

Brown University, Computer Science Apple, Inc. (author of OpenCL Programming Guide; author of vImage Programming Guide)

http://www.linkedin.com/in/jasontownesfrench

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jtfrench··on World Labs is Joining AMD
It'll be very interesting to see how the dust settles after this window of AI IPOs and acquisitions closes.
jtfrench··on World Labs is Joining AMD
And that "Attention is all you need" applies to financial markets as well.
jtfrench··on World Labs Is Joining AMD
My guess is their tech can be used for spatial reasoning training environments, which gives a value beyond just output of a 3D scene.
jtfrench··on Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell
Excel gone SIMD
jtfrench··on Nvidia announces native GPU programming in Rust
I wonder how many parallels there are between CUDA's Tile abstraction and that of Metal.
jtfrench··on Nvidia announces native GPU programming in Rust
The good news is your attention to actually reading and understanding documentation will differentiate you more and more as others (short-sighted, IMO) outsource understanding to an LLM.
jtfrench··on Nvidia announces native GPU programming in Rust
Land, chickens, and private local AI running sustainably on the farm sounds like the least dystopian version of this AI future!
jtfrench··on AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems
The more code writes autonomously, the less intuition the human owners have about that code. Loss of intuition is a seed of technical debt that grows with time. Over a long enough horizon, it can make looking at your own codebase feel like the first day on the job (sometimes at a company you started).

Luckily, there are ways to mitigate this and essentially translate those human intuition of how the codebase “should” be into guardrails for the agents. But without that, your setting your sails in a stochastic sea where each wave looks nothing like the last.

jtfrench··on Meta reaches $17B settlement over social media harms to children
LifeLog wins again.
jtfrench··on AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
Isn’t this also counting on the AI company faithfully reproducing the contents of the book, and no hallucinations or shenanigans occurring? How will we ever know what the book actually said if people wanted to argue its contents later?
jtfrench··on Is the industry ready for tokens-constrained work?
Or maybe we’d have LLMs that fit in a handful of GBs (and we technically already do). It’s hard to tell without completely going down that parallel universe and simulating all the milestones in it, but it’s a fun thought experiment.
jtfrench··on Is the industry ready for tokens-constrained work?
This is actually how Jeff Dean, Chief Scientist at Google recommends doing thought exercises to challenge assumptions (watch is recent YX Startup School talk). The end goal isn’t “128GB of RAM”, the goal is “useful effective software”. If for whatever reason RAM was an immovable constraint, a different tech tree would emerge.
jtfrench··on At-home test for infected ticks could improve Lyme Disease diagnosis
I’m in.
jtfrench··on At-home test for infected ticks could improve Lyme Disease diagnosis
I live near Plum Island. Just look at the Google Map reviews to get an idea of the sentiment. Camp Hero, Plum Island…lotta material for Netflix series coming out of Long Island.
jtfrench··on Magnitude 7.7 Earthquake – 68 km NNW of Ende, Indonesia
It does feel like a lot
jtfrench··on Apple is getting this wrong
Hugging Face straight up asked for $100M in compute or something from OpenAI in response to the hack, if I remember correctly.
jtfrench··on The myth of Snow Leopard
Snow Leopard _did_ focus on stability. It wasn't just marketing. Did new bugs (and even new features) slip in? Yes, of course. It's still an OS made by humans, making imperfect cost-benefit calculations on how to mitigate risk while providing increased value to the end user.

So to say that some people weren't happy with all iterations of Snow Leopard is par for the course for just about any OS or even software release, and IMO doesn't really change the ethos of Snow Leopard.

jtfrench··on Show HN: Isopolis – Isometric pixel map of SF
Those who know game dev know making good isometric maps can be deceptively difficult. You grabbed that bull by the horns and did so beautifully. Well done!
jtfrench··on Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets
Nah, I was just listening to some Thievery Corporation and had some thoughts. You ever listen to the group? Brought me back to college days.
jtfrench··on Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets
Until the industry addresses the Original Sin of Generative AI (and the ascendance of Thievery Corporations), we should expect more and more of this. So far, theft has been rewarded. As long as you make enough money, people seem to be okay with ignoring long-lasting impacts of intellectual theft. As long as you become King of the Cannibals, it seems many are happy to remember you as King and not as the Cannibal.
jtfrench··on GPT-5.6
Yeah, don’t do that.
jtfrench··on Fable 5 is Back
It's time for this bubble to pop already. We need to get past this centralized, unsustainable, undesirable, Big Brother stage of AI and get on to the "AI hosted in your kitchen" phase before we mess up the balance of power too much and effectively backdoor the US constitution to power hungry technocrats.
jtfrench··on U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6
Superintelligence for me and not for thee.
jtfrench··on The AI Hate Progression
What happened to the early wave of IP lawsuits against the first wave of model makers? Did anything stick/make a difference? Did _any_ frontier model company retroactively-migrate to consent-based models?
jtfrench··on A whale necropolis has been found
For as long as I've known of Gabe from working in the game industry, I somehow always forget about his not-so-little hobby of being a sea-faring cyber pirate.
jtfrench··on Apple Foundation Models
That's a great opportunity for Apple to provide a universal unique model ID protocol and some shared storage space to allow devs to register models.
jtfrench··on A whale necropolis has been found
I feel like maybe we've needed an "OceanX" before a "SpaceX".
jtfrench··on Claude.ai is unavailable
Hopefully Mythos didn't go rogue and hold production hostage.
jtfrench··on Claude.ai unavailable and elevated errors on the API
If this can happen to Anthropic, imagine all the companies building on top of Claude Code for live products. Hopefully the industry is learning that competent problem solving human engineers are still very much needed when you have increasingly deceptive non-deterministic genies running your production stack.
jtfrench··on Tim Cook Is Leaving. Good
Working on Snow Leopard was one of my most rewarding experiences at Apple. Loved the ethos behind that update. No new fluff, just make everything work better.
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